Jamal Sims is the choreographer behind Beauty and the Beast: A 30th Celebration special on Disney and ABC.
You know his choreo work on Descendants 3, Step Up All In, 13: The Musical, RuPaul’s Drag Race, RuPaul’s Drag Race Live! in Las Vegas (snatch your tickets ASAP; makes the perfect gift for the holidays!) and directing When the Beat Drops.
“I am the biggest Disney fan. As a child, I can remember just going to Disneyland because I’m from Los Angeles, so we would go to Disneyland every couple months,” Sims told Out. “And just being there, feeling the magic, I would be hyped for days after going to Disneyland. So now I get to be a part of creating the magic. I think that it just feels like a natural partnership.”
The brand new special, Beauty and the Beast: A 30th Celebration has a star-studded lineup including H.E.R. as Belle, Josh Groban as Beast, Shania Twain as Mrs. Potts, Martin Short as Lumière, David Alan Grier as Cogsworth, and Joshua Henry as Gaston.
When asked about what it was like working with Grammy-winning artist H.E.R., Sims said, “Oh gosh, she’s amazing! We call her G…[She] is just everything that I could have ever hoped for in an artist because she came to it just wanting to learn and wanting to do the very best job and was so open to trying new things that she had never tried before. And this is a new arena for her, and a new genre for her. And H.E.R. saying that she wanted to bring a new take on Belle, I’m like, ‘Absolutely. Let’s go for it. Let’s lean into your new version of Belle.’ Because we’ve seen the classic Belle. And so now, what does Belle look like in 2023? And she nailed it. She nailed it.”
