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Versus: Beauty and the Beast (1991 movie) and Beauty and the Beast (musical, 2012 run)
Introducing a brand new review style! Titled "Versus," it's kind of like the Nostalgia Critic's "Old vs. New" segment, but with one critical difference: Mine focuses only on comparitive analysis. I don't try to pick which version is better or not.
And for that reason, with the exception of this review, I will not pit adaptations against one another. For example, no Super Sentai vs. Power Rangers or Ryuki vs. Dragon Knight. It's not fair to either version, which should be taken as separate shows.
So I'm off to a great start, eh? First review of this kind, and I'm already breaking the rules. Well, that's because both the movie and the musical of Disney's Beauty and the Beast are very well-established and well-regarded, so it's not quite as skewed in one direction or the other. And when you've got a theatre adaptation of a movie, or vice-versa, then comparitive analysis is a good tool to see how each crew decided to tell the story.
Beauty and the Beast was one of my favorite movies when I was growing up, and I think today it's probably become my favorite. While The Little Mermaid had a lot to prove in order to bring Walt Disney Studios back from the brink, Beauty and the Beast was a marvel of technology. Using CAPS, a hardware/software system designed to digitally animate the movie, created by Pixar, they added depth to the art and fused CGI, creating a memorable and lovely ballroom scene. The music was top-notch, by the dynamic duo of composer Alan Menken and the late lyricist Howard Ashman, one of his last musical scores before his death in March 1991 from complications from AIDS (the film was dedicated to him). The movie was nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars, and while it didn't win that (nor for Best Sound), it picked up the awards for Best Original Score and Best Original Song (for "Beauty and the Beast"; "Be Our Guest" and "Belle" were also nominated). It currently ties only Disney-Pixar's WALL-E for most nominations for an animated feature.
In 1994, a Broadway musical adaptation of the movie was released, with additional songs penned by Tim Rice, who completed work on Aladdin's soundtrack after Ashman's death. The musical was a hit and ran from 1994-2007. Recently, it went on tour and came to my area. Earlier this afternoon, my grandmother and I went to see it. I'd always wanted to see one of the Disney Broadway shows, and this one was always on top of my list.
In terms of the backgrounds and direction, it's mostly about equal. The colors used look pretty much identical to the movie--which is good because there was symbolism involved in the color scheme (i.e.: Belle and the Beast wear blue when no one else does, making them stand out from the crowd at first glance). And one thing I really liked was how they didn't even hide how the sets inside the castle were moving--the people moving them were dressed as gargoyles. It really gave the sense that this castle was full of things that used to be human; that everything is still alive and moving, from the candles and clocks to the very castle foundations themselves.
The soundtrack is mostly the same, since Howard Ashman had completed the movie soundtrack before his death. There are a handful of other songs added by Tim Rice and Alan Menken: "No Matter What" for Maurice, "Me" for Gaston, "Home" for Belle, "How Long Must This Go On?" and "If I Can't Love Her" for the Beast, "Maison des Lunes" for Gaston, LeFou, and Monsieur D'Arque, "A Change in Me" for Belle, and "End Duet/Transformaton" for Belle and the Beast. "Human Again," a song originally written by Ashman for the movie, was included and later re-inserted in the movie with a new animation sequence. The new songs fit the musical perfectly, and Rice has done a damn good job with both Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin in fitting Ashman's style. The movie always felt like a Broadway musical (I feel the same about Mary Poppins), so it translates easily in terms of music. The tour version, at least as performed at Ruth Eckerd Hall, omits "Maison des Lunes" and the first "No Matter What" (while retaining the reprise), along with most of the wolf chase and all of the battle inside the castle (which is a shame because I love seeing the household kick ass), presumably for time, but you still get the characterization that these songs try to get across.
But where differences come is the characters. Beauty and the Beast has two central characters and a lively cast of extras.
Belle in the movie, as played by Paige O'Hara, is one of my all-time favorite Disney heroines (starting to notice a pattern in how much I love this movie?). As a child, I identified with her easily--she was a brown-haired, brown-eyed bookworm with more than a little social awkwardness. She offered herself as a prisoner in her father's place, and she had the guts to stand up to the Beast when nobody else would. She got into shouting matches with him and won, mostly because nobody ever talked back to the Beast before. She was one of the first people not to be afraid of him and the first to be truly kind to him. And yes, I've heard all this theorizing about Stockholm syndrome; I might not be an expert in the subject, but I don't think it's learned helplessness when you tell your captor to stop being a baby and control his damn temper.
The movie portrays Belle as a nice young woman who just can't fit in because hey, guess what, she's independent and has a brain. She doesn't fawn over Gaston, she doesn't want to be stuck there--she wants something more. The musical focuses on this aspect a little more by bringing up that this is why she reads--to feel like she's visiting these far-off places beyond her small provincial town. Our production starred Hilary Maiberger, and I have to say I wasn't as in love with her performance. Sure, she was a great singer and everything, but she made Belle a little too much of a Disney Princess stereotype. "But Akino," you say, "Belle is a Disney Princess!" Yeah, but the thing about Belle is that she always tried to keep control of her destiny. She evaded Gaston, she offered herself to save her father, she ran off when it got to be too much, she went to save her father--she was the hero. A stereotypical Disney Princess is a kind girl who has magic in her, but really lacks in personality. She's kind of the American equivalent to the yamato nadeshiko trope in Japan. We just groan at this stereotype: pretty, happy, and magical. Belle in the musical is extremely polite; while in the movie, Belle was polite, she also made it clear she was not a pushover. Musical Belle seems to be overdoing the good manners; she comes off as so nice that it feels odd that she would be the town outcast. At the very least, somebody should be able to hold a conversation with her and say that she's a well-mannered girl.
And then we have the Beast. In the movie, as played by Robby Benson, he's more of the tortured soul type. He's unkind, short-tempered, and you always feel that he's dangerous. The fact that Belle stands up to him surprises the utter hell out of him. When he looks like a beast, you know that it's the spell bringing what's in his heart out in the open. When he starts trying to change himself for Belle, he's gentle and unsure of himself. Darick Pead in the musical plays him as more of a brat, which is entertaining, but it really doesn't stand up against the rage and pain that was Benson's Beast. And it's even more of a shame that Benson didn't get any songs other than part of "Something There," when he has a damn nice singing voice. Pead was a good singer, but when it came to Belle falling in love with the Beast, I really had a hard time buying it because he made the Beast such a spoiled child. Even as he was changing, he still came off as a kid. How is someone as mature as Belle supposed to be on equal terms and fall in love with him?
Gaston was another big change. Richard White played him in the movie as kind of a tragic hero, in the classical sense. While he was an egotist, Gaston was the town hero. He was the strongest guy in town, the most handsome, and buddy-buddy with everybody. He decided to marry Belle because she was the only person in town who he thought was about as good-looking as he was. In any other story, he would have learned how to tone down the egotism and that it wasn't all about him, and he'd become the hero--I think you may realize that I've essentially described Kuzco of The Emperor's New Groove. Matt Farcher plays him as pretty much an asshole from the start of the musical, though I will say that in terms of voice, he sounds exactly like White. Even when he's going to propose to Belle, he tells the Bimbettes (the trio of silly bimbos in love with him) that marrying her won't stop him from having affairs with them. Nice guy. He's forever beating on his sidekick, LeFou (played in the musical by Jimmy Larkin; Jesse Corti in the movie). LeFou in the movie wasn't too bright and really kind of stuck around Gaston because why not? He was the strongest, toughest, greatest guy in town. LeFou in the musical is even dimmer and a total coward. While he's funny, you feel worse for him. Gaston comes off as a bully, and Belle outright calls him one. I can see why they'd want to emphasize this in a musical aimed at kids, but I really miss the fallen hero feel you get from the movie version.
Lumiere plays basically the same role between the movie and the musical, but I really miss the late Jerry Orbach, who'd played him in the movie. He made Lumiere kind of a rascal, and his French accent sounded natural. Hassan Nazari-Robati was good in the musical, but even my grandmother had to admit that he ended up sounding a little gay--though that did make it utterly hilarious seeing him play off Cogsworth. Cogsworth was always Lumiere's stuffy heterosexual life mate in the movie, where he was played by David Ogden Stiers, but he becomes a little more panicky in the musical, with James May giving him a bit of a nasally sound. Still, I have to say I felt for the character, if only for the twist going on in the story. In the musical, the household are slowly turning into objects, rather than already being transformed. So where the movie version of Cogsworth is a small clock, the musical version is a man slowly becoming a grandfather clock. At one point, he alarms everyone when he suddenly has a key sticking out of his back, indicating that he's progressing further into the transformation, where he may lose himself completely (it's implied that by that point, the change will be irreversible). Lumiere's interaction with them seems a little more desperate to keep the mood light, something I did appreciate.
Characters with extended roles in the musical were the Feather Duster and the Wardrobe. In the movie, the Feather Duster was known as Fifi (unnamed except in Belle's Magical World, one of the poor sequels to the movie) and really only existed to be Lumiere's love interest. In the musical, she's called Babette and has slightly more to do, if only in UST with Lumiere. See, they're on-again/off-again lovers, who frequently take on other lovers to make one another jealous. She's still not a particularly strong character, and I think she really only got an extended role for fanservice: she's dressed as a French maid with a very short skirt, and she's flirty. She's there for the dads.
The Wardrobe wasn't named in the movie, where she was played by Jo Anne Worley. She was kind of a confidante for Belle when she first arrived at the castle, but she didn't have any backstory. In the musical, she's named Madame de la Grande Bouche, and my version had her played by Shanji Hadjian. Here, she was a former opera singer who came to work at the castle (or possibly was visiting and got caught up in the spell). She loses a bit of her confidante status to Belle this way, but she is more memorable and does end up with some ship tease with Cogsworth at the end.
Mrs. Potts is pretty much the same between movie and musical, played by Angela Lansbury in the first and Erin Edelle in this particular production. It's her son Chip who gets a major change in role. In the movie, Chip (played by Bradley Michael Pierce) became kind of a breakout character just by his performance alone. What never escaped me in the movie was the way the household mostly seemed to see Belle as a means to an end--they pushed her and the Beast to fall in love, just so the spell would be broken. Chip was the first one to see Belle as a person. When the Beast let Belle leave to go rescue her father, Chip stowed away in her bag, asking why she left and if she didn't want to be with them anymore. He saved her and Maurice from captivity when Gaston locked them in their own cellar, putting Maurice's invention to work in chopping down the door. For an adorable little kid teacup, he was a badass. But due to technicalities, Chip's role had to be reduced drastically in the musical. I think he was played by Gabriel Reis in the Ruth Eckerd Hall tour, if only because that was the name on the board outside. Chip was a child's head turning into a teacup--Reis's body was hidden inside a tea cart while he kept his head sticking out and wearing a helmet that looked like a teacup. They'd use a prop when he had to be carried. He ended up being just the cute little kid that Mrs. Potts desperately wanted to see run down the halls one day. Interaction with Belle was limited, and they completely omitted the capture, so neither Chip nor the invention got to see action.
Overall, the musical was very good, but I think I like the movie more. The movie is surprisingly mature for a kids' movie--it takes itself seriously, something that I don't think Disney movies have done very well in the past decade or so (Pixar still knows how to do it, however). The musical has a lot of kid humor--slapstick, the Beast's bratty behavior, things like that. There's also some very adult moments, like Babette or Gaston promising to "rendezvous" with the towngirls after he's married. It doesn't detract from the overall experience, but it comes off as shocking when I'm so used to the maturity of the movie, which was funny without feeling forced or awkward. But then, the movie was pretty much perfect. It's hard to live up to it, even when it competes against itself. Still, the musical puts on a damn good show, and if you ever have the chance to see it, take it.
And for that reason, with the exception of this review, I will not pit adaptations against one another. For example, no Super Sentai vs. Power Rangers or Ryuki vs. Dragon Knight. It's not fair to either version, which should be taken as separate shows.
So I'm off to a great start, eh? First review of this kind, and I'm already breaking the rules. Well, that's because both the movie and the musical of Disney's Beauty and the Beast are very well-established and well-regarded, so it's not quite as skewed in one direction or the other. And when you've got a theatre adaptation of a movie, or vice-versa, then comparitive analysis is a good tool to see how each crew decided to tell the story.
Beauty and the Beast was one of my favorite movies when I was growing up, and I think today it's probably become my favorite. While The Little Mermaid had a lot to prove in order to bring Walt Disney Studios back from the brink, Beauty and the Beast was a marvel of technology. Using CAPS, a hardware/software system designed to digitally animate the movie, created by Pixar, they added depth to the art and fused CGI, creating a memorable and lovely ballroom scene. The music was top-notch, by the dynamic duo of composer Alan Menken and the late lyricist Howard Ashman, one of his last musical scores before his death in March 1991 from complications from AIDS (the film was dedicated to him). The movie was nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars, and while it didn't win that (nor for Best Sound), it picked up the awards for Best Original Score and Best Original Song (for "Beauty and the Beast"; "Be Our Guest" and "Belle" were also nominated). It currently ties only Disney-Pixar's WALL-E for most nominations for an animated feature.
In 1994, a Broadway musical adaptation of the movie was released, with additional songs penned by Tim Rice, who completed work on Aladdin's soundtrack after Ashman's death. The musical was a hit and ran from 1994-2007. Recently, it went on tour and came to my area. Earlier this afternoon, my grandmother and I went to see it. I'd always wanted to see one of the Disney Broadway shows, and this one was always on top of my list.
In terms of the backgrounds and direction, it's mostly about equal. The colors used look pretty much identical to the movie--which is good because there was symbolism involved in the color scheme (i.e.: Belle and the Beast wear blue when no one else does, making them stand out from the crowd at first glance). And one thing I really liked was how they didn't even hide how the sets inside the castle were moving--the people moving them were dressed as gargoyles. It really gave the sense that this castle was full of things that used to be human; that everything is still alive and moving, from the candles and clocks to the very castle foundations themselves.
The soundtrack is mostly the same, since Howard Ashman had completed the movie soundtrack before his death. There are a handful of other songs added by Tim Rice and Alan Menken: "No Matter What" for Maurice, "Me" for Gaston, "Home" for Belle, "How Long Must This Go On?" and "If I Can't Love Her" for the Beast, "Maison des Lunes" for Gaston, LeFou, and Monsieur D'Arque, "A Change in Me" for Belle, and "End Duet/Transformaton" for Belle and the Beast. "Human Again," a song originally written by Ashman for the movie, was included and later re-inserted in the movie with a new animation sequence. The new songs fit the musical perfectly, and Rice has done a damn good job with both Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin in fitting Ashman's style. The movie always felt like a Broadway musical (I feel the same about Mary Poppins), so it translates easily in terms of music. The tour version, at least as performed at Ruth Eckerd Hall, omits "Maison des Lunes" and the first "No Matter What" (while retaining the reprise), along with most of the wolf chase and all of the battle inside the castle (which is a shame because I love seeing the household kick ass), presumably for time, but you still get the characterization that these songs try to get across.
But where differences come is the characters. Beauty and the Beast has two central characters and a lively cast of extras.
Belle in the movie, as played by Paige O'Hara, is one of my all-time favorite Disney heroines (starting to notice a pattern in how much I love this movie?). As a child, I identified with her easily--she was a brown-haired, brown-eyed bookworm with more than a little social awkwardness. She offered herself as a prisoner in her father's place, and she had the guts to stand up to the Beast when nobody else would. She got into shouting matches with him and won, mostly because nobody ever talked back to the Beast before. She was one of the first people not to be afraid of him and the first to be truly kind to him. And yes, I've heard all this theorizing about Stockholm syndrome; I might not be an expert in the subject, but I don't think it's learned helplessness when you tell your captor to stop being a baby and control his damn temper.
The movie portrays Belle as a nice young woman who just can't fit in because hey, guess what, she's independent and has a brain. She doesn't fawn over Gaston, she doesn't want to be stuck there--she wants something more. The musical focuses on this aspect a little more by bringing up that this is why she reads--to feel like she's visiting these far-off places beyond her small provincial town. Our production starred Hilary Maiberger, and I have to say I wasn't as in love with her performance. Sure, she was a great singer and everything, but she made Belle a little too much of a Disney Princess stereotype. "But Akino," you say, "Belle is a Disney Princess!" Yeah, but the thing about Belle is that she always tried to keep control of her destiny. She evaded Gaston, she offered herself to save her father, she ran off when it got to be too much, she went to save her father--she was the hero. A stereotypical Disney Princess is a kind girl who has magic in her, but really lacks in personality. She's kind of the American equivalent to the yamato nadeshiko trope in Japan. We just groan at this stereotype: pretty, happy, and magical. Belle in the musical is extremely polite; while in the movie, Belle was polite, she also made it clear she was not a pushover. Musical Belle seems to be overdoing the good manners; she comes off as so nice that it feels odd that she would be the town outcast. At the very least, somebody should be able to hold a conversation with her and say that she's a well-mannered girl.
And then we have the Beast. In the movie, as played by Robby Benson, he's more of the tortured soul type. He's unkind, short-tempered, and you always feel that he's dangerous. The fact that Belle stands up to him surprises the utter hell out of him. When he looks like a beast, you know that it's the spell bringing what's in his heart out in the open. When he starts trying to change himself for Belle, he's gentle and unsure of himself. Darick Pead in the musical plays him as more of a brat, which is entertaining, but it really doesn't stand up against the rage and pain that was Benson's Beast. And it's even more of a shame that Benson didn't get any songs other than part of "Something There," when he has a damn nice singing voice. Pead was a good singer, but when it came to Belle falling in love with the Beast, I really had a hard time buying it because he made the Beast such a spoiled child. Even as he was changing, he still came off as a kid. How is someone as mature as Belle supposed to be on equal terms and fall in love with him?
Gaston was another big change. Richard White played him in the movie as kind of a tragic hero, in the classical sense. While he was an egotist, Gaston was the town hero. He was the strongest guy in town, the most handsome, and buddy-buddy with everybody. He decided to marry Belle because she was the only person in town who he thought was about as good-looking as he was. In any other story, he would have learned how to tone down the egotism and that it wasn't all about him, and he'd become the hero--I think you may realize that I've essentially described Kuzco of The Emperor's New Groove. Matt Farcher plays him as pretty much an asshole from the start of the musical, though I will say that in terms of voice, he sounds exactly like White. Even when he's going to propose to Belle, he tells the Bimbettes (the trio of silly bimbos in love with him) that marrying her won't stop him from having affairs with them. Nice guy. He's forever beating on his sidekick, LeFou (played in the musical by Jimmy Larkin; Jesse Corti in the movie). LeFou in the movie wasn't too bright and really kind of stuck around Gaston because why not? He was the strongest, toughest, greatest guy in town. LeFou in the musical is even dimmer and a total coward. While he's funny, you feel worse for him. Gaston comes off as a bully, and Belle outright calls him one. I can see why they'd want to emphasize this in a musical aimed at kids, but I really miss the fallen hero feel you get from the movie version.
Lumiere plays basically the same role between the movie and the musical, but I really miss the late Jerry Orbach, who'd played him in the movie. He made Lumiere kind of a rascal, and his French accent sounded natural. Hassan Nazari-Robati was good in the musical, but even my grandmother had to admit that he ended up sounding a little gay--though that did make it utterly hilarious seeing him play off Cogsworth. Cogsworth was always Lumiere's stuffy heterosexual life mate in the movie, where he was played by David Ogden Stiers, but he becomes a little more panicky in the musical, with James May giving him a bit of a nasally sound. Still, I have to say I felt for the character, if only for the twist going on in the story. In the musical, the household are slowly turning into objects, rather than already being transformed. So where the movie version of Cogsworth is a small clock, the musical version is a man slowly becoming a grandfather clock. At one point, he alarms everyone when he suddenly has a key sticking out of his back, indicating that he's progressing further into the transformation, where he may lose himself completely (it's implied that by that point, the change will be irreversible). Lumiere's interaction with them seems a little more desperate to keep the mood light, something I did appreciate.
Characters with extended roles in the musical were the Feather Duster and the Wardrobe. In the movie, the Feather Duster was known as Fifi (unnamed except in Belle's Magical World, one of the poor sequels to the movie) and really only existed to be Lumiere's love interest. In the musical, she's called Babette and has slightly more to do, if only in UST with Lumiere. See, they're on-again/off-again lovers, who frequently take on other lovers to make one another jealous. She's still not a particularly strong character, and I think she really only got an extended role for fanservice: she's dressed as a French maid with a very short skirt, and she's flirty. She's there for the dads.
The Wardrobe wasn't named in the movie, where she was played by Jo Anne Worley. She was kind of a confidante for Belle when she first arrived at the castle, but she didn't have any backstory. In the musical, she's named Madame de la Grande Bouche, and my version had her played by Shanji Hadjian. Here, she was a former opera singer who came to work at the castle (or possibly was visiting and got caught up in the spell). She loses a bit of her confidante status to Belle this way, but she is more memorable and does end up with some ship tease with Cogsworth at the end.
Mrs. Potts is pretty much the same between movie and musical, played by Angela Lansbury in the first and Erin Edelle in this particular production. It's her son Chip who gets a major change in role. In the movie, Chip (played by Bradley Michael Pierce) became kind of a breakout character just by his performance alone. What never escaped me in the movie was the way the household mostly seemed to see Belle as a means to an end--they pushed her and the Beast to fall in love, just so the spell would be broken. Chip was the first one to see Belle as a person. When the Beast let Belle leave to go rescue her father, Chip stowed away in her bag, asking why she left and if she didn't want to be with them anymore. He saved her and Maurice from captivity when Gaston locked them in their own cellar, putting Maurice's invention to work in chopping down the door. For an adorable little kid teacup, he was a badass. But due to technicalities, Chip's role had to be reduced drastically in the musical. I think he was played by Gabriel Reis in the Ruth Eckerd Hall tour, if only because that was the name on the board outside. Chip was a child's head turning into a teacup--Reis's body was hidden inside a tea cart while he kept his head sticking out and wearing a helmet that looked like a teacup. They'd use a prop when he had to be carried. He ended up being just the cute little kid that Mrs. Potts desperately wanted to see run down the halls one day. Interaction with Belle was limited, and they completely omitted the capture, so neither Chip nor the invention got to see action.
Overall, the musical was very good, but I think I like the movie more. The movie is surprisingly mature for a kids' movie--it takes itself seriously, something that I don't think Disney movies have done very well in the past decade or so (Pixar still knows how to do it, however). The musical has a lot of kid humor--slapstick, the Beast's bratty behavior, things like that. There's also some very adult moments, like Babette or Gaston promising to "rendezvous" with the towngirls after he's married. It doesn't detract from the overall experience, but it comes off as shocking when I'm so used to the maturity of the movie, which was funny without feeling forced or awkward. But then, the movie was pretty much perfect. It's hard to live up to it, even when it competes against itself. Still, the musical puts on a damn good show, and if you ever have the chance to see it, take it.