Disney Theatrical President Tom Schumacher on Writing the 'Book I Wanted as a Kid'

Thomas Schumacher, the president of Disney Theatrical Productions, has ushered beloved Disney properties like The Lion King, Aladdin and Frozen to the Broadway stage after beginning work with Disney’s theatrical arm in 1998, transitioning from a 10-year position with the company’s animated film division. Schumacher began work in the theater at the Los Angeles Festival of Arts, Mark Taper Forum and a handful of regional theaters, doing “every job in the theater for money, except play in the orchestra," he told Paul Wontorek on #LiveAtFive. "I mean if you had to suffer through seeing the 1979 Summer Repertory Theater production of Pippin starring me,” he joked, “you would never want to see my ‘Corner of the Sky.’” Schumacher is using that knowledge in the third edition of his book, How Does the Show Go On The Frozen Edition: An Introduction to the Theater. 

Schumacher began writing the kid-friendly work in 2008 in an attempt to create "the book I wanted as a kid," he said. "I grew up in California, outside of San Francisco, and my only way to stay in touch with the theater was to subscribe to The New Yorker, which is inappropriate for a 12-year-old to read every day, and Theater Crafts magazine. I knew more about what was playing on Broadway as written about by snobs - and how to work a Rosco fog machine."

"I want[ed] to write a book about the theater for kids," he said, "about everything that happens, every job from the front door to the stage door. What does a prop man do? What does the wig department do? What's an usher? How does the whole thing work? Lack of information can be very alienating, and I think it's what shuts many of us out to things you've never done."

Schumacher also revealed that he did not come up with the idea that The Lion King, a film about African fauna caught in a Shakespearen power struggle, would work with music. It was his husband. “It wasn't a musical. It was like an animated National Geographic special,” Schumacher said about the film’s early stages. “[My husband] and I were renovating a house, and we were sanding something or whatever, and he said, ‘Why doesn’t this lion movie have songs?’ And I said, ‘Well, it’s lions; they don’t sing.’ He goes, ‘Everybody likes it when they sing,’” Schumacher laughed, “and that’s how it started.”

Good thing, because “between Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King, a whole generation saw their first Broadway show," Schumacher said about Disney shows on Broadway. 

Watch the rest of Schumacher's #LiveAtFive interview below, where he talks more about the release of his book and that time he had to sit on Antonio Banderas' lap.