BEAUTY REVIEWED
Broadway Across Canada’s adaptation of Disney’s Beauty And The Beast offers family fun with questionable gender politics.
Beauty and the Beast
Until Sunday | Queen Elizabeth Theatre
Tickets and Info: From $35 at
ticketmaster.ca
Putting on a live adaptation of a treasured Disney musical is a unique challenge — not only must you balance the animated source material with the natural limits of live performers and set, you must do it for an audience of small children who are both sensitive and limited in their attention spans.
The Broadway Across Canada touring production of Beauty and the Beast running until Sunday at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre is about as faithful an adaptation as you could ask for. The result is a moderately successful bit of musical theatre.
Jillian Butterfield does beautiful work with Belle’s bookish pluckiness without completely doing an impression of the original. The willowy Patrick Pevehouse is a bright light as the randy French butler Lumiere, while the strapping Cameron Bond does a solid Gaston, complete with popping biceps that are visible from the balconies.
The show is at its best during a few impressive set pieces. The Gaston admiration song spirals magnificently into a complex dance number involving clinking beer steins. Be Our Guest is suitably intricate and Busby Berkeley inflected, although I could have lived without the girls in gold bikinis with red hearts over their crotches.
The show suffers from some pacing and tonal issues. Samuel Shurtleff as Cogsworth and Emily Jewell as Mrs. Potts both struggle with their cartoonish British accents. Shurtleff rushes through jokes while Jewell’s high, breathy voice makes many of her lines barely audible. Sound troubles abounded throughout the spoken scenes, causing many of the jokes to fall flat.
The forest scenes take place behind a sheer curtain, giving them a gauzy, dreamlike effect while offering a layer of distance for the many little ones in the audience from the more violent parts. But these scenes tended to be poorly lit, making what might be impressive puppetry difficult to process.
Problems with the original film are magnified in the live production. In an attempt to keep the action moving through the second act, the entire romance between Belle and the Beast appears to take place in about a day and a half. Beast comes off as more violent in the musical without all the film’s facial close-ups to soften his animal appearance. This gives their eventual love a creepy edge.
Like many of its Disney compatriots, Beauty and the Beast masquerades as progressive while actually being deeply regressive. Belle begins as a headstrong girl with big dreams, but a short time with Beast tames her as much as it does him.
The addition of A Change in Me, a short song after Belle returns from the castle and tries to explain how her experiences there have made her appreciate her home, represents an attempt to pave over the fact that Belle gives up her dreams of autonomy to be with Beast. But instead it just highlights how problematic the whole story is.
Sure, it’s a Disney fable — we don’t expect realism — but can’t there be dancing candles without questionable gender politics?
Beast comes off as more violent in the musical without all the film’s facial close-ups to soften his animal appearance. This gives their eventual love a creepy edge.