Psychedelic Disney

All by himself, the late Walt Disney became an American art form, like circuses, animal acts and Radio City Music Hall. Sooner or later they all had to come together, and last week was the time: Disney on Parade opened on Christmas Day in Chicago. After Chicago, the road show moves on to 26 cities throughout the U.S. and Canada.

Naturally the show has everything. Dancers. Acrobats. Aerialists. A motorcycle act. Twenty trained dogs. Live music. Recorded music. More than 500 costumes, constructed out of 3,000 yards of material, 892 lbs. of beads and 3,000 miles of sequins and glitter. And MONEY: over $2,000,000 of it.

Sound-Sensitive. Playing on its own portable, motorized stage, 180 ft. long and 80 ft. wide, the show subdivides into 13 major acts featuring Mickey Mouse as master of ceremonies ("He's so cool and clean-cut," says Producer-Director Bob Jani). Also on hand are Pluto, the Three Little Pigs, Donald Duck, Dumbo and his circus, Cinderella, the Jungle Book characters, Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan. Each act and character is introduced on the giant overhead movie screen with clips from the appropriate Disney movie. Around the edges of the portable stage is a 6-ft.-wide Fiberglas border containing sound-sensitive lights, which respond to the beat of the music, plus ten strobe lights. And, in the middle, a 24-ft. turntable. When all of this gets moving, the stage looks for all the world like a preschool psychedelic trip.

Although conceived by NBC, the show is definitely all Disney, even down to the cast. "We had a swish type or two audition--even a topless go-go dancer," says one of Parade's people. "But for the most part, those who auditioned were Disney-type kids: all-American kids." The average age of the girls is 19, the boys 21, and they run the gamut of honor-rollers, cheer leaders, glee-clubbers and yearbook editors. The cast has such a home-town flavor that Choreographer Miriam Nelson and others had to conduct travel clinics to help the kids adjust to life on the road. "Get eight hours of sleep a night," they were told. "Phone home at least once a week to prevent homesickness."

Although it is all very bippity-boppity-boo and cynics may scoff at those giant cartoon characters bobbing about on that enormous stage, the kids love it. So do most of their parents. In Chicago, the big people were right in there with the little people, singing the Mickey Mouse song, wearing Mickey Mouse hats and scrambling to shake hands with the Disney characters as they moved through the audience.

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