Tale As Old As Time...

So Chief had gotten rather good tickets at a decent from Toyota for Disney's Beauty And The Beast musical. And we weren't letting an opportunity for such a musical slip past us in the first place - Beauty And The Beast was our first Disney animated movie, and we collected the soundtracks on cassette up till Pocahontas.

'Course, nowadays people don't use cassettes as much, so we'd looked for the CDs and mp3s too.

But we digress. So both Chief and us snagged a couple of tickets which included pre-performance refreshments. Which turned out to be a good thing as 'refreshments' consisted of pasta and lots of filling finger food and the two of us haven't had dinner yet when we arrived at KLCC at 6.30pm.

True as it can be.

The Chief is liking Toyota more and more as they seem to show plenty of appreciation for their customers. At least, for Toyota Tribes and Merit members. It may be likely that Toyota shows the Chief better appreciation than we do... :(

Anyways.

No one's got a swell cleft in his chin like Gaston.

While eating and waiting for the show to start some of the performers dropped into the room for everyone to take photos with - the frickin' tall Gaston, Two Silly Girls (Ms Look and Ms Go - we have no idea where Ms Stop was), and villagers whom we could only identify as 5 O'Clock Shadow, Barmaid and Baldy. Chief got Gaston's autograph, but we were both a bit shy to ask the rest as we didn't quite know who they were (their characters not easy to locate in the programme, and 5 O'Clock Shadow and Baldy played two roles, we noticed).

We've already read one disappointed review (WARNING unsafe picture that can scar childhood memories!) about the musical so we know that the characterization for Beast wasn't gonna be up to standard. Cannot fight the animated movie. Gotta learn one thing about musicals - they tend to veer a bit from the story they were adapted from. So had to keep an open mind.

Beauty And The Beast kept very close to the animated movie! There were scenes that kept replaying in our head as we were watching the musical - Belle singing to the lamb about her favourite part in the book as the lamb chews on the corner of the page, Chip telling Mrs Potts that there's a girl in the castle, Belle in the West Wing...

Storywise, very little variations. There are new songs, old songs have been extended, and we can say that we resisted temptations to sing along. Among the new songs, we find the Beast's song to be very nice (although we can't remember too much of it now, aiks). Gaston's song where he hints to Belle that he intends to make her his wife is somehow familiar, we've no idea if we had heard it somewhere before. However, Gaston's voice wasn't strong during The Mob Song, his voice isn't deep enough nor able to be loud enough if he went deep.

Look there he goes, isn't he dreamy?

We also liked how they expanded on the characters and the story - there's a bit more backstory for Madame le Grande Bouche, the enchantress' spell can be seen to continually evolve ("There's something on your back!"), even a cheesy song about the asylum owner Monsieur D'Arque being evil.

There was also more life in the characters, for better or worse. Lumiere, especially was very entertaining and naughty; LeFou was also clownishly comedic - he has a lot of choreography to remember, from stumbling at one point and being knocked about by Gaston at another; Gaston rather campy in a costume that made him look oddly out of proportion; the Beast a childish bully rather than an arrogant bad-tempered aristocrat. We only wished that we didn't keep thinking of Belle as Dorothy from the Wizard Of Oz. :S

Little town, full of little people.

We were considered rather fortunate that there weren't any technical faults during our show, and the only thing that has bugged us was that the Broadway Cast Recording CD sold out before the show started. SOLD OUT. So we're left empty-handed with no souvenirs. Nevermind, somehow or other we'll get our hands on the CD, just not now...

Great show. Great weekend. Lots of love to our Chief for making this happen.