Staging a Comeback: Broadway, Hollywood, and the Disney Renaissance

By Peter C. Kunze

In the early 1980s, Walt Disney Productions was struggling, largely bolstered by the success of its theme parks. Within fifteen years, however, it had become one of the most powerful entertainment conglomerates in the world. Staging a Comeback: Broadway, Hollywood, and the Disney Renaissance argues that far from an executive feat, this impressive turnaround was accomplished in no small part by the storytellers recruited during this period. Drawing from archival research, interviews, and textual analysis, Peter C. Kunze examines how the hiring of theatrically trained talent into managerial and production positions reorganized the lagging animation division and revitalized its output. By Aladdin, it was clear that animation—not live action—was the center of a veritable “renaissance” at Disney, and the animated musicals driving this revival laid the groundwork for the company’s growth into Broadway theatrical production. The Disney Renaissance not only reinvigorated the Walt Disney Company but both reflects and influenced changes in Broadway and Hollywood more broadly.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Sep 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9781978827837

Peter C. Kunze

Peter C. Kunze is visiting assistant professor of communication at Tulane University. He is editor or coeditor of multiple publications, including The Films of Wes Anderson: Critical Essays on an Indiewood Icon; American-Australian Cinema: Transnational Connections; Conversations with Maurice Sendak; and Taking a Stand: Contemporary US Stand-Up Comedians as Public Intellectuals, the latter two published by University Press of Mississippi.

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Cover: Staging a Comeback, Broadway, Hollywood, and the Disney Renaissance by Peter C. Kunze

Staging a Comeback

Staging a Comeback

Broadway, Hollywood, and the Disney Renaissance

PETER C. KUNZE

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW BRUNSWICK, CAMDEN, AND NEWARK, NEW JERSEY

LONDON AND OXFORD

Rutgers University Press is a department of Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, one of the leading public research universities in the nation. By publishing worldwide, it furthers the University’s mission of dedication to excellence in teaching, scholarship, research, and clinical care.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Kunze, Peter C. (Peter Christopher), author.

Title: Staging a comeback : Broadway, Hollywood, and the Disney renaissance / Peter C. Kunze.

Description: New Brunswick : Rutgers University Press, [2023] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022060835 | ISBN 9781978827813 (paperback) | ISBN 9781978827820 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781978827837 (epub) | ISBN 9781978827844 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Musical films—United States—History and criticism. | Walt Disney Company. | Disney Theatrical Productions. | Animated films—United States—History and criticism. | Musicals—United States—History and criticism. | Musical theater—United States—History—20th century. | Stage adaptations—United States

Classification: LCC PN1995.9.M86 K86 2023 | DDC 384/.806579493—dc23/eng/20230522

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022060835

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2023 by Peter C. Kunze

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

References to internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Rutgers University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

rutgersuniversitypress.org

For Mom and Dad

Thank you for letting me burst out into song.

Contents

Introduction

1 Just Waiting for the Prince to Arrive: Broadway and Hollywood before the Disney Renaissance, 1982

2 Sort of Like the Sopranos Took Over the Studio: Regime Change at Disney, 1983–1986

3 Make the Audience Fall in Love with Ariel: Howard Ashman and Alan Menken, The Little Mermaid, and Disney, 1987–1989

4 A Celebration of Certain Sensibilities: Howard Ashman and Alan Menken, Beauty and the Beast, and Disney, 1990–1991

5 Like the Old-Fashioned Musicals Did: Robert Jess Roth, Beauty and the Beast, and Disney, 1992–1994

6 I Don’t Do Cute: Julie Taymor, The Lion King, and Disney, 1994–1998

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Staging a Comeback

Introduction

On February 3, 2020, Lin-Manuel Miranda tweeted a major announcement: the Walt Disney Company had acquired the worldwide distribution rights for the live capture of Hamilton in one of the costliest deals in Hollywood history. Disney’s interest in Hamilton should come as no surprise to observers. The live capture would provide potentially sizable revenues during its initial theatrical run and subsequent release on the company’s newly launched streaming service, Disney+. Furthermore, no media company has invested—and influenced—Broadway theatre more in recent decades than Disney has.¹ In 1981, Walt Disney Productions partnered with established stage producers Nelle Nugent and Elizabeth I. McCann, in the hopes that the theatrical workshops it was bankrolling might be developed into film projects. Walt Disney Theatrical Productions (now part of Disney Theatrical Group), the company’s theatrical producing unit, has staged full-scale Broadway shows since 1994, mostly based on Disney’s animated properties, including Beauty and the Beast (Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise, 1991), Aladdin (John Musker and Ron Clements, 1992), The Lion King (Rob Minkoff and Roger Allers, 1994), and Frozen (Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee, 2013). Even Miranda himself has worked for Disney, composing music and lyrics for Moana (John Musker and Ron Clements, 2016) and then starring in Mary Poppins Returns (Rob Marshall, 2018). With The Lion King on Broadway as well as the High School Musical and Frozen franchises, Disney remains a powerful champion of the Broadway musical on stages, television sets, and film screens around the world. Yet this interest is far from a side project for the company. In fact, musicals helped to fuel Disney’s renaissance, bolster its diminished reputation, and reestablish its cultural influence both domestically and globally.

After years of poor creative decisions and decreased media production in the wake of its namesake’s 1966 death, Walt Disney Productions desperately needed a renaissance. In the early 1980s, the studio produced a limited number of feature films and television programs. Indeed, the theme parks proved to be the company’s major source of revenue during this period, especially after feature animation nearly ground to a halt following the dramatic 1979 exit of Don Bluth and a team of animators over leadership and quality concerns. Ron Miller, Walt’s son-in-law and the company’s president, publicly lamented the restrictions imposed on him by the company’s family-friendly brand, but Disney’s board, especially chairman and CEO Card Walker, insisted on maintaining the company’s reputation for offense-free entertainment: I know the marketplace is changing, but that doesn’t mean we have to provide things we don’t approve of.² In 1984, amid threats of a hostile takeover, Roy Disney and fellow board member Stanley Gold launched an effort to remove Miller and bring in new executive management: Michael Eisner from Paramount and Frank Wells from Warner Bros. Along with Jeffrey Katzenberg, Eisner’s former right-hand man at Paramount, the men focused on what they knew best—live-action feature production, maintaining feature animation only at the insistence of Roy Disney. Katzenberg, in particular, insisted upon tight control over film production—especially film budgets—often favoring modestly priced comedies with affordable stars and directors who complied with Katzenberg’s close oversight. What followed was an impressive decade of prosperity, including the flourishing of Touchstone Pictures, the establishment of Touchstone Television and Hollywood Pictures, and the acquisition of Miramax. In a period characterized by mergers, acquisitions, and hostile takeovers, Disney protected itself by focusing on fiscal conservatism, internal development, and strong, tight storytelling.

But while live-action filmmaking may have been what initially propelled the company forward, it was the rejuvenation of the animation division that ultimately energized contemporary Disney. The company’s animated efforts since Walt Disney’s death, including Robin Hood (Wolfgang Reitherman, 1973) and Pete’s Dragon (Don Chaffey, 1977), had often faced a mixed reception due to what film critics sometimes saw as poor production values and weak storylines. But with the 1984 arrival of Disney’s new executive team came a revised approach to feature animation production partly brought on by the hiring of talent from the theatre, including lyricist Howard Ashman and composer Alan Menken as well as managers and executives Maureen Donley, Kathleen Gavin, Peter Schneider, and Thomas Schumacher. Today, the Ashman-Menken musicals stand as highlights of this period that established Disney as a major film studio and initiated the company’s transformation into a diversified entertainment conglomerate with global reach and influence. Miranda himself admits in the press release accompanying the 2020 Disney/Hamilton deal, I fell in love with musical theatre storytelling growing up with the legendary Howard Ashman–Alan Menken Disney collaborations.³ This sentiment resonates with many contemporary musical theatre composers, including Benj Pasek, the lyricist for the stage musical Dear Evan Hansen and the film musical The Greatest Showman (Michael Gracey, 2017), who states, "It was our gateway drug for everything. The first movie that I ever saw in a theater was The Little Mermaid. A big part of why [musicals] are alive and well right now is because an entire generation grew up with their first stories being musicals and not even knowing that they were consuming musical theater."⁴

Howard Ashman and Alan Menken cowrote songs for only three Disney films: The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin.⁵ Despite this limited output, the impact of these movies in generating revenue for Disney and enriching its brand remains undeniable. The trio reignited Disney’s interest in the animated musical and in films about and for girls, in particular, which continues to this day with the recent success of the Frozen franchise. Mermaid was Disney’s first princess fairy tale in thirty years, helping to reassert Disney’s dominance in feature animation and relaunch the Disney princess films, which remain one of the world’s most profitable media franchises.⁶ Beauty catalyzed Disney’s foray into theatrical production not only on Broadway but through professional sit-down and touring productions as well as licensed amateur, school, and regional productions. By the release of Aladdin, Disney’s investment in consumer products had expanded to the point that the division offered over four thousand Aladdin-related merchandise items.⁷ Based on its success, filmed entertainment surpassed the theme parks as the company’s profit center in 1993 for the first time in years. Collectively, these films reoriented the Disney Renaissance away from the live-action efforts of Touchstone and toward the previously moribund animation division. While historians too often treat Mermaid as the turning point, it more accurately represents a significant moment within a period of artistic development at Disney Animation, arguably beginning with The Great Mouse Detective (John Musker, Ron Clements, Dave Michener, and Burny Mattinson 1986), continuing through Who Framed Roger Rabbit (Robert Zemeckis, 1988), and peaking with the release of The Lion King. Subsequent animated releases achieved critical and commercial success, but none of them matched its box office performance and cultural impact.

Figure 1. Lyricist Howard Ashman, orchestrator Danny Troob, and composer Alan Menken supervise a recording session for Beauty and the Beast (1991). Credit: Author’s screenshot.

The Renaissance also reaffirmed the company as a leader in media franchising as it strategically exploited its intellectual property across its divisions with theme park attractions, consumer products, films, television series and specials, and, of course, theatrical entertainment. In a period of considerable corporate growth, Disney avoided being acquired by becoming a global entertainment conglomerate in its own right.⁸ This period marks the resurgence and expansions of business practices and storytelling strategies that inform much of contemporary media production, including the seeming omnipresence of remakes and reboots, franchise storytelling, and the tentpole mentality.

The animated features that drove the second phase of the Disney Renaissance resulted from a coordinated effort across a well-staffed creative team—most trained in animation, some in feature film production, others in theatrical production. But all of them were committed to a tradition of Disney animation many critics and audiences alike felt had lost its luster in recent years. As Charlie Fink, former head of story, observed in 2022, All of us at the time did not think what we were doing had historic importance, which was part of the reasons the movies were so good. It was that they were made out of humility and gratitude and respect.⁹ Perhaps the most recognizable figures in that group were Ashman and Menken, who underscore the significant impact of theatrical talent at Disney during a crucial period of transition. While the spectacular British megamusical reigned on Broadway, Ashman and Menken—who never had a show together premiere on Broadway during Ashman’s lifetime—brought the Golden Age–era integrated musicals of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II (Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific) and Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe (Brigadoon, My Fair Lady, Camelot) to the Walt Disney Company (its name since 1986, previously Walt Disney Productions). As this book argues, their contributions provided the desperately needed expertise to revive Disney animation through musical theatre storytelling. However, despite Ashman and Menken’s pivotal role in the corporation’s rebirth, most popular and scholarly accounts have focused on and credited the executive leadership of Michael Eisner, Frank Wells, and Jeffrey Katzenberg.¹⁰ This narrative sidelines and ignores the creative contributions of such people as Ashman and Menken—micro-level input that media industry scholars have long argued is vital to understanding the macro processes of corporate entertainment empires. Staging a Comeback: Broadway, Hollywood, and the Disney Renaissance historicizes Disney’s hiring of musical theatre talent for the animation division as well as its adaptation of its animated musical properties for the stage. And it does so by reasserting the importance of producers, directors, screenwriters, songwriters, and animators who powered the Disney Renaissance, including several women and gay men who were crucial to saving an institution of American entertainment but often have been sidelined in subsequent accounts of the company’s revitalization. Their collected, collaborative labor helped to sustain what has become one of the greatest second acts in the history of the U.S. entertainment industries.

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For almost three decades now, the notion of a Disney Renaissance has circulated widely among fan communities, industry insiders, and even Disney itself. Disney fans and scholars alike generally demarcate the renaissance as the period from The Little Mermaid (1989) to Tarzan (Chris Buck and Kevin Lima, 1999), specifically grounding it in the animation division. An early application of renaissance appears in CEO Michael Eisner’s 1986 letter to shareholders in which he calls his tenure’s initial successes an early indication of an enormous reawakening at Disney, a renaissance sure to occur when talented new people blend their fresh ideas with our company’s traditional values.¹¹ Touchstone Films, a production company aimed at making adult-targeted entertainment that Walt Disney Productions launched just months before the new executive team’s arrival, became the cornerstone of the new Disney, producing low-budget hit comedies Splash (Ron Howard, 1984), Ruthless People (Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker, 1986), and Down and Out in Beverly Hills (Paul Mazursky, 1986) and, through the related television unit, The Golden Girls. The press began referring to a Disney renaissance as early as 1988, when USA Today used the term in an article reporting Eisner’s impressive compensation.¹² By the early 1990s, however, it was clear that the renaissance—both commercially and creatively—was based not in live-action filmmaking but in animated feature production. James B. Stewart asserts that Disney knew an animation renaissance was underway soon after the songwriting team of Alan Menken and Howard Ashman won two Oscars for The Little Mermaid in March 1990.¹³ In 1991, Eisner informed stockholders that Beauty and the Beast had salvaged a rather disappointing year for the company in other divisions,¹⁴ and the cover of the 1992 annual report announced The New Golden Age of Animation and featured characters from the three Ashman-Menken musicals. Indeed, the Disney Renaissance was part of a larger renaissance in animation across film, television, even video games in the 1980s and 1990s, including Saturday morning cartoons, syndicated television animation, prime-time animation such as The Simpsons, and the films of Don Bluth.

The Disney Renaissance discourse deserves closer scrutiny for various reasons. First, it continues Disney’s long tradition of crafting its own history—or, perhaps more appropriately, hagiography.¹⁵ Beginning in 1954, the Disneyland television series allowed Walt Disney to manipulate his studio’s history so as to brand and market Walt Disney Productions’ creative efforts, specifically the films and theme park.¹⁶ Disney’s theatrical reissue of its animated features every seven years propagated the notion that its films were time-honored classics. By restricting access to its animated films in the Disney Vault and releasing them periodically on home video for a limited time only, the company actively fostered a legacy aura around these movies throughout the 1980s and 1990s. To this day, Disney uses its theme park attractions, coffee-table books, feature films, and documentaries to promote a romanticized interpretation of its past and reinforce the Disney magic. Second, Janet Wasko observes that Disney histories often conceal the company’s operations in favor of glorifying its genius founder as well as its creative output.¹⁷ Media historians, therefore, must navigate the Disney-produced historical account while situating the company’s and its employees’ efforts within larger corporate and industrial contexts.

Equally important, the Disney Renaissance discourse rhetorically positions the Michael Eisner era as one of rebirth while simultaneously casting the years after Walt’s death as a veritable Dark Ages, both financially and creatively. To be fair, the managerial team of Michael Eisner, Frank Wells, and Jeffrey Katzenberg obviously were integral to the company’s impressive comeback. But Walker’s and Miller’s administrations made decisions that would immensely benefit their successors, including the establishment of EPCOT, the Disney Channel, and Touchstone Films. Team Disney built on these savvy investments by producing live-action comedies for adults that jump-started the company’s domestic box office performance, while the blockbuster success of the animated films in the early 1990s reestablished the company as the leader in family entertainment. John Taylor, an early chronicler of company’s tumultuous recovery, admitted the executives’ incredible feat: In a matter of months, Eisner and Wells had transformed Walt Disney Productions almost beyond recognition.¹⁸ In Prince of the Magic Kingdom: Michael Eisner and the Re-making of Disney (1991), Joe Flower proclaimed, But whatever its future, Disney’s rescue and turnaround, with Michael Eisner as its prince, is one of the great business bedtime stories.¹⁹ Media scholars have mostly followed suit in acknowledging the executive leadership’s transformational impact.²⁰ This narrative, whether written by Disney itself or by others, is tidy, self-aggrandizing—and incomplete.

Emphasizing the role of the executives in a Disney Renaissance ultimately centered in the animation division, journalists and scholars have omitted the contributions of creative personnel—most obviously the animators—in rehabilitating Walt Disney Company. Of course, those operating in the highest offices at Disney made crucial business decisions and shaped that major renewal. But it was nurtured to no small degree by the creative and managerial laborers working across the company in above- and below-the-line positions.

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Staging a Comeback argues that theatre, often perceived as a minor part of Disney’s corporate operations, nevertheless played an integral part in the animation renaissance during the late 1980s and early 1990s and therefore the company’s rise to its current prominence.²¹ Even though Disney executives attempted to turn the company around through live-action filmmaking, they realized by 1992 that animation was generating far greater revenues at the box office, on home video, and through merchandising and licensing, laying the foundation for highly profitable entertainment franchises that continue to be a major profit center for the company. This book follows earlier scholarly histories of media convergence through deeper industrial contextualizing to note relations among and between the various sites of information and entertainment.²² In so doing, this cross-media history, in the words of Mark Williams, will bring into relief significant but often overlooked visions and determinants of media history.²³ In this instance, the supposedly unmediated theatre played an energizing role in revitalizing the lagging media company.

Scholars have framed convergence from a range of critical vantages, including media, economic, technological, and industrial. But quite often, convergence is motivated and sustained by the labor of individuals moving between industries. Individual agency was central to early understandings of media convergence, such as Henry Jenkins’s discussions of fandom in Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, but the movement of media laborers across or among industries also facilitates the aforementioned forms of convergence that scholars study more readily. Cari McDonnell argues that the film musical was developed in large part by individuals, both creative and executive, based in or contributing to other media industries. Therefore, to historicize the genre in an industrial context, scholars must acknowledge that film musicals are situated within a web of relationships among film, radio, recording, and music publishing.²⁴ Furthermore, as David Savran explains, the stage musical as a popular entertainment remains first and foremost a product of the marketplace in which the aesthetic is always—and unpredictably—overdetermined by economic relations and interests.²⁵ The same thinking can be applied to the musical’s filmic iteration. To understand the Disney Renaissance and the animated musicals that have come to define it, this book traces the creative significance of theatre on their production. Furthermore, it also historicizes the influence of the Hollywood film industry on the contemporary stage musical and Broadway as an entertainment industry.

If we follow Michele Hilmes in her assertion that convergence is the very hallmark of modern media,²⁶ then such an approach to writing history is essential to understanding the revitalization of Disney during this period of diversification and conglomeration. Following Hilmes’s lead, Jennifer Holt observes that media analysis must view film, cable, and broadcast history as integral pieces of the same puzzle.²⁷ As entertainment conglomerates increase their investments and holdings in live entertainment, we must broaden our understanding of media culture to include theme parks, concerts, sports, and, of course, the commercial theatre. Media scholars might perceive theatre as unmediated by definition, but Philip Auslander demonstrates that live performance is, in fact, heavily mediatized.²⁸ For example, when someone goes to see The Lion King on Broadway, that experience is likely mediated by their knowledge of the film version. Having an awareness of the show’s narrative trajectory becomes particularly useful for comprehending the more experimental aspects of Julie Taymor’s innovative production. Contemporary uses of microphones, speakers, and video projections further mediate live theatrical entertainment. Relatedly, Jonathan Burston explores how production practices from Hollywood have contributed to cinematizing the theatre,²⁹ while work by Greg Giesekam and David Saltz, among others, examines the role of film, video, and new media in theatre and performance culture.³⁰ Partly inspired by digital culture, theatre and performance studies has reframed and theorized theatre as a medium in its own right.³¹

The defining distinction between film and theatre as media, which inspired foundational theoretical work by Vsevolod Pudovkin, Erwin Panofsky, André Bazin, and Susan Sontag, has become increasingly tenuous in an age of new media technologies and vertical integration.³² Evidence suggests that film and theatre have informed how each other commercially operates since the very beginnings of the film industry,³³ as recent historical work has explored the narrative and industrial intersections of film and theatre.³⁴ This media and industrial convergence continues in innovative and boundary-defying ways. Yet the history of Broadway and Hollywood, or the entertainment industries more generally, has been largely neglected since Robert McLaughlin’s 1974 economic history.³⁵ (The few exceptions include work by Jonathan Burston and Laura E. Felschow on Broadway and Hollywood as well as by Kelly Kessler on Broadway and U.S. television, in particular.)³⁶ The mentioned research provides productive inroads for future scholarship, and the complex exchange between Hollywood and Broadway warrants critical attention to uncover one of the most important yet still underexamined interindustrial relationships in contemporary U.S. entertainment. This book traces one of the most important historical shifts for both film and theatre and Hollywood and Broadway: the exchange of talent and narrative strategies from theatre to Disney filmmaking and later from Disney filmmaking back to theatre. By contextualizing this relationship in the larger history of Broadway and Hollywood, I build upon received accounts of Disney’s relationship with Broadway while also charting significant artistic and economic developments in both industries that continue to shape twenty-first-century media culture. Understanding the Disney Renaissance in an interindustrial context also reveals a period of critical change for both Hollywood and Broadway, as both industries mobilized digital technologies, franchise storytelling, and a tentpole mentality to develop their current production practices and business operations.

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Writing this form of industrial history requires navigating around various roadblocks. Like many Hollywood studios, Disney closely guards its corporate archives.³⁷ Scholars must either cooperate with Disney’s strict guidelines or employ alternative approaches to understand its business operations. Staging a Comeback utilizes a range of methods and materials to narrate Disney’s revitalization in the 1980s and 1990s and the company’s developing role in both Hollywood and Broadway during this transitional period. This book is one of the first to make extensive use of the papers of lyricist and producer Howard Ashman, animator Don Bluth, journalist Bob Thomas, and screenwriter Linda Woolverton—all housed in publicly accessible archives beyond Disney’s control. This is further enriched by trade and press coverage as well as published interviews with Disney personnel, which provide necessary perspectives on corporate decisions and creative labor. Discourse analysis on Disney-created materials, including press kits and annual shareholder reports, reveals a wealth of production and industrial information to understand how film and theatre production unfolded, how the entertainment industries both endured and changed, and how Disney responded in turn. Finally, new interviews and correspondence with a range of film and theatre workers, many of whom were directly involved, helps to address perceived gaps in published and archival materials. What hopefully becomes evident is a more complete account of the Disney Renaissance that also illustrates the complexity of Broadway and Hollywood’s relationship in recent decades.

Disney’s initial entrance, current position, and enduring effect on Broadway remain significant for the commercial theatre industry both domestically and globally, yet the extant discussions often reveal disciplinary limitations. Musical theatre scholars, for instance, rarely have contextualized Disney within a larger series of corporatized theatrical efforts at the time, led by Cameron Mackintosh, Andrew Lloyd Webber and the Really Useful Group, and Garth Drabinsky and Livent.³⁸ Media studies scholars who examine Disney’s theatrical endeavors in their discussion and critique of the conglomerate’s business activities often do not account for other media companies’ efforts to move into the commercial theatre market before or during the same period, including Warner Theatre Productions, Universal Pictures (later Universal Theatrical Group), and, more recently, Sony (as Columbia Live Stage) and Annapurna Theatre. Warner’s and Universal’s efforts in the 1970s and 1980s, for example, were to develop properties for film production. In the 1990s, Disney inverted that formula by taking its film properties to the stage. Studying the Walt Disney Company through its film and theatre productions requires scholars to resist the ongoing critical tendency to treat Disney as exceptional. Disney succeeds and Disney fails, but it is always does so in relation to industry trends, which it alternately inspires, refines, or rejects.

Entertainment conglomerates’ renewed interest in theatrical production in recent years stems not only from Disney’s achievements on Broadway but from its success producing national and international tours as well as licensing regional, community, and school productions.³⁹ In studying Disney or media companies more generally, scholars must pay greater attention to the vital role of site-specific, live, and supposedly unmediated experiences in the corporate endeavors of the major entertainment conglomerates. Site-specific entertainment obviously has been important for Disney at least as far back as the opening of its first theme park in 1955. As Eric Smoodin reminds us, the construction of Disneyland did not simply send [Walt Disney’s] products—the films, for instance—out to the public. Instead, the public came to him, to one location.⁴⁰ These initiatives increase in a media age largely dependent on developing and maintaining entertainment franchises. And live performance—especially what Donald Crafton calls performative branding⁴¹—has become vital for entertainment conglomerates as they exploit these media franchises to their fullest potential. In so doing, such performances further the cultural afterlife of these properties while maximizing its ability to generate revenues in perpetuity. Perhaps more problematically, these licensed productions also introduce branded content into traditionally noncommercial spaces, such as community centers and schools. Theatre remains a vital extension of the franchising logics that define and dominate modern media production. A close study of the relationship between Disney and Broadway underscores the value of a cross-disciplinary, multimethod approach to convergence media history that aims to trace the origins and map the influence of this often underestimated facet of contemporary U.S. media culture.

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As a historical study of the Disney Renaissance, Staging a Comeback highlights the network of stakeholders and decision makers, both executive and creative, who reinvigorated Disney during this important moment in its corporate history and in film history. The critical and commercial successes of media cultural products are rarely the result of visionary management or media creators alone but instead arise from the nuanced interactions among individuals across varying levels of authorial control—and even their audiences, real or imagined.

Studying feature animation foregrounds the complexities of film authorship that persist across all filmmaking. Each of Disney’s animated features implicitly demonstrates the storytelling and stylistic contributions of animators, songwriters, performers, technicians, and executives, even though their individual input is subtly erased to brand the final product as a Disney film. As Peter Schneider observed in 2019 about his time at Disney, It’s not a collective, but a collaboration—a collective means it’s equal democratically but in a collaboration [it] is about how do you find the best idea for any particular moment and that is also a process of rejecting and to some extent allowing all the bad ideas to be expressed.⁴² For instance, one of the most celebrated moments in Disney animation is the Be Our Guest sequence in Beauty and the Beast. In early drafts of the screenplay, the Enchanted Objects were supposed to sing this song to Maurice, Belle’s father, upon his arrival at the castle. It was animator Bruce Woodside who suggested that it should be sung to Belle instead.⁴³ This casual suggestion, of course, reassigned the function of the song within the narrative and reshaped the final sequence. It also serves as a reminder that what we see on screen, whether live action or animated, is far more than the creative efforts of the screenwriter, the performer, and the director but rather represents a network of media workers with varying levels of influence and input. Film authorship, especially commercial film authorship, is not singular but plural—and networked, with varied and fluctuating levels of authority and control. As John Thornton Caldwell asserts, Negotiated and collective authorship is an almost unavoidable and determining reality in contemporary film/television.⁴⁴ Reorganization in Disney animation in this time shifted authorial control away from the animators toward a complex network of contributors that also included theatrically trained talent serving as producers, composers, lyricists, and screenwriters.

Ashman was one of many talents that Disney placed under contract in the mid-1980s, when the company actively sought out inexpensive creative talent, often from theatre and television, but also established Hollywood directors and stars in a career slump. Years before Disney invaded the Great White Way with Beauty and the Beast in 1994, Disney hired theatrical talent—not just Ashman and Menken, but Maureen Donley, Kathleen Gavin, Pam Marsden, Peter Schneider, and Thomas Schumacher, all of whom took on managerial positions in the animation division. For his part, Schneider has admitted he restructured the division in a manner similar to repertory theatre: You have a group of actors, animators in this case, who are cast correctly, and you have a director. And they are required to act within the frameworks of each of these pictures and that is very much like a resident theater company.⁴⁵ As Gavin, whom Schneider worked with at Chicago’s St. Nicholas Theatre Company before he hired her as a manager for Disney animation, recounts, If I’m proudest of anything, it’s that we really gave people the opportunity to grow and the opportunity to do things they hadn’t done before.⁴⁶ This management style converged with the Disney approach to animation, later taught at the Walt Disney–cofounded California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), in which animators understood what they did as a form of performance in its own right, which Donald Crafton has called "embodied acting."⁴⁷ And Howard Ashman, along with his songwriting partner, Alan Menken, renewed Disney’s interest in the animated musical by applying the Broadway-honed