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worked as a line producer for shows Pace sent out on the road; she, in turn, hired six young producers to scour Broadway for talent and material. Clear Channel’s culture would appear to be allergic to anything as unpredictable as actual creativity, but theater is too marginal an enterprise to be subjected to the same stultifying discipline as radio. Beth Williams describes herself as “a Mom-and-Pop producer,” which is true in Clear Channel terms, if not in Broadway terms. Virtually everything has to be a musical, but Williams insists that it doesn’t have to be an inane musical—Dora for grown-ups. She is very hopeful about The Gospel According to Fishman, a musical she has commissioned, set in 1963, in which a Jewish composer hooks up with a gospel group (a setting that sounds dangerously heart-warming).

It would not be the least bit surprising if Clear Channel’s baby production unit unleashed on Broadway a cataract of gooey fudge, such as a Ben Vereen vanity piece now being developed. But you never know. Williams’s executive producer, Jennifer Costello, spent her twenties running an “ensemble-based collective,” Monsterless Actors, with her husband, who also now works for the company. She and Aaron Beall “flowed in the same circles,” she says. Aaron flowed one way, and she flowed another, to Rugrats—A Live Adventure. But her aspirations lie elsewhere. Costello says, “I like theater that makes you feel uncomfortable,” and she enjoys working with theater people who feel likewise. She has been trying to encourage a performance artist she admires to think Clear Channel thoughts. So far, she says, his ideas have been too avant-garde, but he’s moving in the right direction. She’s looking into a project about the drug-addled trumpeter Chet Baker. She would plainly love to produce something she doesn’t find embarrassing. Of course, that may turn out to mean that she will be delighted with the untold story of Ben Vereen.

TOM SCHUMACHER PERMITTED me to see fifteen minutes’ worth of a read-through for a musical of Tarzan, still in the very early stages. Tarzan said things like, “Did you know there were others like me, Mother?” Jane said things like, “My interest in Tarzan is purely scientific,” though also, “His eyes were intense and focused; I’ve never seen such eyes.” Here was another romance in uncorrupted nature, like Pocahontas and The Little Mermaid. There may also have been elements of the mono myth in Tarzan’s awakening. Afterward, Schumacher and I stood by the door, and he asked if I recognized any of the figures in the production. I drew a blank. “That’s Phil Collins,” he said, pointing to a balding figure sitting at a table. “He’s written eight new songs. That’s David Henry Hwang; he’s writing the script. And the actor over there is Roger Rees, from Nicholas Nickleby.” The director was Bob Crowley, perhaps the best-known lighting director on Broadway. All this for Tarzan.

Why do all these gifted people choose to work on a musical cartoon? The answer appears to be Tom Schumacher. Whatever horrors the word “Disney” may conjure up on Broadway, it is not Disney, but Tom Schumacher, who is buying lunch on 44th Street and choosing writers and directors. Schumacher says, “There’s no Disney point of view, because Disney is not an idea. There’s no gleaming granite board which says, ‘We do this. We don’t do that.’” Schumacher says that he always wants to be doing something new. That’s why he has gone to Suzan-Lori Parks to write a script for Hoopz, a musical about the Harlem Globetrotters. It’s why he asked Bob Crowley, who has never directed a play, to do Tarzan.

Rick Elice, a longtime Broadway publicist who now works as a consultant for Disney, argues that Schumacher should be understood as the David Belasco, or the David Merrick, of our day. Disney’s wealth gives Schumacher the power, almost unheard of on Broadway, to make a project happen if he wants to do it; but he is not really free to exercise his own taste as a producer of old was, or even as many producers today are. Schumacher has put some of his own money into the kind