Continuing our impromptu series on Snow White musicals…did you know Disney had a stage musical in New York well over a decade before Beauty and the Beast was a hit in the nineties?
In the seventies, Radio City Music Hall was struggling due to a number of factors, including a population exodus from New York City (over a million people in that decade) and a fear of increased crime in the city. By 1978, the venue was in debt and on the verge of closing. Over the objections of the Rockefeller Center ownership, a public campaign by the Rockettes and others connected to RCMH led to it being added to the National Register of Historic Places. While that saved the physical venue, RCMH was still losing millions of dollars a year. A decision was made to pull programming in-house (instead of letting external producers control it) and to renovate the venue, leading to a month-long closure in 1979.
When RCMH reopened, one of the first productions was a stage musical version of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Costing a then-princely sum of $750,000, the musical expanded on the animated original, adding four songs by Oscar-winning composer Jay Blackton. The show was a success for RCMH; it ran a total of 106 performances, with two thirds of them coming in a second engagement after a brief tour allowed the Rockettes to take over the venue at Christmastime. Looking back, it’s a fascinating mixture of good and “wait, really?”. The casting, sets and costumes are all impressively faithful, with Mary Jo Salerno as a perfect Snow White in particular. But then there are the elements that you’d never see today, like the over-the-top acting (likely due to the size of the venue and that it was “for kids”) or how Snow White’s forest friends are portrayed by less than convincing full-body animal costumes. The most disturbing part, in my eyes, is that the Dwarfs are all portrayed with articulated face masks that allow them to talk and not much else. Hope you like Grumpy’s facial expression, because it’s not changing once during the show.
I do need to give one major content warning: the material added to flesh out the story prior to the start of the movie has aged…extremely poorly. The Evil Queen (no, really, that’s her name and I’m not sure she’s ever had another one) in this production is from a made-up Middle Eastern country, and as this Tumblr post eloquently puts it…
The Queen is said to come from “the exotic land of Shaitan,” which leads to the spectacle of her courtiers and ladies arriving in their pseudo-Middle Eastern garb to the strains of pseudo-Arab music. (Because there’s nothing problematic about making the Queen a Middle Eastern woman, from a country whose name means “demon” in Arabic, driven by jealousy of a Caucasian stepdaughter whose snow-white skin is emphasized in her very name. Nothing problematic at all. Argh!)
Maybe there’s a reason this musical hasn’t been performed since its RCMH production? I guess Disney had enough of that particular flavor of controversy after the Aladdin incident…
Interesting footnote: while the embedded video of the production was one of Disney’s earliest home video releases in 1981, the animated original wouldn’t see home video release until 1994. That means that, for over a decade, if you wanted to see Snow White this was one of the only ways you could do so. Despite that, the stage musical is now long out of print and hasn’t been commercially available in any form for decades, which is why I feel safe risking the wrath of The Mouse. If The Avocado gets sued out of existence by Mickey, I apologize in advance.
Have fun posting!
If you’d like to read more about the show, this New York Times article was one of my primary sources.