Beauty and the Beast's Beast gets a face: the reimagined tour plays Calgary Nov. 10-15
The 30th-anniversary North American tour drops the prosthetics the Beast has worn since 1994, and it plays the Southern Alberta Jubilee Auditorium in Calgary Nov. 10-15.
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The Beast will be visible from his first entrance when Broadway Across Canada's Beauty and the Beast plays the Southern Alberta Jubilee Auditorium, Nov. 10 through 15. For 30 years, audiences never saw the actor's face until the final reveal, because the Beast wore prosthetics made to look as much like the 1991 animated character as possible.
Fergie L. Philippe, who plays the Beast on the tour, says this version is not a remounting of the original. The production opened in Australia in 2023, then moved to the UK and America, and there is now a German version. "Now, there is no question that the Beast is human," Philippe said. "We can see that all his reactions are human, so we sympathize with him a great deal more. I think this brings much more humanity to the story."
Philippe describes the Beast as an introspective person who escapes inside himself, and also as a childlike goofball who is funny but still scary. "What makes him lovable is that he is like a teenager on his first date with his first crush," he said.
Philippe is joined by Kyra Belle Johnson as Belle, Stephen Mark Lucas as Gaston, and Harry Francis as Le Fou. The show plays the Southern Alberta Jubilee Nov. 10 through 15, then the Northern Alberta Jubilee in Edmonton Nov. 17 through 22.
