‘Aida’ Is a Star Turn, but . . .

In Broadway’s original cast of “The Lion King,” Heather Headley played Nala, the lioness seduced by the strains of “Can You Feel the Love Tonight?” Though Headley shone in that auxiliary-feline role, director Julie Taymor’s supple visions of the Pride Lands took center stage.

This time, nothing takes the stage away from Headley.

Just-opened at the Palace Theatre, “Aida,” the Disney corporation’s peculiar follow-up to “The Lion King,” offers a gorgeous and gorgeously soulful performer the leading-lady status she deserves. As a Nubian princess enslaved by the Egyptians, as well as by ill-starred love for her hunky captor, Headley infuses “Aida” with more depth, feeling and musical grace.

At one point, the sight of the entombed Aida and Radames transforms into that of a shining pinpoint in the night sky. Sheer redundancy. With Headley around, who needs another star?

And without her, where would this berserkly inconsistent show be? After a 1998 nonprofit tryout in Atlanta and last year’s commercial reworking in Chicago, it would be heartening to report a viable franchise, a new spin on the 1871 Verdi opera with its own populist punch. The revisions may have improved matters, but the matters don’t matter enough.

Fatally, the show’s librettists--Linda Woolverton, director Robert Falls and David Henry Hwang--haven’t cracked this story in emotional terms. Someone left out the scenes and songs by which we might actually buy the subjugated falling for the subjugator. The way this “Aida” plays, watching Aida falling for Radames is akin to reworking “The Lion King” so that Nala runs off with one of the hyenas.

Adam Pascal plays Radames, young conqueror in luv. So good in “Rent,” another--infinitely better--musical lifted from the 19th century opera hit list, Pascal settles for the touchingly mediocre here. He needs to get in touch with his inner captain. Pascal amps the Elton John/Tim Rice songs just so; he’s a wonderful pop/rock vocalist. But he utterly lacks the easy authority required by lines along the lines of “Beyond the fifth cataract, the Nile leads directly to Khartoum. . . .”

“Aida” frames its action with scenes set in a modern-day natural history museum. At the outset, Pascal and Headley check each other out in the Egyptian wing. One of the exhibits--that of Egyptian princess Amneris, played by Sherie Rene Scott--comes to life and sings “Every Story Is a Love Story,” whisking us back to the doomed romantic triangle.

As in the opera, Radames is a nicer pillaging imperialist than most. The song “Fortune Favors the Brave” makes him out to be a guy who just wants to “seize the day” and “turn the tide” and whatever else lyricist Rice can run through his cliche mill. (That mill never closes.)

The captured Aida upsets her captor’s entire worldview, not to mention his nine-year engagement to Amneris. (They’re the Egyptian equivalents to Nathan Detroit and Miss Adelaide.) The callow, pampered kids’ respective, devious fathers will stop at nothing to make the marriage happen. In “Like Father Like Son,” Radames’ dad, Zoser (John Hickok in full weasel mode), threatens his son while choreographer Wayne Cilento surrounds Zoser with a very unmerry band of leaping, jabbing bodyguards in black--”Russian Ninja Fly Girls,” as the wag on my right described them.

Director Falls makes only so much sense of the mood swings. One minute, we’re watching Nubians rounded up for a lifetime of slavery, or worse; the next, we’re hanging out with a wisecracking, fashion-enslaved princess. The princess is easy company in the early going, thanks to Scott’s comic timing and charisma--”first in beauty, wisdom and accessories,” as the Nubian slave Mereb (Damian Perkins) says. He says such things before he, like the story, turns grim and lips off to Aida with ripostes like “You’re going to meet him, aren’t you?!?”

A lot of “Aida” looks good, in ways only partly relating to the level of expenditure ($15 million to $20 million, depending on estimates). Scenic and costume designer Bob Crowley, whose creations for the Broadway “Carousel” and “The Capeman” offered indelible vertigo-inducing, character-defining sights, here imagines lovely vistas and dizzying perspectives of the Nile, a wall of prisoners, even a bird’s-eye view of Amneris’ outdoor pool.

But the eye candy can’t compensate for the queasy, patronizing mechanics of the story. It can’t override the concept-album tinniness of the weaker songs. If one “Can You Feel the Love Tonight?” didn’t seem like enough for “The Lion King,” “Aida” is the score for you. Here you get a half-dozen songs of similar, slurpy intention. Headley, Scott and Pascal invest everything they have into what they’re given, but after a while, you wouldn’t mind a few bars of Verdi’s “Triumphal March” just to clean out your ears.

Elton John long ago proved himself a first-rate pop songwriter, with innately theatrical instincts. You wouldn’t know it from “Aida.” And yet, it’s an excuse for Headley’s defiant, radiant star turn. “Aida” may run a distant third among Disney’s North American theatrical forays, behind “The Lion King” and “Beauty and the Beast.” But only Tsidii Le Loka’s Rafiki in “The Lion King” popped out the way Headley pops out in “Aida.” A star is a star. Even when the pyramid behind her looks more like a square.

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* “Aida,” Palace Theatre, 1564 Broadway, New York. $20-$80. (800) 755-4000 or https://www.ticketmaster.com.