" It`s Magic"

“If you purchase a pamphlet, we will give you a bunch of roses. It’s $15.”

It is the Lunt Fontaine Theatre which is located at 46th street and Broadway in New York, on March 6. The voices of employees were impressive, recommending pamphlets and roses to the young audiences visiting and watching Beauty and Beast, which continues to be shown for the past 10 years. The average age of the audience is 43. In most of the theatres, the audience is in their fifties and sixties, which composes the main stream of audiences, but in this theatre, young couples, who seemed to be eager for an ardent love like that enjoyed by Beauty and Beast, filled all 1,500 seats of the theatre.

“Oh! It’s magic!”

The musical Beauty and Beast, which converts the original work of Disney animation into a dramatic performance, makes use of special stage effects in order to present the magic spell-cast castle with a tremendous noise of thunder and pouring rain. In particular, as for the last scene, in which the magic cast member of the Beast turns into the prince, it hallucinates the audiences just like the magic shows of David Copperfield.

The servants of the castle, who were cast upon by magic to be transformed into the objects of the castle such as a clock, a kettle, a candlestick, and a clothes chest, also shows no mean dramatic power. Their costumes, which won one of the renowned costume prizes in the world, look like they have come out of the television screen just a moment ago. Their splendid performances of dances with crowns shaped like a spoon and fork, and dresses, which can be spread like a plate, arouse people to breathe a sigh of admiration.

-Magnificent Dancing has Won Popularity for Approximately 10 Years

“In contrast with the animated version, which transforms people into the objects at once, I describe the transformation of magic cast servants gradually as step by step,” remarked the producer of this musical, adding, “From the figures of the servants, who turn into the objects moment by moment, such as having a lid on one’s head and a spring on one’s back, I designed them to grant more cynical impressions to the audiences.”

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Since 2000, the traditional musical comedies such as Avenue Q, The Producers and Hair spray, set in the prosperous 1920s or 1950s and 60s, are recently being released one after another, attracting people’s attention. In addition, the musical Moving Out, which mixes the music of Billy Joel with a dance drama, has become a topic of conversation.

The interesting pieces of dance work, which have challenged the traditional musical market of Broadway, are the Disney animation musicals. Disney produced Beauty and the Beast in 1994 as its first work, bringing out The Lion King in 1997 and Aida in 2000 to be performed on Broadway. It has planned to release three more works including Mary Poppins, Tarzan, and The Little Mermaid in the upcoming two to three years. Due to the Disney’s works which attract not only teenagers and people in their twenties, but children, the average age of the theater-going public has been lowered.

The copious contents of the shows and the huge production costs, about $20 million for each piece of work, have stirred apprehensions of Broadway theatre owners, who have warned that “with such a tendency, Broadway might be turned into Disneyland in the near future.”

In Korea, Beauty and the Beast, the first Disney musical released in Korea, will be performed at the LG Art Center in Seoul starting this August. The performance coordinating company Zemiro, which produced Ghost in Opera, and producer Seol Do-yun, are scheduled to bring out this musical by introducing the stage sets and musical technologies of Disney at a cost of 12 billion won, and appointing top-level Korean performers.

Seung-Hoon Cheon raphy@donga.com