Does anyone remember the David Pumpkins SNL sketch, where one of the beleaguered elevator ride guests asks the cast member "why did you go all in on David Pumpkins?"
This show had me asking a very similar question, namely "why did you go all in on the live action Beauty and the Beast?"
They had the human actors playing the enchanted objects lugging around props that looked more or less exactly like the Emma Watson-version objects. So Lumiere, Cogsworth, Mrs. Potts, et. all all carried a candelabra, clock, tea cart with pot, etc.
To me, this is a huge mistake. It might work fine on film, where a CGI object can fill up a screen and move about, but in real life it seemed to leave the performers hand-strung as far as what they could do with their physicality. Lumiere especially is a big, showy, role, and calls for a lot of hamming it up, but when the actor is stuck moving a 10 inch candlestick around, it makes everything seem...small.
(Also, it makes it a little difficult to worry too much about these objects and their dreams to become human again when you can already see their human forms, and it makes the post-transformation reveal feel a little flat.)
The particular performance I saw was hindered by two technical glitches that led to the cast having to exit the stage and the curtain lower while they got fixed. While it's impossible to say what happened, my wife and I both came away feeling like the show was more technically ambitious than they could easily pull off.
Lastly, the animated movie has already been brilliantly adapted for the stage in the lovely Broadway production, which makes this new adaptation feel particularly unnecessary. It was especially funny to see Lumiere, Belle, and Mrs. Potts make appearances in the final night's "Believe" show in costumes that more or less conform to the Broadway adaptation. The same actor performed as Lumeire in both shows, and you could tell how much more suited he was to play a singing and dancing human sized character with candles for hands and a hat.
Take all this with a grain of salt. The show got raucous applause and obviously the movie made a ton of money, so my opinion was definitely the minority. I simply offer my take, and my wife's take, for those curious. This was our 8th Disney cruise, and we're both theater people (we actually performed as Gaston and Mrs. Potts in a stage production about a decade ago.)
This show had me asking a very similar question, namely "why did you go all in on the live action Beauty and the Beast?"
They had the human actors playing the enchanted objects lugging around props that looked more or less exactly like the Emma Watson-version objects. So Lumiere, Cogsworth, Mrs. Potts, et. all all carried a candelabra, clock, tea cart with pot, etc.
To me, this is a huge mistake. It might work fine on film, where a CGI object can fill up a screen and move about, but in real life it seemed to leave the performers hand-strung as far as what they could do with their physicality. Lumiere especially is a big, showy, role, and calls for a lot of hamming it up, but when the actor is stuck moving a 10 inch candlestick around, it makes everything seem...small.
(Also, it makes it a little difficult to worry too much about these objects and their dreams to become human again when you can already see their human forms, and it makes the post-transformation reveal feel a little flat.)
The particular performance I saw was hindered by two technical glitches that led to the cast having to exit the stage and the curtain lower while they got fixed. While it's impossible to say what happened, my wife and I both came away feeling like the show was more technically ambitious than they could easily pull off.
Lastly, the animated movie has already been brilliantly adapted for the stage in the lovely Broadway production, which makes this new adaptation feel particularly unnecessary. It was especially funny to see Lumiere, Belle, and Mrs. Potts make appearances in the final night's "Believe" show in costumes that more or less conform to the Broadway adaptation. The same actor performed as Lumeire in both shows, and you could tell how much more suited he was to play a singing and dancing human sized character with candles for hands and a hat.
Take all this with a grain of salt. The show got raucous applause and obviously the movie made a ton of money, so my opinion was definitely the minority. I simply offer my take, and my wife's take, for those curious. This was our 8th Disney cruise, and we're both theater people (we actually performed as Gaston and Mrs. Potts in a stage production about a decade ago.)
