Space, Place, and Disney’s International/Global Theatre
Ken Cerniglia
Disney Theatrical Productions
Disney stories and characters have delighted international audiences for more than eight decades, but as The Walt Disney Company has sought to reach new markets in the twenty-first century, Disney’s live theatrical productions have served a unique and important ambassadorial function. Twelve years ago this November, Julie Taymor’s production of The Lion King, which employs elements from multiple cultural traditions, opened on Broadway to critical and popular acclaim. The musical has since been translated into six languages and played in over a dozen productions around the world. This paper examines how through various media and shifts in space and place Disney’s musicals (including The Lion King, Mulan and High School Musical) have disassembled and reconstructed national and ethnic identities in the global age for rapidly diversifying American and international audiences.
Although live performance has been in the repertoire of Disney’s entertainment offerings since Disneyland opened in 1955, its official foray into commercial theatre began in 1994 with the live stage production of Beauty and the Beast, based on the 1991 hit animated film of the same title, which was nominated for best picture. Film-to-stage adaptations are much lamented by a certain segment of Broadway fans, but Beauty and the Beast even on film was constructed as musical theatre, with songs by Alan Menken and Howard Ashman, who had written the off-Broadway hit Little Shop of Horrors and then Disney’s The Little Mermaid. The leaders of WD Feature Animation at the time, Peter Schneider and Tom Schumacher, both had theatre backgrounds and then president and CEO Michael Eisner had grown up in New York going to Broadway shows. While Beauty and the Beast’s garnered mixed reviews, it found and continued to develop a family audience on Broadway and ran for an impressive thirteen years.
Around the world Beauty and the Beast played in a total of 13 countries and 115 cities, including record-breaking box office runs in Argentina, Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, China, Ireland, Japan, Mexico, South Korea, Spain and the United Kingdom. Beauty and the Beast was the first Broadway musical to perform in Beijing, China in 1999 in Chinese. The show has been translated into six languages for Disney productions (Chinese, Spanish, Japanese, German, Portuguese and Korean) and many others for licensed productions, which began via the Music Theatre International licensing catalog in late 2004.
The commercial success of Beauty and the Beast led to two rather sizable and risky investments: the restoration of the dilapidated New Amsterdam Theatre on 42nd Street, and the hiring of avant-garde theatre and film director and designer Julie Taymor to lead an international team to re-invent the blockbuster hit animated film The Lion King. Luckily, the return on both investments has been quite high, leading to further investment in new projects, and, frankly, my job, part of which is to bring a critical eye to our endeavors and their implications for the artists we employ, the stories we tell, the places we perform, and the audiences we reach.
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Ken Cerniglia is a dramaturg, writer and director who has taught, worked and lectured at institutions across the country and abroad, including La Jolla Playhouse, Arena Stage, Cornish College of the Arts, University of Puget Sound, Carnegie Mellon, Harrison School of the Performing Arts, and University of Helsinki. By day he is dramaturg and literary manager for Disney Theatrical Productions in New York, where over the past six years he has developed over twenty professional and educational shows, including Tarzan, High School Musical, The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast JR., Peter and the Starcatchers, and Aladdin Dual-Language Edition. Ken holds a Ph.D. in theatre history and criticism from the University of Washington, is former convener of the International Federation for Theatre Research historiography working group, and continues to present and publish his academic work internationally. Recent freelance projects include dramaturging ReEntry, a new docudrama about returning home from war, at Two River Theatre Company in Red Bank, N.J., and publishing an article about American ethnic performance in the 1870s in Theatre Annual.
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