Beauty and the Best
This is a wonderful performance from the 1992 Oscars telecast of two of the three nominated-Best Songs from the movie, Beauty and the Best, filled with fun, elaborate staging. All introduced by the woman who sang the third of the nominated songs, Angela Lansbury. But the treat is seeing the two actors who voices-only were heard in the movie getting to be out from and center, live and in person. That would be Paige O’Hara as ‘Belle’ who (with Richard White as ‘Gaston’) sings “Belle” and best of all (for me – not the least of which, talent aside, is that he went to the beloved Northwestern…) Jerry Orbach, who played ‘Lumiere’ the candlestick, singing “Be Our Guest.”
At this point, Orbach was only one year into his 14-year stint on Law & Order, though it’s still likely most of the show’s audience had any idea that he not only was the voice in the movie or that he could even sing, but also had one of the great, musical comedy leading-man careers in Broadway history, having starred in the musicals The Threepenny Opera (as ‘Mack the Knife’), The Fantasticks, Carnival, Promises Promises (which I saw him on Broadway) Chicago (that I saw him with the Broadway cast in Los Angeles) and 42nd Street, among others. Pretty impressive. Which explains why he seems so at ease in this number.
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