Until last night, I only knew H.E.R. as the tiny person who lives inside of my TV and emerges once a year to perform on awards shows. Now, I know her as the tiny person who lives inside of my TV who is the best Disney princess since Moana. On December 15, Disney aired Beauty and the Beast: A 30th Celebration, a televised musical event on ABC that was a better, more artistically valuable brand-extension exercise than any dreary “live-action†movie remake could ever hope to be. The production built on the format of The Little Mermaid 30th-anniversary broadcast from 2019 — live musical performances complete with elaborate sets and dancers intercut with animated scenes from the movie — and improved on it tenfold with more creative approaches to filming and staging and interstitial segments narrated by Rita Moreno in a fabulous perm to keep the momentum going.
The cast of this thing is stacked with H.E.R. as Belle and Josh Groban as the Beast — the two of them doing their best doe-eyed Disney princess and brooding prince while making it very much their own (of course, H.E.R. does an electric-guitar solo in the middle of “Beauty and the Beast,†and it works). Martin Short gets to play a stage version of Lumiere who actually has full use of his hands instead of wearing big foam candles, and his “Be Our Guest†is charming because a) it’s nice to see him having fun dressed up as a cross between Liberace and the Heat Miser and b) Belle’s chair is alive and has a human face.
If you haven’t had the pleasure of seeing Joshua Henry as Rapunzel’s Prince in the current Broadway production of Into the Woods, he’s basically doing that same comedic bravado for Gaston.
The best part of this whole thing, obviously, is the costumes, which prove that you can put a million motion-capture stickers on Dan Stevens face, but it will never capture the emotion of a giant Beast puppet with a big static mask maneuvered by Josh Groban singing from inside its ribcage and looking like a boy in a mecha anime. Shania Twain as Mrs. Potts? Remarkable. David Alan Grier as Cogsworth in giant hoop-pantaloons (like a hoop-skirt but pantaloons)? The best.
We haven’t had a live broadcast musical in a bit. They’re fun. More please!