Welcome to my page for “Transforming the Beast: The Theatre Laboratories of the “Disney Renaissance” 1984-1994.”
I focus on this decade because it represents a dramatic turnaround story– where the Walt Disney Company went from the verge of bankruptcy to unprecedented financial, critical, and popular success – that corresponds with an influx of theatre professionals to the Company’s divisions in the 1980s. My project investigates connections between these things, determining a positive impact of theatre people such as Peter Schneider, Howard Ashman, Linda Woolverton, Bob McTyre, Ron Logan, Rob Roth, Matt West, Stan Meyer, and others listed on this slide.
But ultimately, this dissertation is a history of process – not progress – process. While there was unquestionable improvements to the Company’s way of doing things, these changes should not be read as linear, clean, quick, or universally beneficial. Rather, I maintain that the positive impact of theatre came in a form that was more akin to a laboratory – a place of experimentation, where new variables are introduced into an environment and changes occur – with sometimes volatile reactions. Where previous rules and lines of demarcation were challenged, in tense and rigorous encounters, between insiders and outsiders, and between the status quo and the introduction of a new approach to creativity that was rooted in the contexts, conventions, and traditions of theatrical practice.
To tell the stories of these theatre people, who ventured outside the traditional boundaries of their craft, I have embraced my own theatrical and dramaturgical training as a historiographical methodology. Through my research questions, which were informed by Stanislavskian methods for analyzing “action” I was able to identify objectives, obstacles, and strategies of my historical subjects. What did these theatre people hope to achieve at Disney? What was standing in their way? How did they use their theatrical knowledge to navigate these challenges, and lastly, where did their way of doing things come from?
By uncovering these genealogies of theatre knowledge and practice, I am able to place the “Disney Renaissance” in larger contexts of theatre history – specifically histories of theatre laboratories.
In his book History of the Theatre Laboratory, Bryan Brown writes that since the early 1900s, the phrase “theatre laboratory” has been used variously to refer to a specific approach to theatre making that often includes emphasis on creative self-sustainability through training and pedagogy, research and problem-based initiatives and processes, dedication to the development of new works and forms, and innovation on existing ones.
Inspired by this, and the writings of Richard Boleslavsky on theatre laboratories, the four body chapters of this dissertation investigate how the listed theatre professionals brought one or more of the four attributes of a theatre laboratory to the Walt Disney Company, culminating in Beauty and the Beast on Broadway, and the creation of a new division of the Company dedicated solely to theatre.
I chapter 1, I focus primarily on the intervention that Peter Schneider made to Disney Feature Animation to make it creatively self-sustaining in the decades following Walt Disney’s death. As a former production manager from regional theatre, who was hired as Vice President of the animation studio in 1984, he sought to empower artists to cultivate their own artistic voices instead of waiting for a self-appointed genius to guide them. To do this, he had essentially re-train them to overcome the old way of thinking – which was “What would Walt do?”. He had to find ways to break up the obstacles which stifled creative expression, which included factions and -what he calls – Wing-ism. He also had to remove or bypass established figures who didn’t want to share power or opportunities with the younger, more diverse class of artists who were there. To do this, he implemented what he calls a “theatre discipline,” which I am able to trace” directly to the Group Theatre and by extension to Moscow Art Theatre. As this chapter notes, Oliver and Company was the first Disney animated film to adopt this “theatre discipline”, which would be adjusted further on future productions like Beauty and the Beast.
By Chapter 2, the studio was in full swing on Beauty and the Beast, and they needed to create a protagonist – the Beast – who could illicit both fear and empathy. They struggled because traditionally Disney animation relied on a process called “mirroring” or recognizing oneself in a character to trigger emotional empathy, especially for non-human characters like Mickey, Dumbo, and Bambi – as they learned, this is easier for cute little animals than a Beast. To solve this, two theatre people working on the project – the film’s screenwriter Linda Woolverton and its lyricist Howard Ashman partnered up to create a more sophisticated treatment of empathy that accessed cognitive reasoning as well as emotion, using pedagogical theories of Brian Way, Isabel Berger, and Bertolt Brecht to take the audience on a participatory journey with the other protagonist Belle as she learns to judge others with reasoned compassion as well as emotional empathy. This chapter breaks down the creative process to reveal the problem-based solutions that Woolverton and Ashman offered at each turn. And even though Ashman lost his battle to AIDS during production for this film, it went on to break records both domestically and internationally as one of the most successful animated films of all time.
While the animation studio continued their experiments, Disney C.E.O. Michael Eisner, a former theatre major himself, wanted to update Disney theme parks into a more culturally relevant experience with sophisticated, cutting-edge entertainment. However, the parks were designed under a very strict principles of keeping guests moving and purpose-built proscenium stages were traditionally seen as a hindrance to attendance instead of a draw. Nevertheless, Eisner and Disney’s Entertainment division led by theatre people Ron Logan and Bob McTyre, broke the rules and built new theatre spaces for Broadway-style book musicals and staged animated films as drama for the first time in Disney theme park history. They built a new theme park dedicated to entertainment, and these opportunities attracted theatre professionals who innovated new forms of street performance and used new technologies in a massive spectacle like Fantasmic! to give the parks an amount of cultural capital and the attendance boost they so desired.
Finally, these experiments paved the way for Beauty and the Beast to go to Broadway as Disney’s first Broadway show. The bar of expectations was incredibly high, and Chapter 4 determines that placing the unlimited spectacle of an animated film in the limitations of a proscenium was both artistically and financially risky. To meet this challenge, the creative team of Rob Roth, Matt West, and Stan Meyer emulated the cinematic staging techniques of Broadway director Michael Bennett and used their time as Disney theme park creators to expand these techniques using new technologies like intelligent lighting, scenic, and sound systems. Together they staged a version of Beauty and the Beast that ran for thirteen years on Broadway, was staged in dozens of different countries, and just before the pandemic, was the most-performed musical in the United States today in local and high school theatres.
Together, these stories highlight the value that theatrical knowledge can offer in both theatrical and non-theatrical settings. Like many who are defending their dissertations this year, this project was developed in unusual and difficult circumstances during Covid-19. Most notably, it was written with limited access to the libraries and archives. Additionally, as a theatre professional, I wrote this at a time when my industry was decimated, my peers furloughed and unemployed, and the value of our entire craft and education called into question. Are a theatre major and theatre professors a waste of money when the future of the industry is so unknown? The stakes of this research could not be higher, but the resources needed were incredibly inaccessible.
Nevertheless, I have found since my early days in my high school drama club’s gym-atorium the immense capacity of theatre practitioners to tell big stories with limited resources, late nights, hot glue, duct tape, and prayers to St. Genesius – the patron saint of actors. In the end, I chose to write a dissertation that seeks to demonstrate the immense impact that theatre can have when viewed as an asset and when theatre people are given opportunities and resources to make and do big things. In this way, it is my strongest recommendation that if you would like to level up your company, as Disney did in this decade from a million-dollar company to a billion-dollar company, you should hire and invest in theatre people, the proliferation of a theatre laboratory approach, and theatrical education and training. Thank you.