One final Beauty and the Beast before vaulting

It is a pleasure to be able to write a very good review, for a change, of our experience at a Starlight Theatre Broadway show. A good evening is our usual expectation, based on attending the Broadway shows since 1997. But Tuesday night’s presentation of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast was the first time this year that we have felt this way.

Most of our complaints have revolved around the new dining option that we have subscribed to. Instead of contracting with an outside restaurant, Starlight is providing dining through its own staff. That staff has not been properly attentive

But Tuesday night was different. We were greeted, drink orders taken, checked on, and the buffet was properly monitored and the items restocked. They could still break up the buffet a little more and have plates available at more stations, but overall it was a vast improvement.

From there we went to the show. I was told by a staff person that Tuesday nights show was the last one for Beauty and the Beast — not just the last night at Starlight, but the end of the tour, and the end of the show being put on.  It is being vaulted by the Disney company. Who knows how many years it will be before they pull it out of the vault again.

And it was well done for a final show. Most people come expecting to see what they saw in the movie, but a good stage show tells the story, not the movie, as this show did. You could see that from the way items were left in or taken out. And none of the actors delivered their lines by rote — the unique inflections in certain places really added meaning to the action.

As usual the “Be our Guest” number was a thrilling large production number. The steps were well executed, each person portraying the various knickknacks in splenderous motion. The second bit production number, “Human Again”, was also compelling, and worked much better in the stage show than the movie. One of the editing elements in the stage show was eliminating the annoying timeline with a specific number of years until the rose wilted. It had a tremendous impact on how the “Human Again” scene fit into the show.

So an “A” to the dining, and an “A+” to the show.