How Disney staked its claim on Broadway - and suburban stages

When the Walt Disney Co. rolled its massive entertainment resources onto Broadway 25 years ago with the unveiling of a stage version of the animated movie musical “Beauty and the Beast,” the advance felt to some in the industry like the start of an occupation.

Broadway was no landscape for the bottom-line ethos of corporate America. It was the domain of independent producers, singularly driven, often iconoclastic men and women (but mostly men) who assembled shows on the strength of their own instincts, and some ability at raising dough. The fear back then, elucidated in countless cocktail conversations and column inches, was that the Great White Way would now run green, primarily for deep-pocketed companies, and that the theater's entrepreneurial class would be priced out of the neighborhood.

The artistic doomsday scenarios, though, have proved overblown. As demonstrated by the Disney-spawned musical “Newsies” - which made its regional premiere at Marriott Theatre in Lincolnshire in 2017 and just wrapped up a run at Aurora's Paramount Theatre - the impact of the animation and theme-park giant has taken more nuanced turns than anyone could have predicted.

For one thing, that occupation has not generated the complete corporate takeover of the musical-theater business that some imagined. Yes, costs have gone skyscraper-high, and more musicals than ever are spun (numbingly, uninspiringly) from well-known movies. But the important, Tony-winning musicals of the “Dear Evan Hansen”/“The Band's Visit”/“Hadestown” variety still emerge from the dominions of personal vision and nonprofit theater.

Instead of a takeover, a kind of uneasy, symbiotic relationship has taken hold. As the only major entertainment company that has managed to break through in a sustained way, Disney is now as entrenched in Broadway lore as any of the storied producers of yore. With 10 musicals under his belt, from durably dazzling “The Lion King” to quirkily human-scale “Peter and the Starcatcher,” Thomas Schumacher, longtime head of Disney Theatrical Group, has earned the vaunted moniker “impresario.” The Disney offerings have collectively run - on Broadway alone - for nearly 25,000 performances.

In Chicago, local fans have seen touring versions of many of those shows and are looking forward to next year's “Frozen.” Disney productions have also found a home on suburban stages: “Freaky Friday” made its professional Chicago-area debut this summer with Williams Street Repertory in Crystal Lake. A number of suburban theaters, including Metropolis Performing Arts Centre in Arlington Heights, have staged “Peter and the Starcatcher.” And a production of “Beauty and the Beast” opens in November at Paramount Theatre in Aurora, a year after the musical played Drury Lane Theatre in Oakbrook Terrace.

“Out of the box, we had two hits,” Schumacher said as he sat in his glass cube of an office in the penthouse of Disney's own theater on New York's West 42nd Street, the refurbished New Amsterdam. The initial one-two punch of “Beauty” in 1994 and “Lion King” three years later sealed the company's pact with Broadway's burgeoning family and tourist markets. And, in the case of director Julie Taymor's puppet-enhanced “Lion King” (now at more than 9,000 performances), it made inroads with doubters of Disney's interest in being innovation-forward.

“The first is probably more in line with what you might have expected this company to do; and the second one is probably a surprise, although if you knew the players, me and Peter (Schneider, with whom he once ran the theatrical division), you wouldn't think that was so surprising at all,” he said.

The quarter-century mark, a point at which Disney continues to explore new outlets for its stage productions around the globe, seemed a fitting time to sit down with the 61-year-old Schumacher to talk about the vast theatrical groundwork the company has laid, and where it might head next. Over the course of Schumacher's founding tenure at Disney Theatrical, where he presides over a workforce of 120, there have been numerous popular successes: the blockbuster of late being 2014's “Aladdin,” which seems on course to be Disney's No. 2 hit behind “The Lion King.” But there have been notable Broadway misses, too, the worst being a ghastly “Tarzan” adaptation in 2006, and a wackadoo short-lived “The Little Mermaid” in 2008, with the actors playing underwater creatures in sneakers with wheels.

Schumacher said “Starcatcher” earned the most exuberant critical plaudits, while early notices for “The Lion King” were not stellar. “I would say every one's a surprise.”

Still, a corporation's ability to scale up can be a boon even when Broadway fortunes, or the critics, or both, are unkind. “The Little Mermaid” may have been ungainly in its initial form. “By the time we built it, everything became stiff and heavy. It was like watching furniture move,” Schumacher says.

But Disney Theatrical's history of sticking with and reworking projects often paves the way to a happier financial ending - as has been the case with “The Little Mermaid.” “It's been playing in Japan forever - there are two productions there.” he says. “We've played it all over Europe. ... It's paid itself back and, no harm no foul, it lives on.”

The company's staying power in the theater can also be traced to a flexibility in how and where it finds markets for its shows. Schumacher, a San Francisco Bay-area native who helped the stage visionary Peter Brook bring his 1985, nine-hour adaptation of “The Mahabharata” to Los Angeles, has tried to pair Disney's film-to-stage productions with unlikely creative partners. There's Taymor, of course, with “The Lion King”; Goodman Theatre's longtime artistic director Robert Falls, tapped for “Aida”; and the British director Michael Grandage, who helmed “Frozen.” Similarly, he's found paths for his titles that may not even include Broadway.

“Freaky Friday,” for instance, with a score by Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey, Pulitzer Prize winners for “Next to Normal,” premiered three years ago at Arlington, Virginia's Signature Theatre as a family-friendly show destined for licensing by other companies. It ended up also being filmed for the Disney Channel.

Just last month, 1997's animated “Hercules” debuted in Central Park as a live production under the auspices of the Public Theater and rising off-Broadway director Lear deBessonet. With the absorption into the project of 200 amateur actors from around New York in the theater's Public Works initiative, it set in motion yet another model by which Disney could develop material.

According to Schumacher, these notions of injecting patience into the task of finding and grooming audiences began with Walt Disney himself.

“Movies that were not successful in their time became successful over time,” he said. He mentioned “Pinocchio” and “Fantasia,” which didn't make money initially but found their place in the American popular consciousness though theatrical rerelease and, eventually, the arrival of videocassettes.

Among the many productions Schumacher has in development, there's a musical based on “The Princess Bride,” the much obsessed-over 1987 movie. There's also a revival of the 2000 “Aida” and another incarnation of “Beauty and the Beast,” slated for Britain. The $71 billion acquisition by Disney of 21st Century Fox's film and TV properties also provides a new source for potential material. Some of the films in that library, such as “The Devil Wears Prada” and “Mrs. Doubtfire,” are already licensed by outside producers for musicals. The former will have its pre-Broadway run in Chicago, starting July 14.

That is more than wishing upon a star. That is good business.

The Daily Herald contributed to this report.