Disney’s Beauty and the Beast is an animated classic turned live action blockbuster and now it has been transformed into a musical stage show as well. Disney on Thursday officially unveiled a live version of the hit musical film on the 2,500-passenger Disney Dream.
Playing in Dream’s 1,340-passenger Walt Disney Theatre, the hour-long production is about half the length of the movie but manages to squeeze in all of its iconic songs including Belle, Gaston and Be Our Guest — the latter transformed with visual effects.
The cruise ship version of Beauty and the Beast also incorporates high-definition projections splashed across a music box-like space to create elaborate, panoramic scenes designed to be visible in even the most remote corners of the theater.
Released in theaters in March and starring Emma Watson, Beauty and the Beast was the highest-grossing live-action musical film of all time. It had worldwide revenues of more than $1.2 billion. The movie was based on Disney’s 1991 animated film of the same name, which in turn spawned a Broadway musical that ran between 1994 and 2007.
The media received a sneak peek at the cruise ship version of the show in July at Disney Cruise Line’s rehearsal studios in Toronto. One twist that was on display was the use of puppetry for such iconic Beauty and the Beast characters as the candelabra/maitre d’ Lumiere and teapot/housekeeper Mrs. Potts. Expressive and elaborate, the puppets are made to be operated by actors who are visible to the audience — an artifice also used in the adaptation of the Disney blockbuster Frozen that debuted on the cruise ship Disney Wonder in 2016.