But it was amazing.” Eisner looked past the decay and saw the remnants of the theater’s former glory: the Art Nouveau details, the faded friezes depicting scenes from Shakespeare, the remains of an Irish marble fireplace in the lounge. “It was dark, it was raining inside,” he said.
On his way to see his son play hockey in New Jersey one spring morning in 1993, he decided to take a look at the theater.
“I ignored her too,” Eisner said.īut he was intrigued. Disney, she suggested, should acquire it. She told Eisner about the New Amsterdam Theatre, a once grand but now decrepit space, right on 42nd Street. As chairwoman of the New 42nd Street, she was spearheading the revitalization of a key stretch of the iconic thoroughfare. Then, at a charity event, he found himself seated next to Marian Sulzberger Heiskell, of the New York Times family. “I’m the CEO of the company, so I’ll do it.”Įisner ignored Stern. But when Eisner proposed a stage version of Beauty and the Beast, nobody at Disney wanted to do it. Broadway, like the movies, had become a global business. The hundreds of millions of dollars Cats had made around the world impressed Eisner.
He ran into Andrew Lloyd Webber at an event in North Carolina and “began probing,” Lloyd Webber recalled. This is a hobby we can do without.”Īnd then Frank Rich, the influential New York Times critic and columnist, raved about Disney’s animated version of Beauty and the Beast, writing that the movie had “the best Broadway musical score of 1991.” Eisner began to reconsider. But when he was running Paramount Pictures in the early 1980s, the company had produced Tommy Tune’s My One and Only and, he would later say, it was “the biggest nightmare of my life.” Though the show was a hit, Eisner reflected, “it took more time than anything I was doing at Paramount. Growing up in New York City, he’d seen just about every Broadway musical from the time he was six until he went off to college. Michael Eisner, the chairman of the Walt Disney Company, had no interest in bringing the Magic Kingdom to Broadway.
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