Disenchanting Kingdom

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

The greatest of all Disney magic is the magic of copyright. More remarkable than Mickey or Dumbo or any other creation, pre- or post-Walt, has been the company's success in exploiting established franchises and accumulating new ones. Perhaps the most cunning Disney trick is to take fairy tales in the public domain and reinvent them as corporate property. A billion-dollar example is Beauty and the Beast, which has metamorphosed from a bedtime story known to every child into a megahit animated film (and an even bigger hit on video), a sound track, a theme-park attraction, an ice show, a lunch-box and T-shirt decoration and, as of last week, a Broadway musical. Actually, not just a Broadway musical but the costliest and most complex ever, not to mention maybe the most vapid, shallow and, yes, cartoonish.

At its campy, shameless best, the Broadway Beauty brings to mind Busby Berkeley movies, Radio City Music Hall spectacles, the Ziegfeld Follies and Fourth of July at Disney World. You may be amused, you may be appalled, but you cannot fail to be agape. The one thing this riot of color and noise does not bring to mind is the modern Broadway musical, which can delight in scenery and special effects but is most concerned with evoking emotion and telling a story.

Only briefly does Beauty become affecting, when Belle and her captor, a prince transformed into a sort of buffalo, fumblingly get to know each other. Terrence Mann finds coltish gawkiness in a lumbering leviathan and suggests a new reason why the myth has endured. When the beast stops slurping and growling and starts thinking of cleanliness and manners, he evokes the civilizing process boys go through in adolescence as they discover girls. Mostly, though, the characters seem even simpler when played by actors than they did as cartoons. The costumes that help them resemble a candelabrum or a clock also render them slow and clunky. Maybe that is why, despite a barrage of whizbangery, the show is sluggish.

Whether Disney spent $12 million mounting Beauty, as its moguls claim, or a more beastly $20 million, as some theater insiders assert, it has bet big on its belief in a vast untapped stage audience yearning for family entertainment -- even in the honky-tonk heart of Manhattan, even at a $65 top-ticket price, even at a 10:30 p.m. curtain-call time, when much of the target audience should be in bed. So far, business has been good. The day after Beauty opened, it set an all-time Broadway record for a single day's ticket sales: $603,494, vs. the $548,460 racked up in 1993 by The Who's Tommy. By week's end the advance sales exceeded $10 million. Nevertheless, last week chairman Michael Eisner floated the notion of starting evening shows at 7:30 instead of 8. Aides pointed out pitfalls: there may be a lot of latecomers, and the schedule change might imply that Beauty is not for grownups. Regardless of when it plays, 2 1/2 hours is a long time for children to sit still. Adults may be squirming too.

Disney says this is only Phase 1. Next it will invest $8 million in a government-subsidized renovation of a theater on 42nd Street, symbolically & sanitizing the porn district, to mount stage versions of other cartoons. Broadway can only welcome any attempt to instill theatergoing in the young -- and, of course, hope Disney makes the next show better.