Jason Trubitt recalls the review in the New York Times of the original Disney animated movie of “Beauty and the Beast” in the early 1990s.
It said something like, the best musical of the year isn’t on Broadway at all, it is the movie, “Beauty and the Beast.”
Today, Disney musicals are a juggernaut of long-running shows on Broadway, but at that time the New York stage was unknown territory. However, Disney used Broadway writers and other creatives to put together that fabulously popular movie. They already had a team together and the Times review got the huge entertainment company thinking in a different way.
Trubitt now is production supervisor for the international tours of “Beauty and The Beast,” which opens Tuesday, Oct. 14, at Wharton Center.
“This is a magical show,” Trubitt said. “There is a nostalgic factor for all those folks who saw it in their youth and now they bring their children. This property is near and dear to Disney theatrical and to audiences everywhere. It is beloved.”
Getting back to “Beauty’s” Broadway beginnings, Disney took the leap and put everything they had into the new musical, even using some of their Disney “imagineering” professionals to design new and unique sets that used techniques magicians had used. The major set pieces are so special that to this day they would rather not talk about them in detail.
They want to keep the magic alive.
Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast” will open at the Wharton Center on Tuesday, Oct. 14 and run through Sunday, Oct. 19.
“Beauty And the Beast” opened in 1994 and was immediately a smash hit. It stayed on Broadway until 2007 and brought in $429 million, the sixth-longest running show on Broadway. The critics were lukewarm, but it has since played in 13 countries and 115 cities and has grossed more than $1.7 billion.
This tour coming to Wharton has only been on the road since opening in Chicago in July.
“We wanted to make this tour play many different kinds of venues, with stays of one week, minimum,” Trubitt said. “We have the opportunity now to play in places with smaller audiences.”
Although the team designed the show to move quickly from one city to the next, it still needs nine semi-trucks to do the job. With the cast, band, technicians and costume people, they travel with a group of 75-80. Once they arrive in East Lansing, they will add another 100 local people to construct and run the show.
One of the most important elements for a show like “Beauty” are the costumes.
“The show travels with hundreds of costumes,” Trubitt said. “Each character has about 20. We have an amazing group of professionals who dry clean, launder, spot clean and maintain the costumes. Some costumes we send out to a local dry cleaner after the show is over and they get them back to us by 10:00 the next morning.”
Currently, there are “Beauty” productions in Tokyo, Australia and the U.S. The Australian production has been playing for 2 1/2 years and Turbitt expects the U.S. tour to also run for several years.
He feels that the popularity of the musical is largely because of the story itself.
“Whatever form it takes, this legendary story is transformative. It’s in human nature to need to be accepted. “
Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast” will open at the Wharton Center on Tuesday, Oct. 14 and run through Sunday, Oct. 19.
This article originally appeared on Lansing State Journal: ‘Beauty and the Beast’ musical set to open at Wharton
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