A Disney ‘Genie’ comes home to St. Petersburg

After three years going around the globe granting wishes in the Disney stage musical Aladdin, Anthony Murphy comes home to St. Pete this weekend to lay one on the ol’ hometown: The big blue Genie is performing a special jazz and soul concert for Christmas, It’s Gonna Be a Great Day, livestreamed from thestudio@620.

Murphy chose the venue because it’s one of the places he performed many, many times before he moved to New York City and caught his magic carpet to fame.

The son of a singing mom and a musician/recording engineer dad, Murphy attended all three of St. Petersburg’s arts magnet schools: Perkins Elementary, John Hopkins Middle School and Gibbs High’s Pinellas Center for the Arts.

A natural extrovert, Murphy found his calling in the second grade.

“Before that,” he says, “my teachers said I was a problem student and a nuisance to the classroom. They wanted to put me on medication. After they transferred me to Perkins I started excelling. My grades were improving; they wanted to put me in a gifted program because I was doing so well. So the arts really saved my life.”

He credits the Gibbs PCCA, where his contemporaries included future stars Ephram and Martina Sykes, Alex Jennings and Blaine Krauss, with giving him direction.

“It gave me opportunity. We got to perform a lot, which was amazing. I got to train and really focus on what I was doing – every day I showed up and I was working towards the goal of musical theater, working towards being a performer. Even at such a young age.”

He and others from his PCCA class performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland. And during the summer of his junior year, Murphy attended the intensive Broadway Theatre Project in Tampa. Locally, he appeared with American Stage, freeFall and others.

He attended Otterbein University in Ohio, and returned home in 2016. Within 10 months, fate intervened.

“A friend of mine, Ariel Jacobs, was at the time playing Jasmine in the Australian production of Aladdin,” Murphy explains. “I was talking with her and her husband Joe, who’s also in the industry, and they were like ‘Auditions for the tour are about to happen – you should go in for it.’ But I’d just started a new job and I couldn’t take time off work to just go wait in line to audition, you know?

“She said ‘OK, send me your headshot and resume, and a video of you doing something fierce, and I’ll send it to the people that need to see it.’ So I did.”

They saw it. And after auditioning him in person, they hired him.

Anthony Murphy spent the next three years singing, dancing and being zany in the role an animated version of Robin Williams made famous, and for which James Monroe Iglehart won a Tony Award in 2014.

He was the very first Genie on the very first Aladdin American tour. That was the first year; he then transferred to the international tour, visiting Australia, New Zealand and Singapore.

In September 2019, he was world-traveled and back in New York lining up his next gig.

The pandemic arrived, closing the curtain on theater everywhere, as Murphy was starting to rehearse Ain’t Misbehavin.’

Two years in the far corners of the globe made a mighty impression on this St. Pete kid. “I wasn’t necessarily living out of a suitcase,” he relates. “We were on a sit-down tour, which means that we were in cities for three, four months at a time. So I actually really got to experience the cities, especially in Australia, where we were in every city at least three months.”

Saturday’s livestreamed performance, at 7 p.m., is titled It’s Gonna Be a Great Day. Murphy explains:

“Every year, I come home to St. Pete for Christmas. We have a big family. And every year after dinner, there’s always a show. Literally, I have to sing, my mom has to sing, my best friend who also sings has to perform. It’s always a thing – Christmastime with the family, there’s got to be a showtime moment.

“And this year, with coronavirus, we can’t really be together like that – we can’t celebrate with a big dinner and all singing together and being joyous – so I decided to do a concert. So everybody around the world, my friends, my family could all be a part of this tradition that has been going on for years.”

He’s also dedicating the virtual concert to “the ones who supported me, the people, the loved ones, people who helped me raise money to go to the Broadway Theatre Project, and go to Scotland and things like that. So that I could eventually down the line do the tour and these amazing things.

“So this is really a thank you to all of them. It’s called It’s Gonna Be a Great Day because it’s gonna be a great day. This show’s going to be fun. It’s going to be great.”

Info and tickets are here.