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Beauty and the Beast set to enthrall Delhi
The Delhi audience is ready for a show like this. There is a strong theatre culture in Delhi. Delhi will be very receptive towards a show like this Siddharth Roy Kapur, Disney India, MD
Last month, Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, supported by Hindustan Times, which premiered in Mumbai, was a sold-out event. India’s first Broadway-style musical is now set to open in Delhi, next month. Reportedly, in the first two weeks after the booking began in Mumbai, the show sold over 12,000 tickets. After the success of the Mumbai shows, Disney India’s managing director Siddharth Roy Kapur talks about what went into the making of the musical.
Did you ever think that producing a Broadway-style musical in a Bollywood-crazy nation like ours would be risky?
When you try something new, there’s always an inherent risk involved. We are aware of the demand that exists for entertainment and leisure activities in India.
Does the Indian audience have limited entertainment options?
Circuses don’t exist today; you don’t have those many parks or amusement centres as you’d have liked. Families with disposable incomes are getting frustrated, as they have nowhere else to spend it. This is an opportunity to introduce a new form of entertainment. We’re most proud that we did it with a local cast. We thought it would make sense to start out with Delhi and Mumbai and then, hopefully in the future, we will go to other metros.
Alan Menken (music composer) has worked on the original movie too. What was his reaction?
Alan didn’t know what to expect. He was coming to India to see this. Later he told us that he was gobsmacked by the scale of production, by the kind of talent that was on stage, and by the effects we had managed to achieve.