BEAUTY & THE BEAST
‘Tale as old as time’ returns to a Vancouver stage.
Read this and start humming immediately. Resistance is futile.
“The tale as old as time, song as old as rhyme,” a.k.a. Beauty and the Beast, returns to Vancouver. And with it, one of the most viral earworms in the history of Broadway tune contagions: the title riff of Disney’s monster 1994 Broadway blockbuster, culled with equally massive amounts of ingenuity and cash (some $12 million US at the time) from the corporation’s own iconic 1991 movie cartoon.
You know the story already, borrowed from a French fairy tale: handsome but surly prince in a chronic bad mood, mainly because he’s trapped under the curse that’s made him a hairy social pariah. Will the bookish village beauty Belle be able to see past quite a lot of fur and an off-putting hump to fall in love with a fellow outcast? Meanwhile — and here’s a challenge for the live stage and its design wizards — you’ll meet the Beast’s household staff, who are gradually turning into singing and dancing cutlery and kitchen utensils cum cabaret artistes.
“No one’s gloomy or complaining/While the flatware’s entertaining,” they sing in the Ziegfeldesque show-stopper Be Our Guest.
With its Alan Menken score and Howard Ashman/Tim Rice lyrics — pumped up by seven new songs for the stage — Disney’s first foray onto Broadway turned out to be an enchanted affair at the box office. Beauty and the Beast played on Broadway for 13 years and more than 5,000 performances, and has since travelled the world in nine languages.
Since the moment two decades ago when Broadway was dazzled by a pair of tap-dancing saltand-pepper shakers, Disney has transformed more of its hit cinematic animations into stage musicals, not always with the same success. Here’s a survey:
1. The Lion King, 1997
If Disney’s Beauty and the Beast conjures a cartoon onstage as a pop-up storybook, The Lion King stage musical is a very different creature. The acclaimed Disney musical, culled from the smash 1994 animation, opens with one of the most captivating scenes ever: a pageant of African beasts, stylized as life-size animal puppets, moves through the aisles toward the stage to celebrate the birth of a royal lion cub. And the magic doesn’t let up in Julie Taymor’s production. It’s a mesmerizing theatricalization of the epic story, in which an animal kingdom comes to life with puppets, puppet appendages attached visibly to human actors, masks, costumes and lighting.
The more predictable musical theatre contributions of Elton John (from the Disney movie) are supplemented by flavourful music from African composer Lebo M and others, played on authentic instruments.
Continuing to pack houses in New York, London’s West End and on tour, it’s become the highest-grossing Broadway musical of all time, surpassing the $1-billion mark ($6.2 billion globally).
2. Tarzan, 2006
Based on the 1999 Disney animation (and the Edwardian Edgar Rice Burroughs adventure novel), the musical landed, by swinging vine, on Broadway in 2006 with an American Idol contestant as the grownup version of the kid raised by gorillas.
The book by the playwright David Henry Hwang (of M Butterfly fame) has some wit, the Phil Collins score a striking lack of it. Typical example: I Need To Know, one of those palpitating who-am-I-really? identity numbers sung by a despondent young Tarzan. Reviews repeatedly invoked the term “theme park,” led by the New York Times, which called it, memorably, “a giant, writhing green blob with music.”
3. The Little Mermaid, 2008
It’s one thing for a Gallic candelabra with a flame for the ladies to exclaim “Chérie! you have cut me to the wick!”, as Lumière does, so charmingly in Beauty and the Beast.
It’s another for a cast on “merblades,” Heelys wheeled shoes, to skate across a plasticized bright blue sea, waving their mechanical fins and tentacles in an “underwater” calypso number.
On paper, the elaborate $15-million stage version of Disney’s 1989 animated film, with its plucky heroine who changes worlds for love, seemed to have a lot going for it.
Hans Christian Andersen’s tale with a more upbeat ending, for one, plus a catchy score by Menken and Ashman (Little Shop of Horrors) and a book by Pulitzer Prize winner Doug Wright. But it drowned in stage clutter and cumbersome special effects and closed early. Tarzan and The Little Mermaid are Disney Theatrical’s two biggest flops.
4. The Hunchback of Notre Dame, 1999
Based on the 1996 Disney movie, and the 1831 Victor Hugo doorstop, it’s the first Disney musical to première outside the U.S., in Berlin, with an original cast recording in German (Der Glöckner von Notre Dame). This past November, it got its Englishlanguage American première at the La Jolla Playhouse as a tuneup for a (yet-unannounced) Broadway run, with music by Disney’s go-to composer Menken and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz (Godspell, Wicked). An unusually dark and moody affair for chin-up Disney Corp., including a not-happy ending, with some Broadway razzmatazz for singing gargoyles.
5. Aladdin, 2011
It took Aladdin, the musical based on the 1992 Disney animation, three years to make its way from a Seattle première through a 2013 Toronto run to a Broadway opening last March (and a lamp full of Tony Award nominations thereafter). The playful, splashy production directed by choreographer Casey Nicholaw (The Book of Mormon) is dominated by a wild proliferation of harem pants and a go-for-the-gusto performance by James Monroe Iglehart as the sassy Genie. He breaks clean out of the Disney formula with his showstopper Friend Like Me.
6. Upcoming
Disney’s acclaimed 2014 animated movie Frozen is going to thaw onstage as a musical. And, reportedly, so is Disney’s 1967 The Jungle Book.