Across town, Warner Brothers has brought in Steve Kloves of the Harry Potter franchise to write, direct and produce a different live-action Jungle Book.

Disney regularly recycles its properties, strategically releasing anniversary DVDs and most recently having raised a billion dollars worldwide with the live-action version of Alice in Wonderland directed by Tim Burton. In coming years we can expect to see a a number of live-action takes on old favorites, including a prequel to Sleeping Beauty tentatively titled Maleficent (starring Angelina Jolie) as well as Beauty and the Beast (reportedly produced by Guillermo del Toro and starring Emma Watson) and a new Cinderella (featuring Lily James, Cate Blanchett and Helena Bonham Carter directed by Kenneth Branagh). And with Lion King now the highest-grossing musical in Broadway history, the company increasingly tests the market with theatrical versions of its features, managed by its Disney Theatricals division.

But only some of Jungle Book's resurgence can be attributed to Disney (and Warner Brothers) banking on family entertainment with built-in name recognition. Unlike more conventional fairy tales, the Jungle Book with its exotic locale and tale of a child learning where he really belongs seems ready-made for young families that value multiculturalism and globalism in their entertainment. But that, as it turns out, is the source of the trouble.

Staging Kipling in 2013 isn't the same task as it was in 1962 when Disney first tackled it, or in 1942 when the Korda brothers filmed their resonant version. Joseph Rudyard Kipling, an Englishman born in 1865 in Mumbai, was an unrepentant defender of empire who coined the ignominious phrase "the white man's burden" in an 1899 issue of McClure’s Magazine where he urged the United States to colonize the Philippines. (Memorably, George Orwell condemned him as a "prophet of British imperialism".) The Walt Disney studio of the mid-1960s seemed to have been oblivious to the idea that anyone would take offense at the character of King Louie, a jive-talking orangutan who sang to Mowgli about "want[ing] to be like you." New Jungle Book adapters can't claim the same obliviousness; they must contend with the legacy of British colonialism, American racism, and contemporary identity politics against the backdrop of a multimillion dollar brand.

Zimmerman was faced with the trickiness of these issues while her adaptation was still in pre-production. As the show was beginning technical rehearsals, Chicago Magazine writer Catey Sullivan asked Zimmerman about how she was planning to address Jungle Book's problematic legacy. "Kipling’s politics are pretty terrible and pretty undeniable," the director said. "Having been in India I realize most of the stuff we know about India is from books written by Westerners. But you go over there and you see that the British occupation was so short in the history of the country. No one is sitting around moping about the raj. You have to remember the past, but you don’t have to live in it." Then Zimmerman, defending Disney characterization of King Louie, noted, "it’s something I think where the racism is in the eye of the beholder, you know?"