(ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT/05)

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Eduardo Molina y Vedia

MEXICO CITY, Jan 7 1997 (IPS) - The staging of a local verion of ‘Beauty and the Beast’ in Mexico marks the first step in a concerted attempt by celebrated U.S. producers to introduce their theatre into Latin America.

After the season is over in Mexico, the show will go on tour to Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Colombia. In all of those countries, local actors will take up the roles, under the supervision of the Disney company.

Presenting genuine national theatre in Mexico and Latin America is an almost heroic task. Production costs are high and the falling spending power of local currencies limit the size of audiences.

‘Beauty and the Beast’ will be backed by 10 million dollars of investments. This has guaranteed the participation of 160 of the best Mexican actors, musicians and technicians.

In addition to staging Beauty and the Best, the producers will set up theatres and a school for music-hall professionals capable of maintaining a permanent group of plays. In the process they will take advantage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) which promotes commercial links between Mexico, the United States and Canada.

Effective since Jan. 1, 1994, NAFTA is mainly known as a trade arrangement, but it facilitates exchanges of all types, including cultural, and particularly those which are “profitable”.

Some in the theatre world here say the planned Disney tour is another example of unfair competition between Mexico and its more powerful northern neighbour.

“Also in this field of unequal socio-economic development between the NAFTA members there could be damage done, when local forms of culture and entertainment are made to compete with foreign ones under very different conditions,” theatre critic Ana Bianco said.

She told IPS that even if the public attracted to the Disney shows was different from the average local theatre aficionado, there would still be competition for the younger generations who have little experience with theatre.

The staging of ‘The Beauty and the Beast’ will use the most advanced technology, and will be played to a potential audience of television addicts bombarded with mass publicity campaigns. Ticket prices will be five times higher than for other theatrical presentations.

Federico Gonzalez Compean, director of the Events Centre Operating company (OCESA), leading a joint project with the Argentine Daniel Grimbank Rock and Pop company, jokingly said he would “take away the passports of anyone who goes to Broadway (the famous centre of theatre in New York) to see musicals.”

He said the new theatre school will develop Mexican talent. “In Mexico and all of Latin America, there is a public that wants to see musicals and commercial theatres,” Gonzalez Compean said.

Once ‘Beauty and the Beast’ was underway they would start to work on the next presentation “and we could attract new people to recover the public who have in some ways deserted the theatre.”

The OCESA director said he wants to help “university theatre” and “experimental theatre” which was suffering from a lack of audiences due to the limited number of producers and inadequate management.

“If we manage to overcome the fear held by the members of experimental theatre culture and bring them round to a slightly more commercial vision, with respect and a relation of mutual need, this collaboration could work very well,” he added.

OCESA includes the transnational Inter American Entertainment Group Corporation, which plans to cover the entire continent with support from Disney.

‘Beauty and the Beast’ will be presented with almost identical elements as those included in performances in New York, Los Angeles, Melbourne, London, Vienna, Tokyo and other leading cities.

The work is based on a design by the musician Alan Menken and the director Robert Jess Roth, with a libretto by Linda Woolverton, scenery by Stan Meyer and the choreography of Matt West.

Menken also wrote the Disney versions of ‘The Little Mermaid’, ‘Aladdin’, ‘The Hunchback of Notredame’ and ‘Pocahontas’. He has won eight Oscars for music in four Disney feature-length cartoons.

There will be 20 live musicians at each performance and 140 technicians and actors who have been carefully selected by the Disney team in extended auditions over the last few months.

The extravang wardrobe is being made in Milan, New York and Mexico, with fully automated stage background designed in the United States and a sound system with a 40-channel console worth more than 150,000 dollars.

OCESA and Rock and Pop have been given the rights on conditions similar to a Disney franchise, with the latter reserving the right to supervise and authorise all the details in order to assure the highest possible level of presentation.