Justin Glaser and Liz Shivener in Beauty and the Beast.(Photo by Peter Coombs)
By Hap Erstein
On the second day of 2011, Disney’s The Lion King surpassed Beauty and the Beast to become the seventh longest-running show ever on Broadway.
That takes the media conglomerate’s first venture in the high-risk world of New York commercial theater down a peg, but when you run 5,461 performances – more than 13 years – you can console yourselves that you created a much-beloved success.
Still, when it came time to remount the Alan Menken-Howard Ashman musical and send it out again on tour, original director Robert Jess Roth and original choreographer Matt West felt the need to reconceive and redesign the show. So call the production, which kicks off the new year at the Kravis Center on Tuesday for a weeklong run, Beauty and the Beast 2.0.
Twenty years ago, Roth and West had been creating 30-minute shows for the Disneyland theme park and trying to persuade chef executive Michael Eisner to authorize an assault on Broadway. Eisner kept turning them down, until the 1991 animated feature of Beauty and the Beast – the fable of a spunky bookworm and the furry ogre who holds her captive and eventually wins her heart – kept being compared in structure and style to a Broadway show
That motivated Eisner to make the gamble, asking Roth and West how they would adapt Beauty and the Beast for the stage.
“So we created a two-hour version of the show, with songs to be filled in later,” explains Roth. “We’d say, ‘The song’s title is this, and this is what it does in the show.’ And we made a presentation to the board of directors in Aspen, Colorado,” fully expecting to be turned down.
“Instead, Michael said, ‘Wow, great. When does it open?’ And I said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘Yeah, we’re going to do it,’ and eighteen months later we were on Broadway.”
Eisner bet an estimated $12 million on a couple of Broadway novices. “I had danced on Broadway, but I had never really developed a show,” concedes West. “I’d been in them, but I’d never been involved in one from the very beginning.”
Foolhardy? Perhaps, but it paid off, grossing more than $1.4 billion worldwide and kick-starting a theatrical pipeline that includes such shows as The Lion King, Aida and Mary Poppins.
A paranoid Broadway community was wary of, and sometimes openly hostile to, this corporate invasion of its turf. “We couldn’t pay attention to any of that,” says Roth. “We just had to make the best show we could and hope it would be accepted by the audience, which is what happened.”
Now, three years after it closed on Broadway, the show has gone through a complete makeover. “We were interesting in finding out what happens if we reinvent the show and how far can we go,” says Roth.
“We’ve reinvented it, even though it wasn’t broken. I went to all the writers and all the designers and I said, ‘Hey, let’s brainstorm. What if …?’
“Well, we’ve grown as artists,” says West. “When you grow and you develop your art and your craft, and you’ve watched it for those 17 years, you do feel the urge to rethink it.”
Roth describes the new production as having “a lightness and a fluidity, where the original show was a little heavier-feeling.” The original show was cluttered with scenery to approximate the look of the film, whereas this one is more spare, which allows more room for movement and dance.
Totally redesigned are the yapping wolves of the forest, which were two-dimensional and hardly menacing. “So we brought in Basil Twist, a genius puppeteer who worked on ‘The Addams Family,’ and he made beautiful wolves,” reports Roth. “To say the other ones weren’t everything they could be is an understatement.”
In short, the aim is to retain the enchantment of the original Broadway Beauty and the Beast and to redo whatever was a bit enchantment-challenged. “What an unbelievable opportunity this has been, that so few people ever get,” says Roth.
BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, Kravis Center for the Performing Arts, 701 Okeechobee Blvd., West Palm Beach. Through Sunday, Jan. 9. Tickets: $25 and up. Call: (561) 832-SHOW (7469).