Beauty and the Beast (musical)

Beauty and the Beast is one of Broadway's longest running productions, devised and produced by Disney Theatrical, a fully owned subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company.

Plot summary

One cold winter's night, an ugly old woman stumbles up to a prince's castle. She begs the prince for shelter from the cold, though she has only a single rose to give him as payment. Being selfish and heartless, the prince refuses her, simply because she is ugly. The old woman warns him that true beauty is within one's heart, not one's appearance. The prince refuses again and the woman reveals herself to be a powerful enchantress and, as punishment to the cruel and selfish prince, she transforms him into a beast. The servants in the castle are also transformed; they become tea cups, candles, items of furniture, and other household items. His castle becomes scary; the cherubs become gargoyles. This spell can only be broken if the beast learns to love another and receives her love in return. However, this must happen before the last petal of the enchantress's rose withers and falls, or he will remain a beast forever. As the years go by, The Beast falls into a depression, quickly becoming angry, as he wonders who could ever love a hideous monster.

The "beauty" of the title, a girl called Belle, lives with her father Maurice in a small French village. Maurice is known for his Rube Goldberg-type inventions; the townspeople note Belle's beauty, but consider her odd because of her passion for books (most women, at the time, were believed to have to be brainless, in a sense, as quoted by Gaston in the line "It's not right for a woman to read. Soon, she starts getting ideas and thinking..."). Her beauty has attracted the attentions of local hunter and bodybuilder Gaston, but Belle considers him 'rude and conceited', and ignores him.

One day, Maurice decides to take his latest invention to a fair outside the village. On the way, he gets lost in the woods. Wolves chase him, and his horse Phillipe bucks him off in fright and fear. Maurice runs blindly through the woods and eventually comes to the beast's castle. The servants of the castle, still in the form of various household objects, look after him. That is, until the beast arrives. The beast has Maurice locked up as a prisoner for what he considers as "trespassing".

Belle, back in the village, politely but firmly resists Gaston's offer of marriage. Gaston explains to Belle that she is going to be his "little wife", have 6 or 7 handsome males ("strapping boys", to quote the character) like himself, and makes a number of other chauvinistic comments. She is astonished later to find her father's horse without its master. She traces her way to the castle with her father's horse. Once there, she offers to take the place of her father as the Beast's prisoner; and the Beast agrees and sends Maurice back. Maurice tries to tell people back in the town what has happened to Belle, but the villagers, including Gaston, think him insane and rebuff him, so he decides to set off to get her back on his own.

Beast, realizing that she could break the spell, allows Belle to have her own room and permits her to enter anywhere in the castle she likes, except the West Wing - the Beast's old room where he stayed as a human. However, he has lost whatever kindness was left after his transformation, and orders the other servents not to feed Belle when he fails to have her with him for dinner. Belle, still sad after losing her father forever, doesn't want anything to do with the Beast.

At the castle, the various dishes and accessories, including Lumiere the candlestick and Cogsworth the mini-clock, entertain their guest with a fancy French dinner and all the comforts a team of servants can provide (after the Beast orders them not to when he tried forcing Belle to come down to dinner with him). They are, of course, eager for Belle and the Beast to fall in love, so they can be turned human again. Unfortunately for them, Belle and the Beast don't get along very well (due to the chauvinism he is expliciting on her) and are constantly at each other's throats.

Having a tour of the castle, Belle curiously enters a passage she has never been in before, the forbidden West Wing. The room basically describes the Beast's sadness, with broken mirrors and a ripped-up picture of his human form. Entranced by the enchanted rose, she moves to take it, but the Beast returns upsetting her in his fury. She quickly leaves the castle, only coming across more wolves in the forest, leaving the Beast her only defender. As time goes by, Belle and the Beast eventually fall in love and over the following days the Beast becomes more human, showing more kindness as Belle 'sees a side of him she never saw before'. When he gives her a magic mirror that will show her anything she wishes to see, she requests to see her father and sees him sick and dying, as he foolishly tried to reenter the castle to bring her back. The Beast, in his love for her, does what he think is right and releases her to go rescue him, and she takes him back to their house in the village. However, Gaston arrives with a lynch mob to take Maurice to the asylum unless Belle agrees to marry him. Eager to prove her father sane, she ends up showing them an image of the Beast with the magic mirror.

Enraged and feeling betrayed, Gaston convinces the mob that the Beast is a threat and menace to the community and leads the mob to the castle to pillage it, rallying with the cry, "kill the Beast." Most of the mob is fought and driven off by the enchanted artifacts of the castle, but Gaston reaches the Beast and begans to fight with him, though the Beast, disheartened with a belief that Belle will never come back, doesn't fight back until Belle shows up. However as the Beast is about to finish off Gaston, he realises he can no longer find it in himself to kill anyone. As the Beast and Belle are reunited, Gaston stabs the Beast in the back with a dagger, however Gaston loses his footing on the roof and tumbles to his death. After Gaston is killed, Belle tells the Beast she loves him, and the spell is broken. The Beast turns into a handsome prince again, the scary castle becomes beautiful again (the gargoyles turn back into cherubs), and the enchanted artifacts of the castle are turned back into people.

Trivia

• The show is the sixth longest running show on Broadway, debuting in 1994, three years after the release of the movie. It is currently the second-longest running show still being shown, after The Phantom of the Opera.
• The idea for the show came about from a particularly popular 45 minute-long Broadway-style performance of the film at the Disney-MGM Studios theme park. The Broadway version is simply much longer and contains more songs.
• In the past few years, Disney has begun to lease the rights for performing the show to traveling theatrical companies, and now the show is performed all over North America and Europe. In addition, Beauty and the Beast has become the most commonly performed show put on by community theatrical groups.
• The show has been performed on London's prestigious West End, as well as Sydney, Paris, Toronto, Berlin and Weston, MA.

Songs

ACT ONE Prologue Belle No Matter What * No Matter What (Reprise) * Me! * Belle (Reprise) Home * Home (Reprise) * Gaston Gaston (Reprise) How Long Must This Go On? * Be Our Guest If I Can't Love Her *

ACT TWO Entr'acte/Wolf Chase Something There Human Again * Maison des Lunes * Beauty and the Beast If I Can't Love Her (Reprise) * The Mob Song The Battle Transformation Beauty and the Beast (Reprise)

Songs with an asterisk indicate songs written for the musical, though Human Again was animated and edited into the original movie for the special edition DVD rerelease in 2002.