How Disney's ‘Beauty and the Beast' first brought families to Broadway

Chicago Tribune

5 days ago

The new Disney tour of 'Beauty and the Beast' playing this summer at the Cadillac Palace Theatre is introducing bookish Belle, clever Chip and garrulous Gaston to younger generations who were not even born in 1993 when Disney decided to take a stab at turning an animated movie into a Broadway musical. They're also unlikely to know the significance of this particular musical in the history of the art form.
But in fact, 'Beauty and the Beast' sparked a revolution in bringing family audiences back to Broadway. And the success of the show changed the face of the Disney organization.
In the 1980s, the British producer Cameron Mackintosh had come to dominate the market for massive musical spectacles with a succession of shows: 'Cats,' 'Phantom of the Opera,' 'Les Misérables' and 'Miss Saigon.' These productions played London and New York and toured all over the world, running for years in cities from Cleveland to Green Bay, providing a boon to historic theaters like the Auditorium Theatre in Chicago, which programmed such musicals for years.
Mackintosh's secret? His touring productions, which crisscrossed the country in fleets of trucks, were fully the equal of the shows in London and New York. The touring circuit had previously been dependent on stars, but humans are finicky and capricious. Mackintosh had figured out that the better business model was to make the entire production the star. That way, few knew and even fewer cared about who was or was not playing Fantine, say, on a given night.
Mackintosh was an independent. The big U.S. studios, like Disney, had previously concluded that Broadway, with its high production costs and risks, did not offer enough of a potential payoff to be worth their time.
But by the early 1990s, they were beginning to realize how much money Mackintosh had been making. Something else had happened, too.
Disney had decided to reboot its animated franchise with a series of new musical movies that were heavy on songs. The studio had found an enormously gifted duo named Alan Menken and Howard Ashman, who'd made a splash in New York with a 1986 off-Broadway show named 'Little Shop of Horrors.' Although Ashman died from AIDS at the age of 40 during the creation of the film version of 'Beauty and the Beast' (just weeks before its release), the pair wrote eight songs for the movie, following up on their 1989 success with 'The Little Mermaid,' a film that had won two Academy Awards. Even more than 'Mermaid,' 'Beauty and the Beast' was very much constructed as a classic Broadway musical, with Belle set up as a Gigi-like heroine. The title song won an Oscar for best original song and the rest of the score was filled with gems. Which could not be said of most of the live shows on Broadway at the time.
Frank Rich, then the chief critic for the New York Times, wrote a seminal article in December 1991 calling the movie musical 'The Hit That Got Away,' saying 'the best Broadway musical score of 1991 was that written by Alan Menken and Howard Ashman for the Disney animated musical 'Beauty and the Beast.' Rich noted, pointedly, that the pair had never worked as a team on a Broadway musical.
'Disney had just not thought stage musicals were the right business for them,' Menken said in a recent telephone interview. 'But although 'Beauty and the Beast' was an animated movie, it actually had a really strong stage sensibility.' And, of course, it had those hit songs, including some that had hit the cutting-room floor and could be put back into use.
Disney's chairman at the time, Michael Eisner, had also read Rich's article and was well aware of the movie's theatricality. So he ordered up a Broadway stage version of 'Beauty and the Beast.' Up until that point, Disney had never done a full-blown musical, nothing much, really, beyond its early theme-park performances with foam heads and ice shows.
'Michael was a giant fan of theater. He was a former theater student, so he cared deeply about the form,' said Thomas Schumacher, by far the most important Disney executive when it comes to what became a succession of stage musicals, developing in sophistcation and specifically theatrical artistry, but moving through a door opened by 'Beauty and the Beast.'
In essence, the show became the animated movie translated to the stage. That was all that it occurred to Disney to do. (That would change, to spectacular effect, with 'The Lion King' as Schumacher became the head of what morphed into Disney Theatricals, and Julie Taymor was brought on board and creative people wrestled with the problem of a movie starring a cast of animals, not period French folk.)
'I think of 'Beauty and the Beast' was the show we did that is the closest to the original Walt Disney ethos,' Menken said. 'The look of it. The style of it. The Bavarian village. And, of course, it's the most theatrical, given Gaston, Belle and 'Be Our Guest.''
The film had been Menken's last collaboration with Ashman, searing the memory of his beloved creative partner. The famed British lyricist Tim Rice had come on board to help Menken with the stage musical. But when it came to writing the additional songs clearly necessary for a full-blown musical, Menken no longer had Ashman, who had pitched the idea for an animated movie version of 'Beauty and the Beast' in the first place.
'I found a cassette one day,' Menken said, 'from back when we were using cassettes. I think I was going to record over it. But when I played it, I heard Howard and I working on a song for 'Beauty and the Beast.' We were struggling to find the right tone and the right music.'
They found it of course — a romantic, swirling aesthetic, filled with gorgeous melodies and all of the vibrancy of the original animated film. Only with living people.
As part of its animated sensibility, director Robert Jess Roth's original production of 'Beauty and the Beast' had plenty of knock-out theatrical tricks, including a clever idea to put Chip, the talking cup from the film, on his own on-stage tray, seemingly making him a head-only character. Above all, the show delighted audience with its 'Be Our Guest' centerpiece, a dancing-flatware tribute to Disney's 'Fantasia,' as well as its famous moment of beastly transformation wherein Belle finally got all of her heart's desires.
The show was never a critical favorite; reviews on Broadway were tepid, for the most part. 'There was a lot of cynicism,' Menken said, 'about Disney moving in on Broadway. We were pretty much treated with derision.'
Any such derision did not hinder the show's success. The original Broadway run of 'Beauty and the Beast' production would play for 5,461 performances (some 13 years), and became the tenth longest running show in Broadway history. According to Schumacher, the original production has seen more global reproductions than 'The Lion King' or pretty much any other title you might mention.
'It is beloved around the world,' Schumacher said, simply enough.
'Beauty and the Beast' also brought kids and their parents to Broadway. Disney quickly realized that these titles could attract groups of four or more and, in the years that followed, Schumacher's team developed sophisticated pricing and marketing strategies that were aimed at families and would also be used for 'The Lion King' and 'Aladdin,' shows still playing in New York and attracting an audience that constantly renews itself as kids age into their target demographics. None of that would have happened without the massive success of 'Beauty and the Beast' — a new kind of musical that was a long way from 'Cabaret,' 'A Chorus Line' and 'Chicago' and that proved Broadway didn't have to be just for adults.
Review: New tour of 'Beauty and the Beast' lives up to all the expectationsNow, the all-new U.S. tour, which has freshened the title without removing its traditional appeal, is focused on a new generation of families.
For Menken, of course, the success of 'Beauty and the Beast' came in the wake of his heartbreak over Ashman's death. But he wrote a new song, 'Home,' for the stage show in tribute to his friend and 'seamless collaborator.' 'Home,' with its lilting melody, was the repurposing of a separate song, 'My Old Friend,' Menken had written after Ashman's death. By consciously doing so, Menken found a way to write Ashman into the stage version of 'Beauty and the Beast' and not just the animated movie into which the late genius had poured his heart.
'Is this home?' Belle sings in 'Home' of a castle that seems at first like a very chilly spot, before the Beast transforms into her true love.
'Is this what I must learn to believe in?' she sings, gaining in her certitude. 'Try to find something good in this tragic place …'
Belle finds that good. So did Menken. So did Disney. And audiences in Chicago, few of whom know his history, currently are enjoying the good that came from 'Beauty and the Beast' every night.