THEATER : The ‘Beauty’ of Broadway : Disney eyes the future: If the stage version of ‘Beauty and the Beast’ is a hit on Broadway, ‘Aladdin’ and others are in the wings

Actor Gary Beach was watching the movie “Beauty and the Beast” at Hollywood’s El Capitan Theatre a few years ago when the Disney film’s suave French candlestick, Lumiere, started singing “Be Our Guest.”

“Why doesn’t somebody write a part like this for me ?” Beach wondered.

A few years later, somebody did. Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast” opens on Broadway on April 18 with the animated film’s score, songs and sentiment essentially intact. But this time around, Belle, the Beast and the Enchanted Objects--including Beach as Lumiere--are live.

Few films, animated or otherwise, have received the kind of encouragement to move onstage that “Beauty and the Beast” has. It won Oscars for both best score and best song, and film and theater critics alike compared it favorably to staged musicals. The New York Times’ then-drama critic, Frank Rich, called the film’s score “the best Broadway musical score of 1991.”

Such remarks inspired Disney to take “Beauty” to Broadway. So, of course, did the film’s phenomenal success. The feature, the first animated film to be nominated for a best picture Oscar, grossed $146 million domestically, another $200 million internationally. More than 22 million video units have been sold, and until it was topped by “Aladdin”--now at more than 24 million--”Beauty” was the best-selling video ever made.

The big question was would it work as well onstage as on film?

“The creative team had to convince us that you could translate this onto the stage (and) keep the basic integrity of the work,” says Disney Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Michael D. Eisner. “It had to stand on its own but grow out of the movie.”

“Beauty and the Beast” is surely the first Broadway show to be developed first as storyboards. As the musical took form, set designer Stan Meyer and his staff created 140 intricate black-and-white renderings. Many of them featured arrows to show the directions people, props or sets moved.

Meyer counts 73 different settings in the final show, with 42 of them in the first act alone. The show, starring Susan Egan as Belle and Terrence Mann as the Beast, adds six songs, including one written originally for the film, as well as plenty of magic and special effects.

The “tale as old as time” remains the classic fairy tale--as interpreted by Disney. Sweet, adventurous Belle offers herself as a prisoner in place of her father, Maurice, when he is imprisoned by the Beast (who is, of course, an enchanted prince). Assisted by a household of servants who’ve been transformed into objects, and undeterred by her vain suitor Gaston, Belle eventually sees beneath the Beast’s foul exterior, loves him and breaks the evil spell.

Will the people who bought all those movie tickets and videos buy theater tickets as well? Many already have. The show broke box-office records at Houston’s Theatre Under the Stars, where it tried out before landing in New York, and it opens on Broadway with advance sales reportedly at more than $6 million.

That advance, however, is still far below that of “Miss Saigon,” which had a London run to build interest and a record $37 million during two years of advance ticket sales; even “The Goodbye Girl,” which closed after less than six months, opened to a $10-million advance last season. And with a budget that Eisner pegs at “under $12 million”--a figure comparable to mounting “Sunset Boulevard” at Century City’s Shubert Theatre--”Beauty” is among the costliest shows ever to hit Broadway.

“Beauty and the Beast” is also the first venture of Walt Disney Theatrical Productions Ltd., a new entity that could wind up transferring other Disney properties to the stage. Disney also recently signed preliminary agreements with the city and state of New York to restore and reopen Broadway’s historic New Amsterdam Theatre.

Corporate attention to “Beauty” has been considerable, Eisner concedes. He and Jeffrey Katzenberg, chairman of the Walt Disney Studios, went to all major auditions and participated in so many creative sessions that director Robert Jess Roth personally bought Katzenberg a notebook to jot down suggestions.

Eisner, who majored in theater in college and even wrote a few (“very sophomoric”) plays there, readily acknowledges that he’s been having a good time. But “fun,” he makes clear, is just one reason for his own major involvement. “The image of our company is at stake here. We’re going to the media capital of the world.”

Talk of a “Beauty and the Beast” stage adaptation started soon after the film was released in fall, 1991. Eisner and Katzenberg called key staff people at Walt Disney Attractions, which oversees the company’s worldwide entertainment projects, and asked them to appoint a creative team to look into it.

Roth, Meyer and choreographer Matt West were assigned to the project. The three, all in their 30s, had each come to Disney with professional theater experience. At Disney they staged mini-musicals such as “Mickey’s Nutcracker” and “Motorcar Madness” for theme parks and other Disney enterprises.

They created a new adventure for Dick Tracy, for instance, around the time Disney released the film in 1990. Their biggest project before “Beauty and the Beast,” the Dick Tracy mini-musical was designed for the Anaheim and Orlando parks, ran 30 minutes and cost more than$1 million. Learning about computerized scenery and other sophisticated staging, Roth says, “was good education for us and proved very useful now.”

They had all seen “Beauty and the Beast” the day the film opened in Hollywood, driving in together from their homes in Long Beach. Assigned to investigate the film’s stage potential, they went back to see it again in a Long Beach mall, and this time they took notes.

Bundling up Linda Woolverton’s film script, they went off to Las Vegas for one weekend, to Palm Springs for another. To refresh their memories, they’d stop in movie theaters to see the film again. Over the next several weeks, a basic stage structure evolved with songs, locations, possible entrances and exits.

Begun as doodles tossed off during an airplane flight, Meyer’s sketches grew more and more formal. Eventually, they emerged as 140 storyboards done in quarter-inch scale on 11-by-17-inch boards (to fit a photocopier). While design sketches are common in the theater and can easily number in the dozens on a big show, rarely do they suggest stage directions.

“We felt (the sketches) had to be totally clean and figured out, because Michael and Jeffrey were used to this scale of presentation,” Meyer says. “We were trying to get them to say yes.”

In July, 1992, Roth led a presentation to Disney executives in an Aspen, Colo., hotel conference room. They reviewed fabric swatches, costume sketches and a boy-as-teacup illusion. Then, narrating a slide show of the storyboards, Roth talked his listeners through the entire show. At the end of his presentation, Roth recalls, “Michael said, ‘OK, we’re going to do this.’ ”

Disney next brought the “Beauty” stage and film teams together at L.A.’s Four Seasons Hotel. Screenwriter Woolverton, who was called back from a Hawaiian vacation to attend the event, concedes that “it was a daunting prospect given the magic element and translating objects onstage.”

It was not a surprising prospect, however. Alan Menken and the late Howard Ashman created the hit musical “Little Shop of Horrors” before moving on to “The Little Mermaid” and “Beauty.” Woolverton, who has a master’s degree in theater for children, even ran her own children’s theater for a while, and says the three would often talk about the theatricality of their film.

“I thought, foolishly, that it would be more of a physical than storytelling problem,” Woolverton says. “But when we really started working on it (in January, 1993) the prospect became much more a storytelling problem.”

Just one scene wound up exactly the same as the film, she says, and it has been altered during previews. Characters changed as they became three-dimensional, and, Woolverton says, “the tone is different--I wanted to expand the characters and put a little more sophisticated spin on them.”

She heightened the chemistry between Beauty and the Beast “so we discover with them what they have in common.” Their developing Tracy-Hepburn-style relationship existed in the film, Woolverton says, but is more apparent in the stage version.

Back is the song “Human Again” that Menken and Ashman wrote originally for the film, and composer Menken has said he tried to construct the show’s five new songs from musical themes in the film so they would seem familiar. (The new songs have lyrics by Tim Rice, the British lyricist who also wrote lyrics for “Aladdin.”)

That left the problem everyone worried about: how to portray the Enchanted Objects onstage. The creative team chose to suggest objects, Meyer says, rather than have them be objects. Beach, for instance, says he plays not a candlestick but “a man turning into a candlestick; my hands light up, and my feet look like the base of a huge candelabra.”

Costumes help, since identities need to be clear for children as well as adults. To test themselves, the show’s creators drew on what Roth calls the “Leah factor.” Costume designer Ann Hould-Ward, who also designed costumes for “Into the Woods,” has a 7-year-old daughter named Leah and, says Roth, “we wanted Leah to be able to look at sketches and say, ‘That’s Lumiere.’ ”

Rock ‘n’ roll fan Roth also tapped rock concert-style lighting and theatrics for his show, studying the appearance and sexuality of rock stars for use in creating the stage’s Beast.

At the end of the first act, when the Beast sings his lament “If I Can’t Love Her,” Meyer says, “the costume, setting and lighting all come together. The focus is totally on the Beast. He’s like a rock star.”

“Beauty and the Beast” arrived in New York after 50 performances at Houston’s Theatre Under the Stars. Eisner says the 3,000-seat arena was selected in part because it was far enough away from Los Angeles “to give the show room to breathe.”

It was hardly out of sight, out of mind, however. Eisner went to Houston 10 times, he says, and figures he talked to Roth almost every day by phone.

Director Roth, in turn, calls Eisner and Katzenberg “part of the creative team.”

“They’d come watch the show, we’d go to a room at the theater, and they’d have lots of notes,” he says. “Their involvement led to a lot of discussions about how to make things clearer; because they were not there every day, they had fresh eyes.”

But Meyer disputes media reports that Roth was hired because he could be easily controlled by corporate brass.

“This production is really Robert Roth’s production of ‘Beauty and the Beast,’ ” Meyer says. “They didn’t pick Rob to tell him what to do. (Eisner and Katzenberg) were involved, but they weren’t in the rehearsal halls. . . . Rob is definitely not a puppet for them.”

Asked about staffing the stage show, Eisner talks company loyalty more than malleability: “We produce in the U.S. more live entertainment and spend more on our attractions than all of Broadway put together. . . . It seemed to me to do Broadway and not do it with our own people, people who worked with us, was unfair. It would be inappropriate.”

It would also be more expensive, particularly with the major players generally selected for such big-budget musicals. Although Broadway veterans do appear backstage as well as onstage, the show’s producer, director and set designer are making their Broadway debuts.

“We always believed in nurturing new people,” Eisner says. “It is definitely an economic issue but not the overriding issue. The overriding issue is talent. The expensive part of putting on the show is putting on the show, not a few salaries. But if you have the talent and have seen (it) with your own eyes, why would you go to anyone else?”

“Beauty and the Beast” also represents a new corporate direction for Disney, one of the few Hollywood studios to resist previous Broadway involvement. Both Eisner and Katzenberg have long been interested in theater, as a business as well as an art form, and a confluence of factors finally made the timing right.

Earlier, says Eisner, he didn’t want to divert corporate attention “towards something limited to one theater, extremely risky and, for a lot of people, a hobby.” But as Eisner saw Disney profits climb in other areas, so did his appreciation of the enormous profits possible in the theater.

He was watching composer-producer Andrew Lloyd Webber and mega-producer Cameron Mackintosh, Eisner says, “and the afterlife of some of their shows. If you can hit, it makes it economically viable for a big company. You can create content, or software, for future use as part of your inventory.”

The show’s Beast, Terrence Mann, received a Tony nomination playing Rum Tum Tugger in “Cats,” and Disney has obviously noted the Mackintosh merchandising acumen that helped “Cats” hit $2 billion in worldwide grosses earlier this year. “Beauty” programs and cast albums were also ready during previews, very rare on Broadway, and already open in New York are Bloomingdale’s ‘Beauty & the Beast” shops.

Disney is the show’s sole Broadway producer, and Disney Theatrical producer Robert McTyre says Disney will “almost certainly” remain the sole producer on domestic tours. International touring will probably require local affiliates, McTyre adds, reporting interest already from such places as Australia, Mexico, England, Germany, Israel, Canada and Japan.

Other Disney stage ventures also seem likely, given both Disney’s frequently expressed commitment to live entertainment and the company’s planned restoration of New York’s New Amsterdam Theatre. Terms call for Disney to contribute $8 million toward restoring the 91-year-old theater, the country’s first major Art Nouveau building, plus take on a $21-million loan for the rest from the public sector.

Should final negotiations and construction go according to plan, the theater could reopen as early as fall, 1996. “Beauty and the Beast” plays Broadway’s Palace Theatre, but McTyre says Disney hopes its next production will open the New Amsterdam.

Pressed to name likely candidates, he mentions “Aladdin,” “The Little Mermaid” and “Mary Poppins” (which has also been mentioned by Lloyd Webber as a possible future project), “not necessarily in that order.” Like “Beauty,” all three musicals won Oscars for best score and best song. And “Aladdin” has already topped “Beauty” in both film grosses and video sales.

Disney keeps turning out more potential stage fodder, of course. “The Lion King” opens this summer with music and lyrics by Elton John and Tim Rice, while Menken and lyricist Stephen Schwartz teamed for 1995’s “Pocahontas” and “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.” Also on the roster are Schwartz’s “Fa Mulan,” based on a Chinese folk tale, “Hercules,” with songs by Menken and lyricist David Zippel, and a reteaming of John and Rice for “Aida.”

Possible, too, are original musicals and dramas. Disney will also look to see what might be adapted for the screen, Eisner says, acknowledging even the possibility of a live-action film version of “Beauty and the Beast.”

And if “Beauty” is not a Broadway smash?

“I think we’d be pretty disappointed if it didn’t work,” Eisner says. “There was a standing ovation every night in Houston and every night here (in previews), and everybody calls and tells me they love it. If you get that kind of reaction in the movie business, it generally follows through after the opening. I would be surprised and shocked and re-evaluate my own sense of understanding the market. But I would still be committed to go forward.”