Review: Kaunotar ja Hirviö
FROM GIRL TO WOMAN OVERNIGHT
Beauty and the Beast is an educational story about the fact that the right one is worth waiting for.
Young girls are said to have a premature desire to be women. Fairy tales have taught us this: throughout the ages, they have told of princes and princesses or Cinderellas getting each other, who barely know anything about a relationship other than that it is called love.
Beauty Bella isn’t ruined by too much experience either. But he is smart, reads books and of course he is old enough to be able to take care of his father’s finances. Even though her mother hasn’t been there to teach her what men are like, Bella understands that it’s not a good idea to go straight to the first one. Especially not for someone like the self-absorbed chauvinist Gaston, who preys on girls like forest game for a living. When it doesn’t sync, let it be.
Bella comes into contact with the Beast after offering to be his prisoner instead of her father. It’s a bit of a stretch that there won’t be a happy ending, even though everything seems to be going smoothly already at the beginning of the second half of the musical Beauty and the Beast . Gaston is determined to get a reluctant girl at all costs, and when he can’t, he’s ready to kill a rival suitor – but at least not Bella like Don Jose with his unfaithful Carmen.
The pattern of the story is that a witch posing as a beggar conjured up a toy and self-righteous prince into a monster when one rose offered by the old man was not enough to pay him for a place to sleep.
Euko’s magic is only broken if the monster falls in love with someone and they also show love in return. The timeline is that it has to happen before the last petal falls from the cut rose.
A musical is a very suitable theatrical form for telling such stories. The personal psychology is simple enough and there is enough suspense and twists in the plot to counterbalance it. On the other hand, screenwriter Linda Woolverton’s dramaturgical composition, especially in the early part, saws the gap between the castle and Bella’s home village in a comic book style, and some spectacular crowd scenes are irrelevant to the plot transport. The music of Alan Menken , the trusted composer of Disney’s feature animated films, is competent in itself, but frankly old-fashioned: the tune is from the youth of the grandmothers of Britneyspears fans of our time.
The Helsinki City Theatre is actually the only one of Finland’s large companies that has the resources to perform large-scale international musicals. The investment in the production has been enormous, and at least from the costumes (Sari Salmela) and set design (Katariina Kirjavainen) it can be concluded that the creators have had some room for manoeuvre of their own, even though these Disneys and the Webbers and MacIntoshi carefully monitor how the musicals under their supervision are rerun.
The work of Swedish director Hans Berndtsson and choreographer Gunilla Olsson Karlsson has also inspired the entire group of performers, even if it is a repeat of their previous performance in Stockholm. It is also good politics that the theatre has not recently attracted visitors to its productions based on the name alone: Marika Westerling , who plays Bella delightfully and sings with a natural voice, showed her skills already at the beginning of the decade as Marika in the Jyväskylä City Theatre’s West Side Story , and Kari Arffman, the director of the Kotka City Theatre, has been loaned out as the Monster.
Beauty and the Beast is so exciting at times – it lasts almost three hours – that there is no point in the auditorium with children under school age. An adult enjoys the performance with their eyes: Juha Westman’s lighting design is an essential part of the “choreography” of the dance scenes, among other things.
If such a foundation as love is true, Beauty and the Beast is not just nonsense. And its theme is ultimately the acceptance of difference, the sympathy of souls regardless of sight.