We might know the “tale as old as time,” but I know I’ve never been in it. Now, with the Adrienne Arsht Center’s latest show “Beauty and the Beast,” the audience will feel like they belong to the world of Belle and Beast, fit with talking tea pots, dancing candle sticks, all waiting for you to be their guest!
True as it can be, “Beauty and the Beast” is coming to the Adrienne Arsht Center.
Area Stage Company’s new immersive production of Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast” is, as the French would say, magnifique.
Presented in a transformed Carnival Studio Theater at Miami’s Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, the show is a two-year labor of love and creativity on the part of Giancarlo Rodaz, Area Stage’s associate artistic director. Working with numerous collaborators, the young director has achieved a larger-scale success on the order of his immensely popular immersive version of “Annie,” which the company presented in June of 2021, in the company’s smaller South Miami theater.
Since its 1991 debut as an Oscar-winning animated movie, Disney’s Beauty and the Beast spawned a 1994 Broadway musical that ran until 2007 (in 5,461 performances), toured the country, and played all over the world. The show has endured as an immensely popular title for regional, community, and school theater groups.
Now Beauty and the Beast is back, this time as an Area Stage Company production in the Carnival Studio Theater at Miami’s Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts. But the show, which opens on Friday, August 12, is not a typical version of the Disney hit.
Come with playwright Kenneth Lonergan and Area Stage Company as they travel back in time circa 1982 on a Margaret Mead-like archeological expedition to explore the sociological jungle of Manhattan as born-rich 20-somethings give birth to the Me Generation.
Watch pot-selling, coke-sniffing young adults adrift with angst, anxiety, loneliness and the unspoken fear at the buried knowledge that they have no idea who they are or what kind of future they will have – or, more importantly, that they want.
