A Roaring Success and Its Effects on Broadway

Although Disney has since hired world-class directors (Richard Eyre for "Mary Poppins") and designers (Bob Crowley, who also made his directing debut with "Tarzan") and still often netted only mixed or poor reviews from critics, it's hard to argue that the company's impact over the past decade has been anything short of enormous. Just walk down tourist-friendly 42nd Street, or gape at the company's outsize share of the weekly Broadway grosses; Disney claimed more than $3 million of the nearly $22 million total during the week ending last Sunday.

Now its success has attracted a few more big kids to the playground. The newly minted DreamWorks Theatricals will produce "Shrek the Musical" on Broadway this fall, and even Marvel Comics is getting into the game. "Spider-Man" is targeted for sometime in 2009, and it's already much-anticipated: The composers are Bono and the Edge of U2, and the director is none other than Taymor.

Amy Petersen Jensen, author of "Theatre in a Media Culture: Production, Performance and Perception Since 1970," says that the current "viral" world of instant access and ready connections stimulates "our interest in the reinvention of things we're already familiar with." If that makes commercial spinoffs sound less like opportunistic marketing than like basic human nature, Jensen replies, "Marketing strategies play into our human nature, if they're very good."

She notes that Disney literally changed the face of Broadway with its renovation of 42nd Street, and credits the company with elevating theater to "vacation status -- it's the only way you could get them to buy an $80 ticket [a high price on tour] to something that was going to last two hours."

Indeed, one spectacular element of "The Little Mermaid" is the percentage of prepubescent girls, many clutching dolls and wearing sea-toned dresses, occupying $120 seats. (Booster cushions are available and are widely used -- a distinction even from the high-priced heyday of Andrew Lloyd Webber and "Les Miz.") The audience gets what it comes for: a familiar story made new onstage, with technical wonders to impress even the grown-ups and, in many cases, advance the industry standards.

The engineering of "Poppins" and "Mermaid" looks cutting edge, and Benken contends that's no illusion.

"Purely from a technical side, yeah," says Benken, who served as technical director on both "Lion King" and "Little Mermaid." "Everybody always wants to push the envelope a little bit farther."

Schumacher says: "Of course we're going to try to push that, and try to do some things you might not have seen before."

With "Mary Poppins," it's the extravagant flying that's drawing applause each time Ashley Brown (in the title role) lifts off in the New Amsterdam Theatre. For good measure, the show also offers a jaw-dropping dance that takes chimney sweep Bert up the sides and across the underside of the proscenium arch.

For "Little Mermaid," Disney had to find new technical talent to master the automation necessary in George Tsypin's set design, which perpetually shifts between deep sea and dry land. Tsypin's set is largely composed of plastic, which is intensely colorful, shiny and unusually hard to clean. (Apparently it's prone to a static charge that attracts dirt.) Before the show goes out on tour, technicians will make sure it won't crack in cold weather as the set is toted from city to city.

Benken notes that industry-wide, computer-driven systems now far outstrip those that motored the previous generation's megamusicals. Anyone who's ever been underwhelmed by the slow-falling chandelier in "Phantom of the Opera," he says, might want to check out the show in Las Vegas, where Benken just installed a system that drops the fixture at 17 feet per second.

"You couldn't have done that 10 years ago," Benken says, "or at least not for a reasonable amount of money." He also cites rising safety regulations, which is surely on Disney's consciousness in the wake of a seriously injured actor who last month fell off the tall, slender ship in "Little Mermaid" and is suing for damages.

Clearly, these complicated shows take longer to put together than, say, "Damn Yankees."

"Absolutely," says Mary Peterson, an associate costume designer on "The Lion King" and the upcoming "Spider-Man." "I know people who have been involved with 'Spider-Man' for years," Peterson says.

If Disney feels threatened by the oncoming competition, Schumacher isn't letting on. "Animation's not a genre, it's a technique," he says, adding that his offerings have the advantage of familiar music that audiences connect with. "Who's my competition? Me, right? I've got three shows competing for a similar kind of audience."

But that audience might have had its appetite whetted for the kinds of popular film characters and exciting new sights Disney has proved can be delivered anew on the stage. Of the looming "Shrek" and "Spider-Man," Benken says: "I'm familiar with some of what's going on with those shows. They're both very big shows. You're going to see some new ground broken, I think, with both of them."