Beauty and the Beast Live on Stage
Beauty and the Beast Live on Stage is a Broadway-style stage musical at Disney's Hollywood Studios at Walt Disney World, performed in the Theater of the Stars on Sunset Boulevard. Based on Disney's 1991 animated film Beauty and the Beast, it condenses the story into a show of about 25 minutes, built around the film's songs by Alan Menken and Howard Ashman. It opened on November 22, 1991 — the same day the film was released in cinemas — and is the longest-running stage show at a Disney theme park.
History
The opening was a deliberate first. Disney had never before opened a stage show based on a film on the very day that film reached the public, and the show's first performance, at 1:30 p.m. on November 22, 1991, meant that many of its first guests had not yet seen the story it was retelling. The gamble reflected the studio's confidence in the film, which went on to become the first animated feature nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture.
The show did not start in its present home. It first played in the original Theater of the Stars, near the junction of Hollywood Boulevard and what is now Sunset Boulevard. That theatre closed in September 1993 so Sunset Boulevard could be built, and the production moved temporarily to a backlot theatre on the former Streets of America. In July 1994 it reopened in the new, covered Theater of the Stars near the end of Sunset Boulevard, a venue modelled in part on the Hollywood Bowl and seating about 1,500 guests, where it has remained ever since.
The production itself has been revised twice. The original version ran from 1991 to 2001 and presented its songs in an order quite different from the film. A second version, introduced in March 2001, reordered the story to follow the film much more closely, and that structure still underpins the show today. The production closed with the park in March 2020; its stage was used for a time by the Disney Society Orchestra and Friends, and an updated version of Beauty and the Beast returned on August 15, 2021, ahead of Walt Disney World's 50th anniversary celebrations.
Show
A narrator and the opening prologue set up the story: a selfish prince refuses shelter to an old woman offering a single rose, and she — revealed as an enchantress — transforms him into the Beast and his household into household objects, leaving the rose as the measure of the time he has to learn to love and be loved in return.
From there the show moves quickly through the film's main beats. Belle is introduced in her village, fending off Gaston, then finds herself a prisoner in the Beast's castle in her father's place. The enchanted household — Lumière, Cogsworth, Mrs Potts and Chip among them — welcome her with "Be Our Guest", the show's largest production number, staged as a full cabaret-style feast with dancing servitors. Belle and the Beast begin to understand each other in "Something There"; Gaston whips the villagers into a mob in "The Mob Song"; and the title song, "Beauty and the Beast", accompanies the couple's ballroom dance, the emotional centre of the piece. The curse is broken, the Beast is restored, and the full company returns for a finale reprise.
Because roughly an hour and a half of film has to fit into about 25 minutes, subplots disappear and several story turns are carried by narration rather than acted scenes. What is never cut is the score: the current running order — prologue, "Belle" and "Gaston", "Belle (Reprise)", "Be Our Guest", "Something There", "The Mob Song" and "Beauty and the Beast" — keeps every major song from the film in its film position.
The show plays several times daily on Sunset Boulevard, a short walk from The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror and Rock 'n' Roller Coaster.