Basking in the Glow of His Role : Gary Beach’s Lumiere Has Lighted Up ‘Beauty’s’ First Year in Los Angeles

Though Gary Beach loves playing the charming French candlestick Lumiere in “Disney’s Beauty and the Beast,” he runs into more than a few problems backstage at the Shubert Theatre during performances.

“We have fire laws in this state,” explains Beach, who steals the musical with his show-stopping number “Be Our Guest.”

“All doors have to be shut at all times. So if I am in my dressing room, the door has to be shut. I can’t be left alone because I can’t open the door. So, I have a wonderful person who is with me at all times. The costume is hot as hell, so he carries a water bottle at all times. He opens doors for me, closes doors for me, pulls out seats for me. If my phone rings, he answers it. Onstage, I have freedom. Offstage, I can’t do anything.”

Beach, 48, has been with “Beauty and the Beast” since its out-of-town tryouts in Houston more than two years ago. He received a Tony Award nomination for his illuminating turn as the devil-may-care Lumiere on Broadway and has been with the L.A. company since it opened at the Shubert a year ago this week.

Long runs are the norm for Beach. “My first show was ‘1776,’ ” says Beach over a pre-show dinner at the cast’s hangout, Harper’s. “I did that right out of college and I did that about 700 times. I did ‘Annie’ 1,300 times. I [toured] in ‘Legends’ for a year. I did ‘Les Miserables’ for 1,008 performances.”

Initially, though, the easygoing actor turned down Lumiere. “Wouldn’t you?” Beach asks. “Disney had never done Broadway before. [I thought] ‘Is this going to be like Disney on Ice without the skates?’ ”

Beach changed his mind after the New York casting director faxed him the play. “I liked it more than the movie because the things I liked about the movie were expanded on,” Beach explains. “All of a sudden, it wasn’t just a candlestick or a clock. It was a human being turning into these things. Our stakes were higher immediately as characters. We weren’t just Thumper and Jiminy Cricket. I didn’t realize when I first saw the movie these inanimate objects were people until the end of the movie. I must have missed that part. That brought out more in the play.”

He was also drawn to Lumiere’s bright outlook on life. “He is losing his hands,” Beach says. “His feet are becoming larger and more metallic. His whole body is becoming stiffer. His hair is turning into wax. His face will be covered, but he’s an optimist. The other objects, they have moments of doubt and fear. The audience loves him so much. At the end, he gets to be a human being.”

Children, Beach says, don’t know how to react when they meet him out of costume. “All your friends want to bring their kids or grand-kids backstage after the show,” he says. “I have a friend who had seen the show in New York and wanted to bring his granddaughter. So for 2 1/2 hours, she was just cheering and having a great time. They come backstage to my dressing room after the show and she shuts up like a clam and stands there. He said, ‘This is Lumiere.’ She looked up at the ceiling and put both of her index fingers on her nose and began to spin. Kids can’t get this whole thing. It was fine as long as I was a man turning into a candlestick, but all of a sudden there is this guy in the room.”

Beach jokes that in his Lumiere costume, he’s “hooked up to a Gulf Station. It’s just down here at Century City.” In actual fact, Beach has two butane candlesticks attached to each shoulder blade. “I have tubes coming down each arm. The controls are inside. I have a control to turn the gas on and off and then an 80,000-volt stun gun that ignites, that is actually the flame.”

Initially, he was worried about being a human candlestick in the heavily pyrotechnical production. “None of these things had been done before,” Beach explains. “It was all invented for this. Now that they have companies all over the world--when I see the hands for the other Lumieres, they look like they are from the factory. They are beautiful and white. The ones I still am using look like Uncle Ernie made them in the tool shop. But I am used to them.”

As he knocks on the wooden table for luck, Beach says nothing has ever gone wrong with his special effects.

“I have been very careful about it. I announced to the cast the first day in Houston while we were all putting on our costumes that I was never going to play with these things. Don’t ask me to light your cigarettes. It has got to be serious.”

Beach plans to remain with the musical “until I am ready to go. I love him. I dreamed as a kid of having this kind of part.”

Lumiere, he says, is “everybody’s favorite uncle. He’s sexy, he’s romantic and has heart. Friends of mine when I was in New York would say, ‘Gary, don’t you get tired of this?’ I would say, ‘Let’s see. I am standing center stage at the Palace Theatre. I have a hat in one hand and a cane in the other. What is there to get tired of?’ It’s a dream that practically every actor would love to experience at least once.”

* “Beauty and the Beast,” Shubert Theatre, 2020 Avenue of the Stars, Century City, (800) 447-7400. Tuesdays-Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 1 and 6:30 p.m. Indefinitely. $25-$65.