At Olney Theatre, casting Beauty and the Beast with an eye to inclusion
Jade Jones was surprised when she landed one of the leads in the Olney Theatre Center production of “Disney’s Beauty and the Beast.”
As a self-described queer, plus-sized Black woman, she hadn’t expected to be seen as right for Belle, the fairy-tale heroine who’s an ivory-skinned size 2 (or so it looks) in Disney’s 1991 animated film, subsequently adapted for Broadway. “I’m not the typical Belle type, obviously,” she says.
But she now understands how her Belle fits into the production, directed with an eye to inclusiveness by Marcia Milgrom Dodge and co-starring Evan Ruggiero, an acclaimed tap dancer and actor who lost a leg to cancer as a teenager. At Olney, the Alan Menken-scored fable drills down on “redefining beauty, and what that means, and what it means to know your worth and to own it,” Jones notes, during a recent interview at the theater.
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It’s a message she appreciates, having “had to teach myself that I’m beautiful inside and out,” she says. “Just because I don’t look like what the Western culture has forced us to see as beauty doesn’t take away my worth, and it doesn’t take away how I feel about myself. And within that alone, I think, stands beauty. That confidence. That self-worth.”
Known for its singing teapot and other anthropomorphized-object characters, “Disney’s Beauty and the Beast” centers on a prince who’s imprisoned in a monster’s form by an enchantment. Belle breaks that spell when she sees past the Beast/blueblood’s intimidating appearance to his flawed but appealing soul. So a repudiation of lookism has always been part of the musical, and indeed the underlying story. But Milgrom Dodge’s production probes more thoughtfully into the issue and the potential pain around it, according to Ruggiero, who took a break from rehearsals to talk about the show.
“This tale of Beauty and the Beast, it digs deeper as to what beauty is as a whole and how we see that,” he says. “And it’s a little bit darker, I believe.”
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Such an approach is perhaps all the more essential in 2021, a time of heightened awareness about racism, representation, the objectification and abuse of women, harmful social media, and other phenomena that intersect with, or distort, our attitudes toward appearance and human worth.
“Our production really challenges each of us to look around the room with an equitable lens in which all races, ethnicities, body shapes and abilities can be identified and celebrated as the most beautiful person inside and out,” says Milgrom Dodge, whose credits include a Tony-nominated Broadway revival of “Ragtime,” as well as Olney’s 2019 “Once.”
Her spin on this show came together in tandem with the casting of the two leads. She had directed Jones before in “110 in the Shade” at Ford’s Theatre in 2016. That’s just one of the performer’s many local appearances, which also include Helen Hayes Award-nominated turns in “School Girls; or, The African Mean Girls Play” at Round House Theatre and “Into the Woods” at Ford’s. (Jones played Little Red Riding Hood in this last show, giving her a head start in once-upon-a-time revisionism.)
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Though she’s Chicago-based, Jones, 31, grew up in Fairfax County and says the D.C. area “will always be home for me,” because local theaters give her so many opportunities.
Milgrom Dodge knew Ruggiero, her fellow New Yorker, more by reputation. In 2017, he played Tom Jones in “Bastard Jones,” an off-Broadway musical based on the 1749 Henry Fielding novel, for which he earned multiple honors, including a Clive Barnes Award in theater and a Chita Rivera Award nomination for outstanding off-Broadway dancer. Other forays include performing at the Oscars and at Carnegie Hall.
His life story is also striking. A dance prodigy who had been accepted into the New Jersey Tap Ensemble by age 10, he was a sophomore at Montclair State University when he was diagnosed with osteosarcoma in his right leg. After years in and out of the hospital and the amputation of his leg, he taught himself to dance again, inspired in part by Clayton “Peg Leg” Bates, a legendary one-legged hoofer who died in 1998.
Obsessed by “Beauty” as a child, the 31-year-old Ruggiero can now draw on memories of his cancer ordeal to deepen his portrait of the unhappy, spellbound prince. “It’s almost like I was the Beast in that hospital some days,” he remembers. “I was just yelling all the time.”
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By contrast, he was ebullient in the interview, talking about what a blast it is to be in “Beauty.” Even figuring out how fight scenes can incorporate his prosthesis “is so much fun,” he says.
He’s also gratified to help a family-friendly show, like this one, be a teaching moment.
“It’s very important for kids to see actors with differing abilities and different body types onstage playing these roles,” he says.
“We need to be accountable and celebrate all types of body types, all types of abilities,” agrees Milgrom Dodge. “It’s our job, and our privilege, and our responsibility as theater makers.”
Disney's Beauty and the Beast
Olney Theatre Center, 2001 Olney-Sandy Spring Rd., Olney. 301-924-3400. olneytheatre.org.
Dates: Nov. 5 through Jan. 2.
Prices:$42-$99.
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