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Spring 2005

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Feature

Live! At Disney
Anne Hamburger brings her avant-garde sensibilities to mainstream theater

—Jeanne Ricci




	Aladdin cast members salute Anne Hamburger ’76, vice president of creative entertainment for Walt Disney Parks and Resorts worldwide.

ANNE HAMBURGER'S LAUGHTER ECHOES THROUGH the halls of her cookie-cutter office located in Glendale, an unremarkable area of Los Angeles. Considering she is executive vice president of creative entertainment for Walt Disney Parks and Resorts around the world, you would expect her center of command to be overlooking Disneyland in Anaheim or at the company’s studio a couple of miles away. But no matter. Hamburger’s energy and verve light up the room as she settles into a nondescript chair to answer the key question: How did the maven of New York’s avant-garde, site-specific theater world end up working for a huge corporation like Disney?

“In a lot of ways the job here at Disney makes perfect sense for me,” says Hamburger, who is responsible for the creative development of all major stage shows, parades, and nighttime events at Disney parks and on cruise ships. “As a theater artist, it’s the best job in the world because you’re not reaching 400 people a night—you’re reaching millions. I get to run an entrepreneurial department with the resources of a multibillion-dollar company. I no longer have to worry about the phone bill, and that’s a great thing!” she laughs.

There were plenty of times Hamburger did worry about the phone bill: First as a budding performance artist and then as executive producer of the New York theater company En Garde Arts, which she founded in 1986. Her interest in performing arts was first ignited when she was working toward her BFA in sculpture at UMass Amherst in the early 1970s: “My interest in art even back then was very much about the intersection of human behavior with architecture, design, and space,” she says. “At the time I was very into creating representations of my body out of plaster casts. I hung these two bags in a room: I was in one and there was this plaster cast in another, and I would speak to a tape-recorded version of myself. I invited 100 people, and it was art,” she jokes.

After graduation, she did what any self-respecting performance artist would do: She moved to New York. It was there she met the woman who would become a seminal influence in her life, Anne Bogart, who was doing site-specific work at the time. Hamburger acted in a couple of Bogart’s shows, but when the theater group needed a fresh location, she volunteered to not only find a venue, but to produce the whole thing: “I started realizing where I really belonged in the world—I was a creative producer. That realization came with a certain amount of understanding and maturity.”

Hamburger had another epiphany: She wanted to start her own theater company. She entered Yale’s theater management program because she felt she needed to learn the skills that are crucial to run a successful organization. En Garde Arts began as her third-year project at Yale, then blossomed into one of New York’s more renowned theater companies, winning seven Obie Awards, two Drama Desk Awards, and an Outer Critics Circle Award. Hamburger used nontraditional settings, such as a pier on the Hudson River and four blocks of the meatpacking district, to stage a variety of plays and musicals. “En Garde Arts was about the intersection of text with performance, design, architecture, space and community,” says Hamburger. “I’ve always been very interested in who the audience is. There is a lot of developmental theater that is created for other artists or upper-middle-class audiences. I was interested in how people who weren’t coming to the work would be affected by it.”

En Garde Arts productions attracted not only traditional theater audiences, but also people who came to see the work by virtue of its location in their neighborhood. Hamburger instituted an outreach program so that people living in the vicinity of a show could receive free tickets. She literally brought theater to the people. “We were pioneers when there was plenty of space to pioneer,” she says. Now that Manhattan has been redeveloped and gentrified, it’s nearly impossible to find a dilapidated amphitheater or an abandoned building to stage a site-specific work, which is one reason Hamburger decided to move into a more traditional theater setting. But after one season at the La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego, a powerful muse with the last name “Mouse” lured her to the Los Angeles area.

Today, Hamburger produces shows for millions of people near and far, from California and Florida to Paris, Tokyo, and Hong Kong. And, like with En Garde Arts, she’s reaching people who might not normally see a play. “The number of people who come to the park to see a show is extraordinary. And they aren’t people who typically go to the theater, I would venture to guess.”

Preparing for Disney’s 50th anniversary on May 5 was a major undertaking, with the development of new projects such as Parade of Dreams, a street spectacular called Blockparty, and the nighttime event Remember. Recently, Hamburger took the story of Cinderella and reshaped it into a contemporary musical, with five original songs created by the lyricist team of Michael Weiner and Alan Zachary. “The reason someone like me was brought into this division was because I have a great Rolodex of directors, designers, and composers,” she explains. “It was about bringing this level of talent into the theme park world.”

Hamburger’s entrepreneurial spirit hasn’t dissipated with her move to corporate America: She has instituted a program called Blue Sky, a creative development fund
for up-and-coming artists. “I want to work with people at all stages of their careers, and give artists a chance to grow and work with resources they’ve never really had the ability to work with before.” She will give a director, designer, or composer a small amount of money to come up with ideas, which can sometimes lead to future assignments.

Hamburger visits all the parks regularly, especially when a new show is being mounted. That means frequent trips to Paris, Hong Kong, and Tokyo. As the mother of seven-year-old twins, balancing work and family life can be a challenge. “I am lucky enough to have a husband who wants to be a stay-at-home dad,” she says. “Otherwise, I really couldn’t do this.”

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