I’m a big fan of Disney’s stage musicals. I also love taking a different lens to a known property to help recontextualize, reconfigure, and restyle it for a new audience. Disney Theatricals loves to revive and reconsider their past works…in anywhere but America. If you can sense bitterness in the previous sentence, you are right.
In recent years, the amount of astounding Broadway revivals I’ve had the chance to see has been life-altering. Deaf West’s Spring Awakening, John Doyle’s The Color Purple, Daniel Fish’s Oklahoma, Michael Arden’s Parade and Once On This Island…the list goes on and on. These shows created new paths for classic musicals to tread, and in some cases, improved on the original works. So, why isn’t Disney allowing their own shows to return to Broadway in new and inventive ways?
Now, this is not to say that Disney Theatricals isn’t trying new things with their shows. Just last year, Aida returned to the stage in The Netherlands with an updated production. Originally, the production was meant to premiere at the Papermill Playhouse in New Jersey, then embark on a national tour. However, COVID-19 delays led to the plans moving abroad. Beauty and the Beast received an all-new production in the UK and is now playing across Australia. Tarzan, Disney’s first Broadway miss, has had a life of its own in Germany, running off and on for over a decade.
Let’s look at Tarzan with a deeper lens. The show ran for a little over a year, not hitting in the way other Disney Theatrical productions had up to that point. Yet, the success of the show in Germany shows that there is something within the roots of the show that is good. The opportunity to give the reins to an inventive director to examine what works and what doesn’t would be an incredible one for Disney Theatricals to branch out.
If the goal is to reconfigure shows globally to then bring them back to New York City, then great. However, it seems that they are only interested in bringing these original productions anywhere but the United States. I am over-the-moon for the original ideas being brought to the stage, but what bigger statement is there for the state of creativity than to bring an imaginative revival to Broadway?
This is the crux of my want for Disney to bring a revival to Broadway: the opportunity to do something new. If they could successfully revive a past show in a brand new way, it could open the doors for more unique productions from the theatrical branch. Maybe Hunchback could finally make its way to the main stem. Something more in the vein of The Lion King could find success. Disney Theatricals has a treasure trove of stories to tell, so why not kick start a new era with a new look into the past?