Hard to believe, but it was 25 years ago that Walt Disney Pictures reinvigorated its brand and changed the face of animated film with “The Little Mermaid”, ushering in something of a golden age of cartooning that has been continued in everything from “The Simpsons” to Pixar to Disney’s latest, “Frozen”. Only three years after “Mermaid”, Disney brought out “Aladdin”, featuring Robin Williams as the title and songs by Alan Menken and Howard Ashman (with lyricist Tim Rice taking over after Ashman died in 1991).

Though “The Little Mermaid” proved a Broadway disappointment, Disney Theatricals, which had a very long run in “Beauty and the Beast” and nearly unmatched success with “The Lion King”, hopes for big things from their stage version of “Aladdin”, which is being directed and choreographed by Casey Nicholaw (“Spamalot”) at Broadway’s New Amsterdam Theater. After a fall try-out in Toronto that received mixed but promising reviews, New York previews for “Aladdin” began Feb. 26 for an opening tonight, March 20.

Did critics roll out the magic carpet for this Arabian fantasy or waterboard it?

We’ll start with a rave. The most negative thing Associated Press critic Mark Kennedy can say about “this perfectly lovely adaptation” is that lead actor “James Monroe Iglehart is just so magically delicious as the guy in the lamp that the show sometimes feels like its holding its breath until he reappears.” Kennedy lauds Bob Crowley’s “dazzling” design, notes that director Casey Nicholaw “juggles all of this with supreme skill,” and adds that having Jonathan Freeman (from the film) return as Jafar is a welcome bit of casting. “He is simply delicious,” Kennedy gushes, “relishing his evilhood.”

TheaterMania’s Zachary Stewart loves the spectacle of the show and agrees with Kennedy that Iglehart has “incredible showmanship and energy.” Though Stewart rails against Chad Beguelin’s “clunky book” that is “chock-full of baffling missed opportunities,” he concludes that “you’re going to have a great time at `Aladdin’.”

Echoing Stewart’s problems with the book, Chicago Tribune critic Chris Jones wishes the director and librettist had paid “a little more attention to the importance of committing to the truth of the plot.” He also finds the Aladdin and Jasmine characters “pro forma” and the “non-Genie book scenes” flat. Nevertheless, Jones loves Iglehart and concurs with other reviewers that the musical number, “Friend Like Me”, is a bring-down-the-house thriller.

Not swept up at all is Variety’s Marilyn Stasio, who feels that the project has been thrown together with a lot of money but no heart heart. “In the spirit of overkill that comes to define the entire production,” she gripes, “the costumes become so heavily encrusted with bling, it’s a wonder anyone can move in them.” Most distressing to Stasio are “the contemporary updates to book and lyrics that replace the tone of fairy-tale innocence with show-queen vulgarity.” In a nod to late lyricist Howard Ashman, Stasio chides, “Restoring a person’s work without respecting his artistic sensibility is no tribute at all.”

New York Post reviewer Elisabeth Vincentelli is similarly unimpressed, happy with the show only when the “nifty” genie Iglehart is onstage. Otherwise, this ** ½ “amped up” enterprise “lays on the Borscht-Belt shtick with a trowel.” She concludes, “The whole vibe is like a throwback to those old Bob Hope/Bing Crosby movies: `The Road to Agrabah.’ But the journey may be a short one — leaving the beautiful New Amsterdam Theater free just in time for the “Frozen” musical to move in.”

By contrast, the feeling of a road movie is exactly what Newsday critic Linda Winer likes most about the show. “The carpet flies, kids, and it’s awesome,” she writes, “But what's a whole new world, as the song promises, is the almost modest, down-to-earth human scale of director-choreographer Casey Nicholaw's big, cheerful production -- an enjoyable throwback to old-time musical comedy… There is a by-the-pants looseness to the style that feels a bit slow in the first act but picks up gleefully after intermission.”

Writing in a similar vein, New York Times critic Charles Isherwood found himself pleasantly surprised by “Aladdin”, which has “an infectious and only midly syrupy spirit. Not to mention enough baubles, bangles and beading to keep a whole season of “RuPaul’s Drag Race” contestants in runway attire.” For Isherwood, the show offers “a breezy insouciance that scrubs away some of the material’s bland gloss.” Like his compatriots, the Times scribe raves about Iglehart and his “Friend Like Me” number and finds the magic-carpet sequence “a nifty bit of wonder.”

In his *** review for the Daily News, Joe Dziemianowicz loves the magic carpet and Iglehart (who “shines with enough charisma to light a thousand and one nights”) but finds the score “a mashup” and the show as a whole “as tirelessly energetic as a toddler, but it also feels canned… In lieu of soul, the show pours on the droll.”

Talkin’ Broadway’s Matthew Murray sees an even greater split between the quality of the show and its star turn by Iglehart. The latter has “all the force (and subtlety) of an out-of-control locomotive” and wears “a 100-megawatt smile that both ingratiates you to his every word and motion, and makes you forgive him for the sweating and heavy panting that prove he knows exactly how hard he's working.” Alas, for Murray, “everything else in Aladdin is, like the endlessly expansive desert in which it's set, dusty and unwelcoming.” The show wants “to be a blockbuster, but without the writing, direction, design, or, most critically, guts to back up that aspiration.”