All in Second Star to the Right
In celebration of Disney’s Aladdin celebrating it’s 1,001st performance on Broadway, I thought it might be fun to speculate what other films in the Disney canon might be worth looking at for the stage musical treatment. Here are some ideas I have, admittedly some are longshots or require some major rethinking. Would you want to see any of these reach the stage, or do you have some ideas of your own?
Walt Disney had a lot of hit films in his career. Indeed, many of the films made in his lifetime ranked in the top-five movies of the year that they were released. After his death, however, many of the films that followed fell into what is considered a mediocre time of the studio where projects seemed either aimless, or did not have that Disney stamp of excellence. The last project that Walt Disney green-lit was the live-action 1967 musical The Happiest Millionaire. It is interesting to think what the final product would have looked like had Disney survived to infuse it with his special brand of magic. Woefully, he did not and the final product is one of the biggest duds the studio has ever churned out. That is not to say that The Happiest Millionaire doesn’t have little bursts of excellence within its overly long original 164 minute running time.
It was recently announced that Disney Studios will make a new Mary Poppins film musical, one that tells the further adventures of the Banks family with the titular nanny, some twenty-years after the original stories. Hairspray and Bombshell composing team of Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman are on board to provide music and Rob Marshall, director of Disney’s film adaptation of Into the Woods is set to direct. In recent years it has been de riguer for the House of Mouse to make live action versions or adaptations of films they have already made: Alice in Wonderland, Cinderella, and Maleficent come to mind, as do the forthcoming Beauty and the Beast and The Jungle Book. This is not to say that I am opposed to “new” Mary Poppins film musical, but isn’t it starting to feel that a lack on ingenuity and creativity is resulting in audience being served up a lot of reheated properties?
With the recent hoopla surrounding Disney’s announcement that Gigantic, based loosely on the Jack and the Beanstalk fairy tale, will have a score by Frozen’s Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez, I began thinking, what other fairy tales, folk tales and mythological stories would be the perfect fodder for an animated musical courtesy of Mickey Mouse. After pouring through lists of titles, these are the animated film musicals I would love to see happen.
