For the first time in what certainly feels like forever, classics from the Disney songbook will once again — and sooner than expected — ring out from a Broadway stage. The New Amsterdam Theater, usually home to “Aladdin,” will briefly welcome audiences back for four concerts benefiting the Actors Fund in late July, with a handful of Disney stage alumni performing numbers from “The Lion King,” “Frozen,” “Beauty and the Beast,” “Aladdin” and others. “The Lion King” and “Aladdin,” along with nearly a dozen other Broadway shows, start back up in September. “We have a concert unit, and we have a theater that’s sitting there waiting to be opened, and so it made sense to ‘what if,’” Thomas Schumacher, the president of Disney Theatrical Productions, said in a Zoom interview from London’s Lyceum Theater. (“The Lion King” is set to begin performances there later this summer, as is “Frozen” down the street.)

Source: New York Times July 07, 2021 12:00 UTC