"But am I the only one who feels a bit queasy about theatre nakedly pitched as exactly that: product? A commodity rather than culture, stock to invest in financially for profit rather than emotionally for the experience?"
Personally, pickled onions make me feel a bit queasy; the homogenised commodification of theatre, less so. But that's just me.
Most of her points are ably tackled in the comments by Andrew Hayden. I would only add this. Lord Andy and the Big Mac did indeed create "franchised" musicals in the 1980s. They tended to reproduce the original production of their shows as exactly as possible (hence the McDonalds-isation charge) and, in doing so, reached parts of the world shows didn't normally reach.
What Disney did was different in one important aspect. Disney took its successful film musicals - Beauty and the Beast, Lion King - and reproduced them on stage. The stage versions were deliberately imitative of the films. Of course there were a lot of changes made from screen to stage but these shows, it could be said, are not properly the original products. They're not a theatrical franchise; they're really just one part of a film franchise.
For my money, the Brit's franchising efforts are more impressive. They did it just as well as Disney but without the help of a blockbuster film and the world's biggest entertainment corporation. Their commercial success was (and is) an astonishing achievement.
This may tells us nothing about the artistic achievement of these shows but the exceptional nature of that achievement should at least be recognised.
