No resisting the pull of Disney's magic

As I'm neither a 5-year-old nor a menopausal Disney fanatic, a dubbed Disney mash-up is not the kind of performance I typically attend.

And yet, I found myself recently at the Beijing Exhibition Center Theater surrounded by the glistening, bald heads of skinny 5-year-old boys and the perky pigtails of their female counterparts. I was watching Mickey's Music Festival that claimed to be a "lively concert experience guaranteed to deliver enough rockin' memories to last a lifetime."

At first, I was skeptical of this description. Five minutes into the show, I still had not received my quota of "rockin' memories". Compared to the elaborate Disney on Ice shows and Lion King Broadway musicals I had watched before, this one was strictly mediocre.