Today we are turning our attention to Disney's hotly anticipated new live action movie musical adaptation of BEAUTY & THE BEAST.
Be Our Guest These days on Broadway, rarer than musicals based on movies are properties actually not sourced by celluloid material, yet the fascinating artistic trajectory of Disney's BEAUTY & THE BEAST both onscreen and onstage is truly enthralling to analyze. Of course, the 1991 animated movie musical smash arriving at the height of the Disney renaissance was based on the hallowed French fairy tale by Jeanne-Marie Le Prince de Beaumont, featuring a rapturous and rollicking score by the famed Disney composing dream team of Alan Menken and Howard Ashman. The worldwide success of BEAUTY & THE BEAST as both a commercial property and a critical triumph was further buoyed by the film being nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award at that year's ceremony - a truly shocking and anomalous event for the time - and took home two, including Best Original Score and Best Song. While the film leapt forth from the screen with theatricality, wit, verve, color, enchantment and excitement, the notion of adapting an animated property to the stage and utilizing real actors in place of artistically crafted figures was highly unusual at the time and the prospect of translating BEAUTY & THE BEAST to Broadway seemed ludicrous to some prognosticators at the time, although all were willing to admit that the material certainly sang - and sang brilliantly - onscreen as realized by Don Hahn and the creators of the feature film. But, how to somehow capture that intangible magic again?
Photo Credits: Disney
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