Word: beastes
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BEAUTY AND THE BEAST...
That metaphor may be a bit of a stretch, even for Disney, but after seeing Beauty and the Beast: The Musical, the stretch may be worth the exercise. In the self-proclaimed "Smash Hit Musical," Disney works hard to prove that, as with everything else, it can put on a really pretty show with many dazzling special effects and less than 10 percent new material. Hey, if it succeeds in one form, one needs only alter the package a little to make it instantly popular again, right? While one would hope that this isn't true...
...comic relief is not too distant. Gaston, played with expected egotistical shmuckness by Tony Lawson, and his human punching bag of a sidekick Lefou (Jeffrey Howard Schecter) are funny simply because they are so repulsive. While the overdone pitfalls and exaggerated screaming initiated amongst the walking housewares in the Beast's castle may make one cringe with embarrassment, Gaston's idiocy and the rest of the town's blind adoration of him remains mildly entertaining. Lawson's portrayal of the handsome villain as Elvis with extra testosterone remains particularly amusing, and the enormous stain glass wall picturing...
...focus of the story changes from Belle's village to the Beast's castle, the show grows simultaneously better and worse. The wolves that chase Belle's father Maurice (Grant Cowan) and the Beast himself (Fred Inkley) resemble the cast of Cats infinitely more than they look like vicious forest carnivores. In addition, while all of the living objects in the castle don exquisite costumes, their exaggerated gestures and facial expressions worth of Jim Carrey start out cute but quickly degenerate into irritating. They deserve props for being able to perform at all in such rigid costume designs, particularly...
...production. Rather than starting out as full-fledged living clocks and feather-dusters, the castle characters reveal that they are slowly turning into houseware, which adds a nice touch of humanity to the painfully splashy musical. Also, through conversations and (ahem) read-aloud sessions, Belle's love for the Beast develops because they both feel isolated and rejected in their respective homes. This is a particularly refreshing change, since the "beauty" in the story is usually depicted as coming down from her pedestal to love the "beast" despite his ugliness, rather than because they have something in common. Despite...