Or, Beauty and the Beast makes a huge sap of me.
I’ve made no secret of how much I absolutely adore Beauty and the Beast. Belle is, was, and will always be my brown-haired bookish heroine (I mean, I’m more the below socially awkward blue dress Belle than glamorous castle yellow dress Belle, but that should surprise no one.)
(By pinkdisneyprincess on tumblr.)
Very few things make me genuinely happier than Beauty and the Beast does, as a movie, as a soundtrack, as a stage show. And as a stage show goes, it’s ridiculous, but it’s damn impressive.
Now, my best friend was in the stage show semi-locally a little while back, and I went multiple times, so I’m more than used to the stage show differences. (How the objects are part-object, part-human, so it’s not weird to have giant life-size forks or something.) But seeing it done by people with big budgets and technical amazing is a special treat.
The set and how it’s put together is really cool, the techie in me observes. I loved the curtain setup, I loved the floating staircases that made up the castle and looked really pretty, I loved that when the techies did things like operate the spinny platform of onstage Beast-to-Prince transformation, the audience felt compelled to applaud. I didn’t love how it took me like half of Act I to realize the set was being spun by gargoyle-people, but that’s just my own silly.
I loved the supporting cast. The players made me really, really happy: Gaston especially. He was fantastic. He and Lefou had this slapsticky thing going that was perfect. Actually, everyone was playing it kind of slapstick. But since they were all committed to the insanity, it worked out well. It was almost cartoonier than the cartoon, but they pulled it off.
And Lumiere was horny. Man, was he. Everyone came off like caricatures of themselves, but in a good way. Lumiere was really horny, Cogsworth was really British, Babette who I love so deeply ’cause of my soft spot for flirtatious French maid types. Babette who was totally pulling Lumiere off to get some as soon as they had human parts again. (I love, love, love that Lumiere and Babette, Cogsworth and the wardrobe, they were off to boink the second they could. It makes me smile.)
I loved the ensemble. Once again, there was one tall girl with dark hair and a curvaceous figure (the ensemble here actually really differed in shapes and sizes, it was neat) who wound up predictably my favorite (brown dress, 1700s cap, ringletted pigtails). The dance numbers were nice. The one in the middle of “Gaston” (I don’t remember the break being that long, but hey) played really, really well, as they all did a jig with beer steins. (I love how alcoholic the town scenes are.)
I didn’t love the Beast or Belle. The Beast went a little tone deaf sometimes. Belle sounded more like she should have been playing Glinda (her resonance was screwy and her voice was cartoonish). Weird, I know. But I loved the rest of it, because I am a sap. Yes.
–your fangirl heroine.
