News, Analysis and Reviews of the Disney Entertainment Business
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It has been nearly fourteen months since the lights were dimmed on Broadway stages due to the pandemic, but with the coronavirus showing signs of allowing people to return to some sense of normalcy, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo this week announced that Broadway will be able to reopen on September 14, 2021. Tickets for a few shows even went on sale yesterday, and The Phantom of the Opera goes on sale today for performances beginning October 22. Phantom is Broadway’s longest running show.
According to a statement from the Governor’s office, theaters will be able to open at 100% capacity. The governor’s announcement was met with enthusiasm, as the return of Broadway means not only high-quality entertainment for theatre patrons, but the return of numerous jobs for the industry, from actors to support staff to local restaurants which depend on show traffic each night. The Governor’s office reports that nearly 100,000 jobs are supported by the Broadway shows, with $14.7 billion dollars tied to the New York economy, and prior to the pandemic, nearly 250,000 patrons a week attended Broadway shows.
“We are thrilled that Governor Cuomo clearly recognizes the impact of Broadway’s return on the city and state’s economy and the complexity of restarting an entire industry that has been dormant for over a year,” said Charlotte St. Martin, President of the Broadway League. “Nothing beats Broadway. The theatre owners, producers, and other League members will continue to work with the NY State Department of Health and the Governor to coordinate the industry’s return and the related health and safety protocols required to do so. We remain cautiously optimistic about Broadway’s ability to resume performances this fall and are happy that fans can start buying tickets again.”
But while some shows might be prepared to raise their curtains in September, others may need more time to reopen, due to rehearsal schedules, staffing concerns, and theatre logistics.The Music ManandDiana: The Musical have both reported December starts for their performances. It is expected that each Broadway show will announce their sale dates, performance schedules and timelines on a show-by-show basis. A number of the theatres, however, are expected to share their plans in the next few days, including Hamilton and The Lion King.
According to the Broadway League, when Broadway shut down on March 12, 2020, thirty-one productions were running, including eight new shows in previews, with another eight productions in rehearsals for spring openings. Disney had three shows performing: Frozen, The Lion King and Aladdin. Sadly, Frozen saw its final performance the evening of the shutdowns, and will not be returning to the New York stage.
For the most up-to-date new performance schedule for the shows, head to each show’s own website, or to the Broadway League’s website.
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Beth Keating is a regular contributor to DisneyBizJournal.
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The awards’ season is nearly upon us, and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association this morning announced its nominees for the 78th Annual Golden Globe Awards. Disney productions captured a number of nods, with five nominations for Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures and one for Disney+.
The Mandalorian was nominated for “Best Television Series - Drama,” along with The Crown; Lovecraft Country; Ozark; and Ratched.
Hamilton was responsible for two nominations, the first for “Best Motion Picture-Musical/Comedy,” up against Borat Subsequent Moviefilm; Music; Palm Springs; and The Prom.
Lin-Manuel Miranda was also nominated for Hamilton in the category of “Best Performance By An Actor In A Motion Picture-Musical/Comedy,” along with Sacha Baron Cohen, James Corden, Dev Patel, and Andy Samberg.
Two Disney/Pixar animations will be pitted against one another in the category “Best Motion Picture – Animated.” Soul and Onward will compete against The Croods: A New Age; Over the Moon; and Wolfwalkers.
Soul also brought a “Best Original Score -Motion Picture” nomination to Jon Batiste, Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor, with Ross and Reznor squaring off against themselves for their work in Mank, with additional nominations for Alexandre Desplat for The Midnight Sky; Ludwig Goransson for Tenet; and James Newton Howard for News of the World.
The Golden Globes recognize achievements in 25 categories; 14 in motion pictures and 11 in television. The Golden Globes is traditionally the first of the season’s awards shows; this year, because of COVID, the January gala has been moved to February. It will take place February 28, 2021, but COVID complications have added another twist to this year’s ceremonies. This year, the award show will be bi-coastal, with Tina Fey returning to host from the Rainbow Room on the east coast in New York, and Amy Poehler also returning to host from the west coast at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, where the awards normally take place. Nominees will likely be appearing from locations around the globe as well, given the current travel situation. The show will air on NBC.
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Beth Keating is a regular contributor to DisneyBizJournal.
Please support the efforts of DisneyBizJournal.com to bring news, analysis and commentary on Disney to readers such as yourself. Make a contribution right here via PayPal. Thanks!
Now that you’ve watched Hamilton three or four or seven times on Disney+, you are probably looking for some new Disney productions to fill your pandemic days. Disney Magic Moments is coming to the rescue. Offered up this week on the Disney Parks Blog, the previously recorded full-length version of Tangled: The Musical, features the original cast from the show’s opening in the Walt Disney Theatre onboard the Disney Magic.
A musical adaptation of the 2010 Tangled movie, this Broadway-style Disney Cruise Line exclusive opened in 2015, casting Elisha Ainsley as Rapunzel, Nick Pankuch as Flynn Rider, Katie Whetsell as Mother Gothel, and puppeteer/actor David Colston Corris as Maximus the horse. Tangled is based on the Grimm’s fairy tale of the lost princess Rapunzel.
The live stage extravaganza was created by a Grammy, Tony, Emmy and Academy Award winning team. Academy Award-winning composer Alan Menken and Grammy Award-winning lyricist Glenn Slater were the duo who brought you the soundtrack behind the animated film with all the Tangled songs that you know and love, and they added three new original songs to the Cruise Line production, including the opening number, “Flower of Gold.”
Adding to the collaboration is master puppet designer Michael Curry, who brings you the life-sized, mischievous Maximus the horse. Curry has previously won awards for his work with Olympic ceremonies and on Broadway, and has designed for such diverse entertainers as Cirque du Soleil, The Metropolitan Opera, Michael Jackson, Katy Perry, and Lady Gaga.
Tony Award winner Paloma Young is the designer responsible for Tangled: The Musical’s vibrant eye-catching costumes. You may know her work from Peter and the Starcatcher.
Bradley Kaye, scenic design, has been involved in a number of Disney Cruise Line productions, including Halloween on the High Seas and Aladdin – A Musical Spectacular, as well as in Disney Parks’ shows, parades, and locales, such as Star Wars Launch Bay. He has received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle.
The energetic show takes place on a series of moving sets, an amazing feat when you recall that the show’s home is on a cruise ship with limited space. The opening number, with its appearing and disappearing elevator floor, is an ingenious way of giving all the backstory and exposition needed to jump right into Rapunzel’s tale, in a purely musical way, of course. The floating lanterns in the night sky later in the production are an especially fun touch that surely was even more enchanting in person in the theater.
To make your evening of viewing more complete, Disney Parks Blog also offers a recipe for making your very own purple and yellow Tangled popcorn to eat while you are watching the show. It’s not quite the same as enjoying one of the Tangled “Lost Princess” Dole Whip adjacent cones from Storybook Treats in the Magic Kingdom, or last summer’s limited edition Tangled éclair with its sugared flowers and miniature chocolate frying pan from Pinocchio Village Haus, but you can get the popcorn recipe here.
If you are hooked on Disney Cruise Line’s Broadway-esque productions, you might also like to catch a glimpse of the Beauty and the Beast production from aboard the Disney Dream. Back in April, at the beginning of the pandemic, Disney Magic Moments posted a 20-minute long, narrated and edited video of highlighted scenes from the Disney Cruise Line version of the Beauty and the Beast Musical.
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Beth Keating is a regular contributor to DisneyBizJournal.
We are New Yorkers at DisneyBizJournal. That means that we are, I think, required by state laws to show up in New York City once a year during the holidays to visit the tree at Rockefeller Center and go to see a Broadway show. Really, you can look it up somewhere. It’s tantamount to people who live in Orlando being magnetically drawn into the theme parks. We’re microchipped or something.
Over the years, we’ve seen dramas including Shakespearian productions such as Christopher Plummer in Macbeth, big budget musicals like Phantom of the Opera and Into the Woods, monologue spotlights like Jake Gyllenhaal’s Sea Wall/A Life, and holiday celebrations including Patrick Stewart’s one man version of A Christmas Carol. Twice.
What we haven’t seen is Hamilton.Hamilton is one of those shows that everyone wants to see, but no one can get tickets. Scalpers command thousands for desirable seats, though the face value of the ticket usually ranges from $149-$449 (it varies widely by day and time and seat location).
If you, like our family, didn’t have the good fortune to snag tickets to the show with its original Broadway cast, Disney is getting ready to hand you an Independence Day gift. In a spectacular display of foresight, the Hamilton production was filmed over three days in July 2016 with most of the original Broadway cast. Now the three days have been woven into a single film, with input from the creators themselves. Originally set for release in October in theaters, Disney bumped up the “go” date to July 3 and is offering it for streaming on Disney+. Viewers will see the Broadway production in its entirety, as if they are watching it from the best seats in the house.
Inspired by the 2004 Alexander Hamilton biography by historian Ron Chernow, the Broadway show is the brainchild of Lin-Manuel Miranda, the 2008 Tony award winning creator of another Broadway standout, In the Heights. (You also know him from Moana and Mary Poppins Returns, and he’s currently working on the new live action Little Mermaid film.) Miranda fell in love with Alexander Hamilton’s story as he read Chernow’s biography while vacationing on the beach, and managed to condense 818 pages into a slightly-less-than-3-hour musical. Hamilton is a high-energy, two-act look at the life of one of America’s youngest Founding Fathers, with the story portrayed almost entirely in song, with a blend of hip-hop, jazz, R&B and traditional Broadway styling.
An unusual choice, to be sure. “This is the story of America then, told by America now. It looks like America now,” said Miranda of the decision to use modern musical genres and cast the role of the white Founding Fathers with men and women of varied ethnic backgrounds.
In an interview on CBS Sunday Morning in 2015, Miranda said of Hamilton’s story, “There’s great drama, there’s a great love story, there’s incredible political intrigue.” And Miranda has helped bring that story to life, not only as the writer and lyricist behind Hamilton, but as the original lead, giving birth to the very first Alexander Hamilton in the show. Miranda imbues Hamilton’s story with musical deliberations on such weighty topics as the proper role of the Federal government, debated through the give and take of Rap battles.
For those unfamiliar with Alexander Hamilton, he was George Washington’s righthand man during the Revolutionary War, wrote many of “The Federalist Papers” supporting passage of the Constitution, and served as America’s first, and perhaps greatest, Secretary of the Treasury. In his book, Chernow observed, “In fact, no immigrant in American history has ever made a larger contribution than Alexander Hamilton.” And since no one is perfect, Hamilton also exhibited terrible political instincts, and supplied the nation with its first major political sex scandal.
In the 2015 CBS interview, Lin-Manuel Miranda also said of Hamilton, “This is a guy who on the strength of his writing pulled himself from poverty, into the Revolution that helped create our nation.”
Hamilton was the winner of eleven 2016 Tony Awards, including Best Musical, and also won the 2016 Grammy for Best Musical Theater Album, the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and a special 2018 citation from the Kennedy Center Honors. The show began as a break out hit off-Broadway at The Public Theater, before moving to Broadway in 2015. When the Broadway theaters bring up the curtains again post-COVID-19, the show will resume at its home at the Richard Rodgers Theatre.
Among the original Broadway cast members appearing in the film are Lin-Manuel Miranda as Alexander Hamilton, and fellow Hamilton Tony winners Daveed Diggs as the Marquis de Lafayette/Thomas Jefferson, Renée Elise Goldsberry as Angelica Schuyler, and Leslie Odom, Jr. as Aaron Burr; and Tony nominees Phillipa Soo as Eliza Hamilton, Christopher Jackson as George Washington and Jonathan Groff as King George.
Lest you think the tale of Alexander Hamilton is just a story for erudite, ivy-leagued, elbow-patched old men who spend their time debating the minutia of history of the days of yore (Hamilton’s hip-hop accompaniment notwithstanding), there is an unusual subplot to this musical. The creators of Hamilton have teamed up with The Rockefeller Foundation and The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History to produce the Hamilton Education Program (EduHam), which has served more than 160,000 students across the country since 2016. Through EduHam, “students study primary source documents from the Founding Era, learn how Lin-Manuel Miranda used primary source documents to create the musical Hamilton, and finally create their own original performance pieces based on the same material.”
In the spring, as the ramifications of COVID-19 began closing down schools across the country, sending kids into home schooling scenarios, the EduHam team, already working on a family-based component to their programming, stepped into high gear and launched EduHam at Home, a free family version of EduHam that will continue to be available through August 2020.
One of the central objectives of EduHam is to not only get students excited about history, but to familiarize them with using primary source material. The website includes an instructional video by Miranda, 45 people from the Revolutionary period (some of whom appear in Hamilton), and 14 historical events for students to explore through the use of more than two dozen original documents from the period. Interviews with Lin-Manuel Miranda and Alexander Hamilton biography author Ron Chernow are available to students on the site as well. Check it all out here. As part of the program, the students have the opportunity to work their way through exercises that help them pen their own original works of art based on the historical material.
When school is in session, and students from across the area descend on the Richard Rodgers Theatre to experience performances of Hamilton for themselves, each school picks a student ambassador to perform original material they have created as part of their Hamilton curriculum. The ambassadors climb up on the stage in front of members of the Hamilton cast and their fellow students to share what they’ve crafted. What an amazing opportunity, and a generous component for the students, from the theatre community, The Rockefeller Foundation, and the Gilder Lehrman Institute.
As a short warning to families (this is Disney+ after all), Hamilton is rated PG-13 for moments of adult language. Hamilton aficionados are aware of the “F-Bomb” that finds its way into the Broadway version of the show several times. If left intact, that would have garnered the film version an R rating, under the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) rules. Miranda has addressed this issue on his Twitter feed, acknowledging that, rather than cutting the lines entirely, a few of the profanities are muted or have a record scratch overarching the word in order to maintain a PG-13 rating so the kids can watch the show too. He suggests that viewers should feel free to sing along to their hearts content over the missing words.
"You can sing whatEVER you like at home (even sync up the album)! Love you. Enjoy," Lin-Manuel offered on Twitter to his fans. (Admit it, those of you who love the show will, in fact, be singing away at the top of your lungs anyway.)
In a New York Times interview, Miranda acknowledged, "If we have to mute a word here or there to reach the largest audience possible, I'm OK with that, because your kids already have the original language memorized. I don't think we're depriving anyone of anything if we mute an F-bomb here or there to make our rating." Considering the Richard Rodgers Theatre holds about 1300 guests per show, and the audience for Disney+ is seemingly limitless, his compromise is undoubtedly a valid one. Besides, Miranda wrote the show himself, so if anyone is allowed to make edits, he certainly has that prerogative. It’s his show. (Fair warning: There is still one F-bomb intact in the songs.)
If you would like more information about the Hamilton musical, visit the website here.
Don’t throw away your shot… Take Disney up on the opportunity to see this Broadway phenomenon with its original cast. It’s a chance that too few were able to see in person.
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Beth Keating is a regular contributor to DisneyBizJournal.
