Parades and performers have been a key component of Disneyland — in fact, a parade kicked off the opening of the park in 1955, and the beloved Disneyland Band played for guests — and they continue to entertain at Disney parks around the world.
Disneyland Live Entertainment oversees the shows, the thousands of performers and everything that goes into the spectacles across all parks, resorts, cruise ships and other locations. It’s a huge undertaking, and as David Lightbody, senior vice president for Disney Live Entertainment and the Muppets Studio, notes, “We’re definitely one of the biggest theatrical organizations in the world.” But that doesn’t mean that details get lost. “I see a character meet and greet as the purest, simplest form of theater. It’s one character and one guest having this interaction. It’s pure theater,” he says with enthusiasm as he sits surrounded by piles of parade and theatrical props in a special rehearsal room on the Walt Disney Imagineering campus in Glendale.
Lightbody honed his stage instincts in Scotland, where he launched a small theatrical company “putting Shakespeare on in castles,” he says, eventually attracting the attention of mega-producer Cameron Mackintosh. Working with Mackintosh steeped Lightbody in commercial musical theater, as he learned valuable lessons about successfully staging Western shows in China. It’s rock-solid base to oversee the global DLE ops.
To quote Walt Disney: “Disneyland is a show.” Disney Live Entertainment has productions in 12 Disney theme parks and six Disney cruise ships, as well as at global special events. Across the world, the team produces more than 150 live parades, stage shows and spectaculars every day, while developing and creating dozens of new shows, parades and events. The DLE includes a wide range of disciplines, from writers, directors, producers and designers to technical experts, costumers and more — plus thousands of performers, technicians, costumers, riggers, lighting experts and creative storytellers. The DLE team also works closely with their colleagues in Imagineering, which has led to some innovative storytelling tools. And, of course, a little bit if pixie dust is part of the blueprint.
It’s all about storytelling, Lightbody says, and the technical advances of Imagineering work in service of that. DLE teams pioneered projection mapping technology, while continuing to develop advanced animatronics, wireless audio, interactive character experiences and mobile show controls.
Paint the Night, a parade that originated in the Hong Kong park, stars in the Disneyland 70th anniversary celebration. It’s the first parade Lightbody produced for Disney. It’s also Disney’s first all-LED light parade and features more than 1.5 million lights as well as other innovative technical achievements, including a flying Tinker Bell.
“That’s kind of changed the game even further than the Main Street Electrical Parade, in the sense that it’s got so much movement and color and dynamics,” Lightbody says.
The refreshed World of Color Happiness! show at California Adventure also incorporates new eye-popping projections, music and such movie stars as Joy from “Inside Out.”
Lightbody makes the connection with the ancient origins of theater and the way DLE uses technology today to engage audience imaginations in the service of a story. “Whether it’s projection mapping, whether it’s the use of new technology like the virtual programming environment, drones — we’re using more and more in our nighttime spectaculars, and that is a really interesting area to me. And that requires us to be hand in hand with our tech partners.”
Besides the technical innovations, “I feel quite lucky in the sense that the other thing that keeps coming is great new stories from our filmmakers,” he says. “So that is a constant refresh, and I am very lucky that my job is to reinterpret those stories in a live way that allows the guests to interact with that story in a more immediate way.”
And with DLE, it’s showtime around the world, 24/7.