Beauty And The Beast: An Enchanting Experience Enthralling Every Generation
With the advent of winters, parents are all set to go out with their kids to visit various places in and around their city to make the most of the pleasant, cool, and sometimes chilly weather. After the long period of humid summer months, the North Indians especially get excited with a wishlist in their hands to visit different destinations and various events happening around their cities. While the regular annual trips to the zoo, the museum, and other amusement parks are on my list, I have an interesting addition to my list this year and I feel privileged to be a resident of Delhi NCR area to be able to have this inclusion. I am referring to Disney’s musical and theatrical presentation of the timeless classic fairy tale Beauty and the Beast.
Beauty and the Beast is one of the first fairy tales I read out to my son when he was 2.5 years and, thereafter, I read it out several times until he turned big enough to read stories on his own. While I have shown him a movie version of the story already on YouTube, I am excited to introduce my son to theatre now and the fact that he already knows the story too well will only contribute to his familiarity with the content of the show and a higher proximity of the resulting enjoyment.
In fact, even though we are living in an extremely fast-paced world surrounded by gadgets with internet ensuring everything is at a touch away, I have grown up loving and enjoying books, stories and theatres and somewhere have the same little secret wish in my heart to inculcate the same passion in my son. And, I can’t think of anything better than taking up this opportunity, which is right in my city on a story we all know so well and presented at a grand scale of magnificence and splendour by none other than Disney, a name associated with kid’s entertainment since the time my generation remembers a production company associated with this genre.
I especially appreciate the choice of the fairy tale by the production house. Being the mother of a son, I have noticed that boys typically don’t get too fascinated by the stories of Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, or Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. However, they find stories like Jack and the Beanstalk and Beauty and the Beast enchanting because of the characters, with whom they can relate to (for example, Jack) or an oxymoronic character like the good beast. In fact, the story of the two protagonists of Beauty and the Beast, Belle and the Beast, represents the virtues of sacrifice (for parents), hope (for a brighter future), commitment (of words), love (devoid of physical attraction), trust and care. All of these are personality traits, which we are constantly trying to imbibe in our children. Therefore, a visual representation of this drama in action right in front of them is only going to make the experience enthralling for them, satisfying for us as parents for being able to introduce them to a new form of art, and for the production house and the entire team for carrying on the theatre cult to the next generation.
As Simone Gray puts it in her article ‘Great Reasons to Take Your Child to the Theatre’: “Theatre and drama enable children to recognise how to express themselves physically and emotionally in a healthy manner, help them understand under-developed parts of themselves, and assist them in putting things into perspective — all of which can go a long way to empowering them.” (Quotation courtesy: Child Magazine, http://www.childmag.co.za/content/great-reasons-take-your-child-theatre#.Vm70oDYzWlJ)
I am very excited that the Broadway style Musical is finally in India and can’t wait to take my son to this spectacular show!
For bookings and more information on the show, visit: bit.ly/BATBDelhi-
#BeautyAndTheBeastIndia
Picture Courtesy: 'My Big Book of Enchanted Fairy Tales,' published by Quixot Publications
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