There’s a big blue centaur hanging out backstage. As I enter the backstage of the Walt Disney Theatre, I’m greeted by Nessus—or at least the puppet version of him. He’s life-sized, requires two people to operate him, and has a very soft tail. As Rachel Quinn, vice president of entertainment operations for Disney Cruise Line, coos: “I’ve got to say he's my favorite. When he comes out, I just love him.”

So does the audience, as the night I saw Hercules, the newest Disney Cruise Line stage show (now running onboard their Destiny cruise ship), the audience gave Nessus his own entrance applause. And he’s not the only puppet at sea. There are actually 24 puppets, many of them very tall (such as a five-headed hydra whose necks extend into the audience). All of them are stored backstage at the 1,200-seat Walt Disney Theatre, which takes up six decks on this massive 13-deck cruise ship and includes moving set pieces and three stage lifts.

As Quinn points out to me with a smile: “It's like any live theatre. We just have that additional element [that] we're on a ship, which makes it a little bit more exciting.”

As its creatives describe it, Disney Cruise Line is basically operating a repertory company on the high seas. On its newest ship, the Destiny, the Walt Disney Theatre is currently running three musicals in rep—which means that each night, there is a different show playing. On the day I came by for a backstage tour, on deck were puppets from the newest stage show Hercules. But as the theatre’s senior technician Lisa Hendershot tells me, they are currently swapping out scenic elements and puppets for Frozen (the third musical is a variety show called Disney Seas the Adventure).

“It's about two hours, we can get from one show to the other,” Hendershot explains to me, before pointing out the lifts and catwalks, on which a puppet of Sven from Frozen is hanging up high in wait. “For Sven, this big lift comes down from Deck Four, we’ll swap out puppets and small props and then it goes back up. So Nessus will go up, Sven will come down. The Hydras will go up, the turtles will come down.”

Then there’s the 24 actors, including two swings that learn over 30 tracks, and thousands of costumes (1,700 just for Hercules). It’s an elegant, high-budget operation that is far from the 30-minute panto-style musicals I used to attend as a child at Disneyland.

Get an exclusive look at the closing number from Hercules, "A Star Is Born," below.

The key is balancing spectacle with storytelling, as Jenny Weinbloom, vice president of Live Entertainment for Disney Signature Experiences, tells me. As VP, Weinbloom handles the entertainment for the cruise lines (it’s a different division from Disney Theatricals, which handles Broadway). She’s newer to her job—just two years in—but she used to be a producer on the Off-Broadway immersive hit Sleep No More.

“Growing up as a New Yorker who went to the theatre all the time, my family, when we would go to the parks, we rarely sought out the live entertainment. We thought, what's the thing we never can do back home? We can't go on rides," she explains, adding that what did inspire her love for theatre was seeing the nighttime shows at Disney World, particularly the spectacle-focused Illuminations at Epcot. “A challenge of the theatrical space in a park environment is you have a lot to do in your day at a park. You paid a lot of money to be there and you want to engage in all the different themed lands that are available, all the different attractions, all the different shows. And so entertainment is competing for the guests' time with attractions and all these other offerings—maybe we can only take 15 minutes, 30 minutes of that guest's time before they’ve got to get back out there, they've got churros to eat,” says Weinbloom.

But a Disney Cruise, by contrast, says Weinbloom, entertainment is the main event; so she feels called to deliver all kinds of storytelling opportunities—from spectacle-driven stage shows, to dinner theatre, to intimate experiences for just 10 people. On the Destiny, there’s the three musicals at the Walt Disney Theatre, a Lion King-themed show at one of the restaurants, a cabaret space where Maleficent hosts a stage show, and a Cruella de Vil-themed piano bar. Plus, the first thing that guests see when they enter the ship is a stage, out in the open—where short plays take place, including a scene with Loki declaring himself king of the ship.

As Weinbloom notes: “The ships are a fleet of floating performing arts complexes. So you have your main stage theatre, and you have your black box. And like any artistic director of a performing arts complex in 2025, we're also thinking about: How do we program shows in the coffee shop, in the stairwell, in the dressing room? How do we kind of colonize every inch of the ship with storytelling and theatre?”

It’s an ethos Weinbloom takes from her time as a producer on Sleep No More. There are experiences on this Disney ship that are entirely new—such as a 15-minute interactive experience with Dr. Facilier from Princess and the Frog, where he performs a card trick while bantering with an audience of just 10 people (and yes, I did sit in for one and it did leave me going: How did he do that?).

The word “immersive” gets brought up quite a bit in my conversation with Weinbloom, who explained that for her, it goes beyond photo opps with Disney characters: “What if we played with intimacy in a way that is totally native in an immersive theatre environment like Sleep No More, but maybe not expected on a cruise line or in a parks experience—but it’s actually the perfect medium for it? We have a lot of folks on our team who are just deeply passionate about immersion and interactivity in storytelling.”

But back to it being on a cruise ship, the creatives admit there are special challenges to performing aboard a moving vessel—the phrase “sit down, you’re rocking the boat” is apt here. According to the creative team, spectacle doesn’t get in the way of safety. So if the waters are rocky, says Quinn, “We have various levels of safety contingency right up until we don't do the show … It happens very rarely, but it has happened. We can also do what's called a flat show, if we had to, where there’s no lifts.” She then adds, chuckling, “And we have to hope the cast and the techs are not seasick.”

Luckily actor Matthew Patrick Quinn, a Broadway alum who is now performing on the Destiny (no relation to Disney’s Rachel Quinn), is not seasick. This is his fifth time performing on one of Disney’s cruise ships. He currently plays Hades in Hercules and King of the Trolls in Frozen. On some days, he could be doing three performances of Hercules (which clocks in at 80 minutes), and the next, he could do two performances of Frozen. Sure, the stage could be moving sometimes, but he doesn’t mind—he makes his stage entrance floating on a hoverboard and if the ship is too rocky, he’ll ditch the hoverboard.

“It’s like theatre in rep,” he remarks, while sitting in the Walt Disney Theatre. “You get the opportunity to stretch yourself and play a multitude of different roles, some smaller, some bigger. It does keep it fairly interesting.”

He also finds it a nice strengthening of his acting abilities after doing over 600 performances of Hadestown on tour and on Broadway—and yes, he did play the title character, marking a funny coincidence. Another coincidence: it was seeing the Fantasmic nighttime show at Disneyland, which features a pirate ship sailing on the Rivers of America, when he was eight years old that inspired him to be an actor.

Recounts Quinn, his eyes wide in wonder: “That moment I saw Captain Hook coming across on that ship, I knew in that moment that I wanted to be a part of something so epic. I wanted to create something that made me feel as emotionally connected as I did to that experience … To have the opportunity to come back again and relive my childhood each time by creating something and originating something that I know is going to have an effect on child in the audience who's never seen theatre.” He then pauses, then says with a delighted smile: “That is what keeps me coming back. Because, as they say here at Disney, we create happiness, we create memories.”

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Photos: Disney Hercules on the Disney Destiny

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