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Beauty and the Beast gets makeover on tour

Costume designer Ann Hould-Ward discusses the transformation on stage

Broadway Across Canada presents Disney's Beauty and the Beast, Feb. 3 to 8 at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre, 650 Hamilton St., Vancouver. Tickets start at $35, available at ticketmaster.ca or by calling 1-855-985-5000.

Before she could get to work on the 1994 Broadway debut of Disney's Beauty and the Beast, costume designer Ann Hould-Ward had to go antique shopping.

Tasked with outfitting a cast that consisted of several anthropomorphic household objects, she needed inspiration to reinvent the animated characters in a way that would work for live theatre.

"The norm for us is we're doing our research in historical clothing, but in this instance we were not only researching clothing, but we were researching furniture," says Hould-Ward, who has designed costumes for dozens of stage productions. "We spent over a year doing research into the period when the actual fairytale was written down for the first time."

The tale, first published in France in the mid-1700s, served as the basis for Walt Disney's 1991 animated feature film which tells the story of Belle, a young woman in a provincial town, and the Beast, who is actually a prince trapped under a spell cast by an enchantress. If the Beast can find love, despite his outward ugliness, the curse will be lifted and he will be transformed back into his human self.

Linda Woolverton adapted her movie screenplay for the musical, adding new scenes to flesh out the story for the stage. The score contains six songs from the film - including "Be Our Guest" and the eponymous ballad "Beauty and the Beast" - as well as one song cut from the film that has been restored for the musical and six new songs composed by Alan Menken with lyrics by Tim Rice.

During the Broadway show's lengthy two-year design and development period, Hould-Ward had the chance to travel to Anaheim, Calif. to meet with the animators who created the Disney characters. She also collected images and examples of 18th-century teapots, candlesticks and pendulum clocks to inspire her sketches of Mrs. Potts, Lumière and Cogsworth, respectively. The finished costumes represent a "melting together" of her historical research and the movie characters and won her a 1994 Tony Award for Best Costume Design.

In a departure from the film, the musical initially depicts the Beast's household servants as humans who are in the process of turning into objects. "In the musical Mrs. Potts is going 'Oh my goodness, lookit, I'm turning into a teapot. Oh look, my surface is getting harder.'" Though the characters never completely transform, their costumes act as "visual representation" of the inanimate objects, yet they are still flexible and light enough for the actors to move about comfortably.

"You have the parameters of what you want to create visually that's exciting and wonderful, but also knowing that it has to lie within the rules of the human body," Hould-Ward says.

The current touring production, which kicks off the Canadian leg of its journey Feb. 3 to 8 at Vancouver's Queen Elizabeth Theatre, uses a scaled-back collection of costumes to allow for more efficient travel.

"The entire creative team from the '94 production was able to come back together and to re-imagine the production," Hould-Ward says. "It was an opportunity to go back and look at the show and really do that kind of streamlining."

The first step in that process was to identify the most iconic costume pieces and leave them be. For Hould-Ward, Belle's blue peasant dress and yellow ball gown were non-negotiable.

"Every little girl in the world who knows that movie knows Belle's yellow dress, so that was really an important thing for me."

But the team was able to downsize in other areas. The villagers, for example, wear essentially the same outfits throughout the touring show, plus or minus accessories.

"It still has a lot of the jazz, a lot of the glitter, the sparkle," Hould-Ward says of the costumes. But the touring wardrobe can be packed into half a truck, allowing the production to visit smaller cities it has never been to before, such as Hould-Ward's hometown of Great Falls, Montana, where her niece watched the musical for the first time.

One of the most gratifying things about designing the costumes for Beauty and the Beast, Hould-Ward says, has been catching the show in different cities over the years and seeing young children delight in the spectacle she helped to create.

"During 'Be Our Guest', instead of looking forward toward the stage, I would turn around and look at all the parents and the kids in the audience and see their faces," she says. "It's a wonderful opportunity to get our children to understand the magic of what theatre can be."