THEATER : Disney’s Newest Franchise? : The company went reluctantly into live theatricals only to find out that in ‘Beauty and the Beast’ it had a monster on its hands. Now it has show plans for . . . just about everywhere.

What a difference a season makes.

In 1994, as the Walt Dis ney Co. prepared to open “Beauty and the Beast” (its first legitimate theatrical production) in New York, the stage world let out a collective “ eeek !” at the thought of a mouse on Broadway.

Traditionalists fretted about the theme park-ization of the Great White Way. They took it as a sign that theater was headed straight down the pricey, gizmo-centric trail--the one blazed by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Cameron Mackintosh--to a place you can’t talk about in a Disney show.

The Cassandras were not entirely wrong. “Beauty and the Beast,” as it turns out, does share certain characteristics with the mega-musical, including the flashy production pyrotechnics and boffo box office. But almost a year later, there’s also an up side.

For despite mixed notices from the critics, not only has Disney’s venture been successful beyond even the company’s expectations, but it has also been a boon to the strapped-for-cash stage. The show has provided work for Disney’s own and for theater professionals as well. And perhaps most important, it may be helping to inculcate a love of the medium in a new generation.

Now, as Disney prepares for the Los Angeles premiere on Wednesday of “Beauty and the Beast” at the Shubert Theatre--featuring most of the key original cast members, including Terrence Mann, Susan Egan, Gary Beach and Tom Bosley--last year’s new kid on the Broadway block is bullish on its thespian future.

“It’s much bigger than we ever thought it would be,” says Disney Chairman Michael D. Eisner, seated in his sixth-floor office on the Burbank studio lot. “It all went well, maybe too well. Maybe we think it’s too easy.”

What’s more, the buck doesn’t stop at the U.S. border. Disney is also about to launch a domestic touring company and a slate of international franchised productions.

“It was our expectation to be in New York and have a touring production, but it just exploded on us,” says producer Robert McTyre, senior vice president of Walt Disney Theatrical Productions. “In 1995, including the shows that we produce as well as the ones that we’ve licensed, we’re mounting seven different productions, which to my knowledge has never been done by anybody in one year.” There are also plans for a London “Beauty and the Beast” as soon as a theater becomes available to house it.

Additionally, Disney is going ahead with plans to restore the historic New Amsterdam Theatre on 42nd Street in Manhattan. The landmark venue will be used to house other upcoming, though as-yet-unannounced Disney stage shows.

All of which means that even if “Beauty and the Beast” was at first intended as a test of the waters, it’s now clear that Disney is in the theater business for the long haul.

“If ‘Beauty and the Beast’ had been a bad experience or economically unsatisfying, then we probably would be careful,” Eisner says. “But we’ve seen the light, and we’re going to follow it.”

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Disney had flirted with theater before.

“The idea of doing theater is not a new one for Disney,” says McTyre, who came out of the company’s theme parks division. “There have been many people, including myself, who prior to this wanted to motivate the company to go into the theater business. But the company never felt it was right before.”

Eisner has indeed often professed a fondness for the stage.

“In the first eight years I was at Disney, I really controlled our natural instincts for theater,” he says. “When I came here, we had a lot to do in other areas.”

It was, in fact, Eisner’s former studio chief, Jeffrey Katzenberg--who acrimoniously and publicly parted ways with Disney in September when Eisner refused to promote him--who was instrumental in persuading the Disney chairman to go ahead with a theater gambit.

“Jeffrey Katzenberg was pushing me pretty hard to do theater, and I kept saying, ‘Jeffrey, no, go back and do movies,’ ” Eisner says. “Theater is too difficult. There’s too small an audience.”

But then came the success of the “Beauty and the Beast” film, featuring music by Alan Menken and lyrics by the late Howard Ashman. The 1991 release, with screenplay by Linda Woolverton, was the first animated feature to be nominated for a best picture Oscar and won Oscars for best score and best song. When, by June, 1991, it had grossed $141.5 million in the United States alone (to date its gross, not including videos, is $146 million domestically and $202 million internationally), Eisner believed he had the right property.

“When Jeffrey, to his credit, kept discussing it with me, I finally said, ‘OK, we can do this one.’ ”

The project was approved in 1992, and a creative team led by in-house talent was appointed.

“I insisted that we use the people that I’d been working with at Disney for years,” Eisner says. “I didn’t necessarily want to go out and work with the current New York theater group.”

Robert Jess Roth, who had worked for three years on Disney theme park shows, was chosen to direct.

“Coming from shows in New York where the whole budget was $5,000, it was a chance to have these tools and get computer literate,” Roth says of his lucky break.

Eisner says the company’s theme park expertise shouldn’t be underestimated:

“We do more live entertainment than all of Broadway put together every year. It’s not that we’re not in the theater business--just not with a story that goes from beginning to end in two hours and 20 minutes. We do 20-minute pieces.”

In addition to McTyre and Roth, Eisner tapped his theme park talent pool for choreographer Matt West and scene designer Stan Meyer, neither of whom had worked on Broadway before. Also on the creative team were such non-Disney artists as costume designer Ann Hould-Ward, who went on to win a Tony, and many of the performers. Disney also added an Ashman-Menken song not heard in the film, plus new songs by Menken and lyricist Tim Rice.

“We had a certain amount of experience in-house, but in addition to that we hired people with professional theatrical experience such as the Dodgers and others to supplement ours,” McTyre says, citing the veteran producers of “The Who’s Tommy.”

“We’ve learned a lot from the professionals. We had to go through a long discovery process of finding out who are the good people, what do they do and what it costs.”

Still, critics accused Eisner of going with Disney employees in key artistic capacities because it gave him more control. And Eisner and Katzenberg were indeed along for the development process every step of the way, from casting through the show’s pre-Broadway tryout run at the Theatre Under the Stars in Houston.

That was when the real buzz started.

“Within a matter of weeks,” McTyre says, “the Japanese wanted to do a production, the Austrians wanted to do a production, and people from all over the United States were calling us. That’s the thing that surprised us, how much demand there was for the show.”

Costing just under $12 million both in New York and in L.A.--roughly equal to the tab for opening “Sunset Boulevard” at the Century City Shubert--”Beauty and the Beast” is among the most expensive shows of its time.

The pre-Broadway advance was $6 million--far below the record set by “Miss Saigon” at $37 million--but it did go on to break the record for single-day sales in New York with a box office of $1,296,722. (In L.A., it beat the first-day phone sales record set by “Phantom of the Opera.”)

Clearly, the show will turn profits for a long time. The New York production is about to recoup its costs, in roughly the time it has taken similarly scaled productions to do so, and it is showing no signs of slowing down.

In addition to the L.A. opening and the touring company that opens in Minneapolis in November, “Beauty and the Beast” is set to rear its lovely and ugly heads in five international locations in the near future: Melbourne, Australia, in July; Vienna, in September; Tokyo, in October; Osaka, Japan, in December, and Cologne, Germany, in September, 1996.

To facilitate the growing enter prise, Disney has been making a place for theater in the corporation.

“When we started this project, the company really didn’t know where it was going to be done out of,” McTyre says. “Was it going to be done out of theme parks--which has a big live-entertainment division--or out of the studio? There was a lot of debate.”

Although it was incorporated in February, 1993, Disney Theatrical Productions was initially regarded as more of an on-paper division than an actual center of operations.

“We have in the company a division made up of pieces of many divisions, which we’ve never done before,” Eisner says. “Creatively, it’s being run out of feature animation. The business watch and the ‘back of the house’ come out of motion pictures, and the productions around the world and the show itself are being supervised by Disney Theatricals, with me as cheerleader.”

Eventually, that ad-hoc structure will be centralized.

“It will evolve into its own division with its own head eventually, but right now I’m enamored with the individual pieces of our company,” Eisner says. “If you drew an organizational chart and went to the Harvard Business School, they would throw you out, but for us, it’s working.”

The venture derives particular strength from being able to bring Disney’s business acumen to a world not normally known for its state-of-the-art business practices. Needless to say, though, it hasn’t always been a seamless merger.

“We’re a publicly traded corporation, and we have strict financial controls,” McTyre says. “To try and marry those with a business where people kind of run it out of their pocket is quite an interesting prospect.”

He pointed, in particular, to Disney’s attention to long-term projections on its projects--five-year plans, for instance--and other accounting strategies that are not commonly used in theater.

“Sometimes what we do can be overkill,” he says. “Do you really need to do all the things that you need to do to run a corporation to run ‘Beauty and the Beast’? No, you don’t. But we do them anyway.”

They have also learned from moguls Lloyd Webber and Mackintosh, who pioneered the worldwide mega-musical.

“We’ve certainly done research in trying to pay attention to what other people have done,” McTyre says. “The theater is a difficult business and a lot of people do lose money, but there are people who make a lot of money.”

In addition to tapping the overseas markets, Disney plans to keep a presence in domestic theater, both nationwide and in New York.

The company signed an agreement last year with the city of New York, which, if all goes as planned, will have the New Amsterdam ready to open in 1997, in time to house the next Disney show. Although a final decision will not be made on the renovation until this summer, McTyre and Eisner expect no glitches.

What show will go in the historic theater is another matter, about which the company is, for the moment, mum.

“Sometimes if the first thing you do is a big hit, you get too cocky about the ones that are to follow,” Eisner says.

“We’ll be doing a show, one a year, in New York, beginning in the spring of ‘97, and we will move them out around the country. Some will be based on works we’ve done in other areas, and some will be completely original.”

Candidates that have been mentioned in the past include “Aladdin,” “The Little Mermaid,” “Mary Poppins,” “The Lion King” and the upcoming film “Pocahontas,” with music by Menken and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz. Original efforts that may also be under consideration include Schwartz’s version of the Chinese folk tale of Fa Mulan and a “Hercules” by Menken and lyricist David Zippel.

But the one that’s almost certain to be first out of the gate is a theatrical adaptation of the opera “Aida,” with music and lyrics by “Lion King” Oscar winners Elton John and Tim Rice. “Elton John, Tim Rice and Rob Roth are working together with our animation group on ‘Aida,’ ” says Eisner, who nonetheless declines, for the moment, to elaborate on the project.

Eisner seems to like talking about “Beauty and the Beast,” though, and not only because he’s had a relatively rocky year in other quarters. It’s a project that he finds not just profitable but also fun.

“It’s gratifying to sit in an audience and see the effect,” he says. “It’s hard to feel that when you watch a television show, because there are only a few people in the room, even though it has a much bigger impact, of course. It makes all the pain of running a big company disappear.”

And the people in the room who matter the most may be the children.

“The cultural phenomenon of ‘Beauty and the Beast’ is the effect it’s having on kids,” Eisner says. “As they get older, they’ll be getting into more serious shows.”

That’s what happens, say the Disney men, when you start with a property with an already established cadre of young fans, not to mention their parents.

“We attract people who either haven’t gone to the theater before or haven’t gone often,” McTyre says.

“If those people see the show and enjoy it, it’s our belief that they’ll then go and see something else. This property will build audiences and have a positive impact on theater for years to come.”

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* “Beauty and the Beast,” Shubert Theatre, 2020 Avenue of the Stars, Century City. Opens Wednesday. Schedule: Tuesday-Saturday, 8 p.m.; Saturday, 2 p.m.; Sunday, 1 and 6:30 p.m. $25-$65. (800) 447-7400 (Telecharge).