That wasn't
the case with Peter Schneider, a 17-year employee--and briefly, studio chairman--of
the Walt Disney Company, where he teamed with Tom Schumacher to spearhead the
1990s revival of Disney's animated film musicals and their stage incarnations,
including Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King. Since leaving the company in 2001, he's ventured into solo
projects, including his newest: directing a revival of the 1989 musical Grand
Hotel at the Colony
Theatre in Burbank, which opens in October.
It's a
multi-character show whose central metaphor is a revolving door, in fact, as
the guests of a posh Berlin hotel come and go. As Schneider has learned of late,
the transience of life should be less cause for alarm than for hope.
That's part
of what led him to leave the company he'd served for so long. "I had the
best time of my life," says Schneider, a wiry, silver-haired 53-year-old
whose ready smile is somehow also audible in his voice. "I'm a real fan of
the company. I grew up there, in some sense; I was 33 when I started there."
Schneider
clearly harbors no hard feelings about the company he left in June, 2001, and
he has no dish to offer about the recent feud between CEO Michael Eisner and
former board chairman Roy Disney. "They were very generous to me,"
Schneider recalls. "Michael Eisner is a really interesting guy, and Roy
Disney I just adore. As someone who loves the Disney brand as much as I do, I'm
sad to see what's happening there."
But his
ascent at Disney took him to a midlife impasse that's fairly typical of
overachieving creative types. "In animation I was a doer," he says. "I
was artistically actively involved every single day with the artists, doing and
making. As you get higher and higher in organizations, and you take on more and
more responsibilities, and you get paid a whole lot more money, you stop doing
and you start supervising. It's an interesting challenge, and I was good at it,
and the studio made lots of money when I was there. I found it less satisfying
personally."
Just months
after he left Disney, he and his wife were on a runway at JFK Airport when the
World Trade Center Towers across town were struck, prompting a cathartic moment
of stock-taking. "You have to make a choice and say, we better be living
our lives exactly the way we want to live them if we can, because life is
short," Schneider says. "It's kind of obvious, people talk about it
all the time: You have one life. But we don't do anything about it. We get stuck:
ÔGosh, I'm not really happy with the job, blah blah blah--well, I can't really
change.' We get trapped by our fears.
"I've
done a lot of thinking about what it is that makes me interested in life, and
makes it worthwhile to keep on living," he continues. "I had directed
and been involved in theatre for many years before I went to Disney, and I said
to myself, If there's one thing I would want to go back and do, it's to start
directing again."
He had
helped run Chicago's St. Nicholas Theatre in the 1970s, and directed theatre in
New York and London. But since he and his family are based in L.A., and
Schneider is a regular playgoer here, he started asking around in his own backyard.
Several theatres said yes--but only Barbara Beckley of the Colony Theatre
actually followed up.
"She
said, ÔOK, what do you want to do?' That of course is the big challenge,"
Schneider says. "We explored several options, Pajama Game being one of them. Just as we said,
ÔThat would be interesting,' they announced a New York production to open in
October, with Kathleen Marshall directing and choreographing."
Schneider
went back to the drawing board and found a show that was far from overlooked on
Broadway--it won Tonys for its director and choreographer, Tommy Tune--but wasn't
exactly admired. "If you go back and look at the Broadway reviews, Grand
Hotel was a triumph
for Tommy Tune--a big dance piece, glitzy and glamorous," Schneider says. "But
it got somewhat nailed for having no substance."
As directors
love to do, Schneider dug deeper. "Of course, I said, ÔOoh, there's great
substance here if we focus on it, ' Not neglect the glitz, but make it much
more of a chamber piece." Such a chamber piece, in fact, that the show's
signature set piece--the revolving-door entrance of the titular Grand Hotel--isn't
being built. "I said to the set designer, David Potts, ÔWe need a
revolving door in the damn thing, because the metaphor of the whole show is
that life is a revolving door,' " Schneider says. "None of his
designs had a door in it. And I kept saying, ÔWhere's my door?' and he kept
telling me why the door was not going to be there."
It was his
choreographer, ballroom dancing star Cate Caplin, who unexpectedly bailed him
out of this back-and-forth with the stubborn scenic designer. "I went to a
rehearsal of one of her pieces, and in the middle of this piece, here was her
partner Gary, standing straight up--she is on his hip, her legs are spread, and
she does this scissor movement," says Schneider. "And I went, ÔOh my
God, it's a revolving door!' The door can now move all over the stage, and it's
a much more interesting image."
As a
producer of such extravaganzas as The Lion King and Aida, though, does Schneider ever miss
that kind of scale and largesse? "I haven't even thought about it; it
never crosses my mind," Schneider insists. "You know when you walk
into the Colony Theatre that you're going to have to be creative in terms of
solving problems in a way you won't have enough money to solve. I said to the
costume designer, ÔWe can't afford to do this show, so pick your moments.' "
"I was
so reminded of doing animation; it was the same conversation. One of the things
I pushed the artists on is that they were spending so much time on things that
were on the screen for an eighth of a second. And I would say, ÔWhy? No one can
see that. Let's focus on things that are onscreen for a second or two seconds.
Let's put our energy, our money, our best people where we actually get a bang
for it.' "
Besides, he
says, as much as audiences respond to theatrical tricks and treats, that's not
the main course on the menu. "Ultimately when you go to the theatre, you
go for the story, you go for the emotion. If I can make you cry a little bit,
laugh a little bit, and feel as though, ÔOh, that was good,' you won't care
that the door wasn't there, or that we cut out three characters, or the script's
a little clunky in Act II."
Schneider
does have a trick of sorts up his sleeve: Jason Graae in a serious role, as a
terminally ill clerk determined to have one last spree. "I've seen Jason
in so many things for so many years, and he's always cast as the funny man, the
second banana. I knew Jason could do something serious, but he'll bring such
humor, that sense of comedy to it."
A leavening
touch is a good counterbalance to the show's inherent cyncism. Indeed, playgoers
expecting a breezy musical may be surprised to find something a bit closer in
its world-weary tone to Cabaret than to, say, 42nd Street.
"The
show is quite serious, in some weird way; it's not this fluffy comedy," he
avers. All the characters, as he sees it, are either dying physically or
emotionally and find in the course of events some reason to go on: love,
health, or just tomorrow's morphine fix.
"The
whole piece is about this issue: We must live each day of our lives, we must
find reasons to live, we must get up every morning. I think that message is
fun. That's why I'm attracted to the piece, not for the dancing, not for the
glitz. In there is a small chamber musical."
Who else but a man steeped in Disney's entertainment values could call a message "fun"? In Schneider's case, he not only means it--his track record and enthusiasm make it seem likely that the fun will be catching.