Big Stage Productions in conjunction with Santa Barbara Dance Arts will present a production of Walt Disney’s Beauty and the Beast at 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. Tuesday and Wednesday in Marjorie Luke Theatre, 721 E. Cota St. in Santa Barbara.

The production will feature music by Alan Menken, with lyrics by Howard Ashman and Tim Rice and a book by Linda Woolverton, based on the 1991 Disney film of the same name.

The tale of a ferocious beast transformed — in fact, domesticated — by the love of a pure beauty into the perfect man, the ideal of a handsome and chivalrous mate, was first written down and published in 1757 by a French anthologist with the lofty name Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont, but it wasn’t until nearly two centuries later that Beauty and the Beast became permanently fixed in our imaginations by the genius of French poet and filmmaker Jean Cocteau, with his magical 1946 film La belle et la bête.

Forty-five years later, in 1991, Disney built a fabulously successful animated musical feature upon Cocteau’s archetypal fantasy, and a mere three years after that, a stage spectacular with seven new songs opened on Broadway and ran for 5,464 performances — Broadway’s eighth-longest running production in history.

And only an anti-social recluse such as Greta Garbo would want to cry, as she did after Cocteau’s Beast shed his makeup to become the Adonis, Jean Marais: “Give me my Beast back!” There is no pleasing some people.

Tickets to matinees of Beauty and the Beast are $12 (students and seniors) and $20 (adults); for evening performances, tickets are $15 (students and seniors) and $25 (adults). They can be purchased through the Lobero Theatre box office at 33 E. Canon Perdido St. or 805.963.0761. Click here to order online.

— Gerald Carpenter covers the arts as a Noozhawk contributor. He can be reached at gerald.carpenter@gmail.com.