January is shaping up to be a banner month for Central Florida’s theater patrons, between last weekend’s final FestN4 mini-festival at Fringe Artspace and this week’s bumper crop of shows and stars direct from Broadway. The Dr. Phillips Center is playing host to both Paul Mecurio’s Permission to Speak and ABBA’s Mamma Mia!, while Miguel Cervantis — who was the longest-running lead in Hamilton in NYC and Chicago — appears Jan. 18 at the new Hideaway Performing Arts Center in Eustis (hideawaypac.com). But the biggest New Year’s treat for local musical theater fans arrives at Walt Disney World Friday, Jan. 17, when EPCOT’s International Festival of the Arts returns for its eighth annual edition through Feb. 24 with art activities, photos ops and daily Broadway-caliber concerts, all included in the price of park admission — a bargain that sure beats queuing in the cold for the TKTS discount booth in Times Square.
Adrian Sarple, an associate director for Disney Theatrical, is serving his second year as director of the festival’s Disney on Broadway concert series, and even though he’s opened massive musicals with major names all around the globe, he sounded equally enthused about coming back to EPCOT this season. A native of the U.K., Sarple’s interest in the arts was sparked at age 7 when he saw a Gene Kelly film and became “sort of obsessed by what he did up on screen, his personality and just his style of performance.” His mother packed him off to a dance program that he describes as “very Billy Elliot [and] a lot like the [Royal Ballet’s] White Lodge process of being analyzed and photograph[ed].”
After legendary producer Cameron Mackintosh recruited his entire class as the ensemble for the out-of-town tryout of Moby Dick, Sarple was one of five students to transfer to the West End. He went on to perform in Mackintosh’s musicals Martin Guerre and Saturday Night Fever before transitioning into resident directing with Mary Poppins, which was a co-production with Disney.
“Disney, of course, is part of a huge corporation,” says Sarple when asked about the differences in style between Disney Theatrical and Mackintosh. “Even the bosses have board members [above them, and] it’s a public company as well, so all those checks and balances that need to happen. Cameron doesn’t, and it’s very interesting. Despite his global reach, it’s still a very intimate operation. It still feels like a cottage industry, weirdly, even though it’s this massive global concern; but that’s because he’s so involved.”
Most notably, Sarple is credited on nine different productions of Frozen — from Broadway and national tours to international stagings — as associate director, which means he helps new performers re-create Michael Grandage’s original direction. “People sometimes say, ‘How can you do a show, time after time after time, year after year after year, production after production?’,” Adrian says. “It’s easy, really, because the show itself may be the same, but the people are always different, and so the perspective of those performers and what they bring to it is so different. It’s why fans go back and see these shows year after year, because they see different people play the parts, and they learn something new about it.
“The interesting challenge for me is always, how do you keep it as close to what the original intent was, despite the fact this is a completely different human being trying to play it? Whatever the blueprint that is set down in the original is the thing you have to try and adhere to, which is often a challenge, because no two humans are alike.”
In addition, many fans are likely to have seen impressive versions of Frozen (or other Disney musicals) in theme parks or on cruise ships, which means Disney’s Broadway shows must continuously raise the bar. But, Sarple says, “You have to please the fans. You know they need to see certain things, you know they need to hear certain things. If we cut ‘Let It Go,’ we’d be in trouble.”
Since taking over EPCOT’s concert series from original director Jeff Lee, Sarple has revamped the America Garden Theatre set with new lighting and video displays, and tweaked the between-song banter. “What I like to try and do, without being sanctimonious, is just to try and give a little bit of a hint of what the original intention behind the song is,” Adrian says. “They just give them this little bit of insight or a reminder of what the song is actually about, so when they listen to it, they listen to it a little deeper than they did.”
Something that hasn’t changed is the eagerness of A-list Broadway performers — including Josh Strickland (Tarzan), Ashley Brown (Mary Poppins) and Michael James Scott (Aladdin) — to return to EPCOT year after year, according to Sarple. “They absolutely love it [because] there’s such a huge fanbase down there that are loyal and encouraging. There’s nothing better for a performer than performing to people who really want to be there, and people move heaven and earth to get to this festival.”
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It’s time for EPCOT’s International Festival of the Arts, with plenty of sip-and-stroll diversions
This article appears in Jan 15-21, 2025.