Stanley A. Meyer has designed full-blown Broadway shows, rock-concert staging for the likes of Alice Cooper and Cyndi Lauper, a Busch Garden roller coaster, a Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Circus, a Nutcracker ballet, and much, much more. In fact, no large-scale project seems to be beyond his skill set. These days, he’s stoked about one of his newest challenges, a long-time dream: designing flowered floats for Pasadena’s Tournament of Roses New Year’s Day parade (the one that happens before the Rose Bowl).

“This year I had three floats in the parade and it’s this mass of people coming together with the goal of creating the most beautiful thing you can create,” the design veteran enthuses to the Straight over the phone from New York. “So that’s fairly new to me.”

Of all the projects Meyer has embraced, perhaps none of his work is more famous (or seen) than Disney’s Beauty and the Beast—one of the world’s longest-running musicals (21 years and counting, millions of audiences later). It’s an extravagantly staged show he recently helped redesign, with his original creative team, for a tour that will soon make its way to Vancouver. And it has him thinking back to how different it all was, two decades ago, when Disney set out to stage its first musical—an initiative that was so successful, the company actually has an entire live-shows division these days.

“When we started we just wanted to do a Broadway show,” the affable artist explains. “There was a Phantom and a Miss Saigon, and that was the directive: they wanted us to go make a big spectacle. Michael Eisner, the CEO at the time, was very clear that he wanted the cartoon come to life. So the original production was much more about being literal to the production.”

Not so with the newly reimagined edition that is coming here. “This one is much more evocative and less literal to the movie,” Meyer says. “I do like the design’s simplicity and boldness much more than in the original. It allows the audience to use their imagination a little more.

“There aren’t really doors or windows, just magical, curly, swirling shapes that tell you something enchanted is going on,” he says of the Beast’s hidden mansion. “And then in the town, it’s the 90-degree angles of man.” He adds the feel of the set is of transparency and layers, a metaphor for the idea that you have to look beyond surfaces to find the true heart of a person (or beast, as the case may be).

While the musical has long outlived what anyone on his team expected, the show still holds a special place in Meyer’s heart, as well as in those of the fans who flock to it. The modest visionary won’t take full credit for its longevity; he says Beauty and the Beast continues to succeed because of its memorable music and characters like its feisty heroine, Belle. Still, his scenic design helps: “The set now is not heavy or laden down,” he says, “and that really allows the story and the music and the acting performances to soar.”

Disney’s Beauty and the Beast is at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre from Tuesday to next Sunday (February 3 to 8).