South View Middle School’s adaptation of the musical based on the Disney movie “The Beauty and the Beast” was by all accounts charming, well performed, and enchanting. Its greatest quality, perhaps, isn’t the singing or dancing. It is how the cast of 6th through 9th graders were able to so competently encompass all the hyper-capitalist, pro-free market, and violently anti-communist themes addressed in the original fable.
From the very opening of the musical, the anti-socialist message is clear almost to the point of being heavy handed. It opens with a character, known only as “The Young Prince” and later “The Beast” (played to perfection by Jonah Calvo and Xander Idrogo-Lam) being assailed by a poor, elderly, obviously communist woman asking him for some hospitality, or, more properly, a handout. The Young Prince, being a wise economist, obviously refuses the demands of this lazy beggar, who in turn transforms him into a terrifying beast. This transformation is a very obvious but nevertheless apt metaphor for the transformation of successful, legitimate businessmen into monsters by the public eye.
The play then shifts in time and place to a small, presumably socialist french village, where the main character, Belle, and her father are persecuted intellectuals and entreprenuers who are not allowed to advance to their rightful role in society by their ignorant proletariat neighbors. Through a series of events, Belle finds herself trapped in the castle in which The Beast is being kept. The castle itself is a metaphor for the means by which the rightfully wealthy are sometimes forced to seclude themselves from the general public, and the beast’s servants, strange animated objects like teacups and cupboards, are metaphors for the middle class who are all too often represented by what they own rather than who they truly are.
Once Belle and The Beast have fallen in love, the villagers attempt a revolution against the assailed Prince and his friends. Through murder of the revolution’s leader, The beast finally regains his human form, freed from the anger of the lowest classes after slaying their leader. He then goes on to marry Belle and the two live happily ever after.
Some may say that directors Erica Gardener and Jim Hawthorne didn’t go far enough with the capitalist themes, especially when compared to Walt Disney’s hyper-capitalist original animated film. But the keen viewer will see that the musical goes to lengths to make their work even more controversial than the movie. For example, the enlargement of the role of LeFou, a caricature of the ignorant, fat communist, was a bold move by those crafting the production.
All in all, I think audiences will be deeply influenced by this bittersweet love letter to the free market disguised almost seamlessly as a musical. I for one left the theater ready to physically attack the socialist and communist factions operating within the Edina Public School system at this very moment.
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