When it was first announced, Tarzan the Broadway musical seemed like a slam dunk. By the early 2000s, Disney had established itself as a critical and commercial force on Broadway. Two of its biggest film hits from the “Disney Decade” or Disney Renaissance—Beauty And The Beast and The Lion King—had been adapted to the stage with great success, and Disney Theatrical Productions had even managed (albeit, less successfully) to make its own Rent with a rock-musical version of Aida. The movies of the Disney Renaissance, often musicals that pulled inspiration from musical theater productions, seemed like a well the company would be able to return to again and again.
Of course, two examples do not a trend make, but given the library that Disney produced in the 1990s and the success of its first two Broadway adaptations, it wouldn’t have been unreasonable to believe the company could keep pumping these out with relative ease. That was quickly disproven in 2006 with Tarzan, still the least successful production Disney ever brought to the New York stage. The expectations for it were high, but in hindsight, Disney’s own confidence in the seamlessness of these transitions was the thing that was most inflated.
The plot of Tarzan the Broadway musical plays out more or less like that of the animated film based on Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan Of The Apes. A young Tarzan is stranded in Africa with his parents when the ship they’re on is caught in a storm. The family manages to survive the crash but the parents are eventually killed by a leopard. Tarzan is raised by the gorillas native to the forest, where he lives happily until more humans arrive in the jungle, including the beautiful young botanist Jane, which destabilizes the young ape-man’s identity and relationship to his world. Both versions are filled with Phil Collins’ music.
The role that music plays in the movie should have been the first clue that this adaptation needed to be handled more carefully than the previous Disney musicals. In both The Lion King and Beauty And The Beast films, the characters are doing the singing, and the songs are composed in the style of musical theater. But in the movie, Tarzan does not sing and, outside of the “Trashing The Camp” scene, Collins’ music is mostly used as a traditional movie soundtrack. Of course, this doesn’t mean it shouldn’t have been adapted, but it did mean that fashioning “You’ll Be In My Heart” for the musical stage was going to be more difficult than it was to fit “I Just Can’t Wait To Be King.” Pop songs, like those in Tarzan, are generally solos, fairly repetitive, and are less focused on moving a story forward than with capturing a feeling.
But those who worked on the original production have indicated that Disney Theatrical didn’t seem to anticipate how long it would actually take to develop the musical; in fact, the company set a tighter deadline for Tarzan than it did for Beauty And The Beast. In a 2020 video, Disney historian and YouTuber Behind The Ears interviewed a couple members of Tarzan‘s original Broadway cast, who recalled how the rehearsal period doubled as a workshop period and that they hadn’t really gotten the show ironed out by the time it opened. What’s more, both Beauty And The Beast and The Lion King (as well as Aida, which wasn’t based on a Disney movie but produced through Disney Theatrical Group) opened first outside of New York to fine-tune the production, as is typical of Broadway shows. When it moved to Broadway, Tarzan only had four shows a week (as opposed to the typical eight) so the production could have more time to rehearse. It officially opened in May 2006.
I saw this original production with my parents and brother, and the children and adults all came away with the same take: The first 10 to 15 minutes of the show were spectacular. Then, it fell apart. Looking at the contemporary critic reviews and interviews with the cast 20 years later, most people back then felt the same. Like the 1999 Disney movie, Tarzan on Broadway opened with a scene of the shipwreck that ultimately leaves a young Tarzan stranded in Africa. It was some truly remarkable stagecraft; using harnesses and lights, it made it look as if two actors were floating through the sea and swimming through the air live on stage. It was a dazzling start—it’s something that I still remember seeing 20 years later—that the rest of the musical failed to live up to. As cast member Kevin Massey said in the Behind The Ears interview, “We kind of showed everything we had in those first five minutes… most things that came after that were not as amazing to the audience.”
A lot of Tarzan‘s action was on the same harnesses. Most of the cast played great apes who hang from trees, jungle cats who leap, spiders who built giant webs. And, of course, the animated hero of the Disney movie spends a lot of the runtime swinging around on vines. It’s only natural that the stage musical would also want to make use of this, but there are ultimately only so many times you can watch someone rope swing around a theater before it starts to get repetitive. What’s worse, the new music for the musical—also composed by Collins, who cast members recalled as very willing to collaborate—was ballad-heavy and failed to leave much of an impression beyond the music that audiences were already familiar with. In my memory, there were a lot of bored kids in that theater, especially during the musical’s second act when an eight-year-old’s attention span is pushing at its limit. And when so much of the musical is airborne so quickly, the more grounded, human moments can’t help but feel like a bit of an emotional letdown. After she’s already been rescued from a giant spider, we get three consecutive duets with Jane—one with her father and two with Tarzan—that felt, at least at the time, like they ground the extravaganza to a screeching halt. The momentum never came back.
Tarzan barely lasted a year on Broadway, with its final performance coming in July 2007. Though it has found success in international markets like Germany, where it’s been running intermittently since 2008, it was still a major disappointment for Disney. It hardly destroyed the company’s theatrical ambitions—Mary Poppins, which I also saw with my family and was genuinely pretty great, opened later in 2006—but it definitely challenged the idea that a Disney movie could just be thrown on stage and be an instant hit. The corporation never again tried to open a show directly in New York. All of its subsequent productions (The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, Newsies, and Frozen) opened in smaller markets before coming to Broadway.
But there could be another, more unfortunate lesson the company took from the failure. Tarzan might also be the last time Disney tried to take a major creative swing on Broadway. Everything that came after 2006 were adaptations of works that were already straightforward musicals, and kept the visual aesthetic of those movies that people were familiar with. And other than Aladdin, all these shows have ended. Tarzan certainly didn’t stick the landing in the way that The Lion King did, but the actors who have spoken about the original production seem to think that the rushed execution was the biggest issue with the show, not the idea itself. Perhaps Tarzan on Broadway played a part in making Disney more risk-averse, for better and for worse. Years later, when Frozen became an onscreen juggernaut and the conversations about bringing it to Broadway began, then-CEO Bog Iger said, “We’re not demanding speed. We’re demanding excellence.” Clearly, the speedy route didn’t make Tarzan excellent.
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