Beauty and the Beast may be a tale as old as time, but that hasn’t stopped artists from finding their own ways of telling the story of the shy, beautiful girl who falls in love with the ugly monster who is really a prince. Now, Lemieux Pilon 4D Art co-founders Michel Lemieux and Victor Pilon are delivering their own take. La Belle et la Bête, at the BAM Howard Gilman Opera House November 21 to 23, blends elements of the classic 18th-century fairy tale with 21st-century technology.
Those issues also extend to the third major character in the piece, called La Dame, a fairy who fell in love with the Prince and then put the spell on him when he rejected her. However, she has stuck around the castle to take care of him—and is not happy when La Belle shows up. “She wants to be the beauty in the house, even though she’s 60,” says Lemieux. “She still loves the prince for who he is inside. So, it becomes a triangle, but not in a conventional sense.”
What makes this version particularly unusual, however, is that only those three characters are played by onstage actors, while everyone else in the tale—including Belle’s sister—is embodied by projections with whom the stars interact. Indeed, while projection technology plays a major role in all aspects of this production, it is not the raison d’être.
“We do use technology, but we do it so we can more freely talk about human issues,” says Lemieux. “In watching theater, adults can be very critical. But when you create something magical, adults open themselves to this world of wonder. Even it’s just for the first 30 seconds, this little door opens in the mind—the door that was opened when they were children. And they immediately become less critical. And then we can talk to them in ways other than through their intellect. We can talk to their souls.”
As Pilon admits, doing a show in this fashion can be a great challenge to the actors onstage. “They don’t see the projections, so it takes a lot of time to integrate their work with the projections,” he says. “But it’s worth it, because we know you don’t touch people with just technology. You touch them with actors who believe in these projections.”
“Many of the scenes are like being in a painting,” says Lemieux. “Victor takes photographs from around the world—especially a lot of Romantic architecture—and they work their way into the projections. All of the technology is quite magical, to be sure. I say our show is like a jewel box, but it’s the actors who are the jewels.”
Since it premiered in Canada in 2010, the production has toured internationally and in the US. “It’s always exciting to us to see how different audiences react from place to place,” says Pilon. Still, Lemieux notes that most audiences share one common reaction. “A lot of people tell us they become so absorbed in the story that they feel like they’re in a dream and that they only wake up when they realize the show has ended.”
Brian Scott Lipton was editor-in-chief of TheaterMania.com and currently covers theater for IN New York, Where, Edgeonthenet.com, TDF Stages, and Cititour.com.
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