The Devil's Playground_ A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square - James Traub [131]
Whatever “Disney” is, Schumacher himself is plainly not an alien life form on Broadway. He is Broadway. When we had lunch one day at a popular theater spot on 44th Street, Margot Lion, the producer of the hit musical Hairspray, waylaid him to say how much she had missed him while he was out of town. The restaurant’s owner, another Broadway fixture, came by for a chat. Schumacher made a point of greeting a young woman at another table because she worked for him in some capacity, and he didn’t want her to be embarrassed lest he overhear an unguarded comment. (Disney is probably the largest employer on Broadway.) It was like dining with David Merrick, or David Belasco. And Schumacher has the bona fides. When he challenged me to think of a musical that wasn’t derived from an earlier work, I tried Oklahoma! “Completely adapted from Green Grow the Lilacs,” he fired back. Hello, Dolly!? “Based on both The Merchant of Yonkers and The Matchmaker.” When I complimented him on his erudition, he grinned and said, “Yes, the term ‘show queen’ does come up.”
Schumacher is a San Franciscan who went to UCLA and then went into arts administration—first with a dance company, then with the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival in Los Angeles, then with the Mark Taper Forum. In 1987 he established the Los Angeles Festival of Arts, where he presented the English-language premiere of Peter Brook’s Mahabharata, a production to which he often proudly refers. He then went to work in Disney’s animation unit, which had just been revitalized by Michael Eisner. There he supervised the development and production of Toy Story, Monsters, Inc., A Bug’s Life, and such more classically Disneyesque fare as Tarzan and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Schumacher is proud of his work, and at times he skirts self-parody as he provides a gloss on the Disney output worthy of a man who produced the Mahabharata. When I asked him why one Disney heroine, or leading man, is indistinguishable from another, he said, “It’s a retelling of the mono myth.” The mono myth? “Who am I? What am I? What is my purpose?” In other words, as Joseph Campbell would put it, the hero with a thousand faces. Schumacher is a Disney true believer; of course, you wouldn’t want to have a cynic turning out children’s movies.
After the movie of Beauty and the Beast was greeted, at least by some critics, as a better musical than anything then running on Broadway, Michael Eisner, himself a native New Yorker and something of a theater nut, decided to produce a theatrical version of the show as an experiment in a new medium for Disney’s animated characters. Disney executives came up with a noisy theme-park-style show that underwhelmed critics and delighted the plebes; Beauty has been running since 1994, making it, as of 2003, the seventh longest-running production in Broadway history. Schumacher makes a point of saying that he had nothing to do with the original production. I couldn’t actually bring myself to buy a ticket, but Alex, who was forced to go by virtue of a class trip, found it so profoundly beneath his twelve-year-old contempt that he could barely bring himself to describe it. “Stupid,” I think, was his chief impression.
Meanwhile, Disney was fixing up the New Amsterdam. Eisner now agreed to create a separate theatrical unit, and to run it he appointed Peter Schneider, the head of Disney Studios, and Schumacher. The Lion King had been released just as the theatrical production of Beauty and the Beast opened and was the logical choice for the next fable