Who

The president of Disney Theatricals, Schumacher has produced colossal money-makers like The Lion King and Mary Poppins.

Backstory

Schumacher was raised in the San Francisco Bay area, and spent the first few years of his career on staff at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. He later co-founded the Los Angeles Festival of the Arts and served as the assistant general manager of the Los Angeles Ballet. In 1988, Schumacher joined Disney's animation division—then under the direction of Peter Schneider, whom Schumacher had worked with at Taper—where he worked on movies like The Rescuers Down Under and the 1994 hit The Lion King. Schneider and Schumacher eventually assumed responsibility for Disney Theatricals, the company's live entertainment division, and extended the Disney franchise to a newly-sanitized Broadway with Beauty and the Beast.

In 1998, Schneider and Schumacher surprised many when they picked Julie Taymor—who was then known as a director of avant-garde theater—to direct the Broadway incarnation of The Lion King; some ten years later, the lavish musical continues to pack in Ohioan tourists and pull in millions annually. In 2000, Schneider left to become president of Walt Disney Studios and Schumacher assumed Schneider's job as chief of Disney Theatricals. Although Schumacher stepped down from his position in the animation division in 2002, he continues to head up the company's theatrical unit as well as oversee Disney's live ice shows, such as Monsters Inc. and Finding Nemo.

Of note

Since the success of The Lion King, Schumacher has produced Elton John's Aida, the Broadway run of Mary Poppins, and the Bob Crowley-directed Tarzan, which opened to relatively poor reviews and closed after only a year, although it's since opened in Holland and is now in rehearsals in Germany. After thirteen years of dancing teapots and singing candlesticks, Disney's enormously successful Beauty and the Beast concluded its epic run in 2007. The company has since debuted a big-budget Broadway version of The Little Mermaid. Upcoming productions include Peter and the Starcatchers, a prequel to the Peter Pan story; Man in the Ceiling, which is based on a story by Jules Feiffer and features music and lyrics by Andrew Lippa; and a musical based on the life of Christian Dior.

Personal

Home for Schumacher is an apartment in a Sanford White-designed building on lower Park Avenue that he shares with his partner, Matthew White, a ballet dancer-turned-interior designer. (Kenneth Jay Lane lives in the same building.) White was responsible for the interior, which features an Indian theme. Right next to their canopy bed, there's a matching canopied dog bed that resembles an antique Indian temple.