Bring Out The Beast
As London's most expensive musical settles into its stride at the Dominion Theatre, Rob Halliday looks at where a substantial portion of the reported £ 10m has been spent
It's a funny old world at times: while the tradition has been for new musicals to start on the stage and then progress to the cinema - a trend undergoing a revival with last year's film of Evita and talk of a film version of Phantom, allegedly to star John Travolta Disney, an undisputed king of cinema, are moving in the other direction. Beauty and the Beast enjoyed considerable success as an animated feature film and is now, as the advertising constantly points out, London's most expensive musical - a £10m blockbuster that has settled into the Dominion Theatre for what all involved hope will be a long run. Turning a stage show into a film is relatively easy: the cynic might say that you just employ a star (singing ability optional) and scale up the visuals. But to turn a film into a show - especially an animated film, where just about anything goes? That's harder.
It works in this case because even in its film incarnation, Beauty and the Beast had a familiar story told in the structure of a good old-fashioned musical narrative linked songs, interspersed with moments of spectacle. This is probably because of the theatrical background of its creators: author Linda Woolverton, composer Alan Menken and lyricist Howard Ashman.
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