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Leopalooza
Africa meets Disney in The Lion King
BY CAROLYN CLAY
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In theater circles, The Lion King is not at the very top of the food chain. That position is held by its feline cousin, Cats, which ended a record-breaking Broadway run after 18 years. But Simba, that prodigal Hamlet with fur, is doing just fine. The musical extravaganza commemorating his maturation is in its seventh year at New York’s New Amsterdam Theatre and has just brought its spectacular multicultural lions’ pride to the likewise spectacular den of the newly restored Opera House. The opening night, attended by both director Julie Taymor (the first woman to win a Tony Award for direction of a musical) and Mayor Thomas Menino, was like an excited, congested answer to the show’s tuneful question "Can You Feel the Love Tonight?" No question that what local-girl-turned-theater-goddess Taymor has done with The Lion King, which is based on the 1994 animated Disney film, is remarkable. She brings not only Africa but also Asia — and a sense of the mythic — to the likable cartoon material. Disney’s first colonization of Broadway, Beauty and the Beast, is a live re-creation of the animated film, right down to the dancing cutlery. Taymor (who also designed the colorful costumes inspired by African fabrics), with the aid of choreographer Garth Fagan, South African composer Lebo M, and co–puppet designer Michael Curry, has transformed The Lion King, turning it into a graceful and percussive pageant that dares to flex the audience’s imagination. That said, there is a disconnect between Taymor’s contribution and Disney’s. Sometimes The Lion King, which retains the songs from the film (plus three written by Elton John and Tim Rice for the stage show) and large chunks of its broad-comic dialogue, seems like a slicing and dicing of primal exotica and blithe cartoon. The story, albeit darkened and brought to vivid metaphoric life, is taken from the Disney film, which begins with the presentation on Pride Rock of infant heir to the animal-kingdom throne Simba and ends with the mature Simba’s presentation of his own first-born, thus mirroring the first song, "Circle of Life." This opening is a marvel in its own right, starting with a piercing call by the show’s witch doctor/moving spirit, Rafiki, that brings forth supple giraffes on stilts, a cheetah melded to a dancer’s body and licking its paw catlike to clean itself, trotting zebras, leaping antelopes on a wheel, white birds on dancers’ heads, even a large, wafting elephant, all parading up the aisles and across a stage lit by a simmering sun of shimmering silk. The intro is both celebratory and inexplicably moving. But it’s followed by tough times for cocky little Simba. The cub’s drolly malevolent uncle, Scar, is out to get him, and the death of his father, the mighty Mufasa, is followed by exile from the Pridelands (which are almost bankrupted by Scar, in collusion with some slavering, dopy hyenas), coming of age, and returning to fight for his rightful place. The use of masks and puppetry in The Lion King — engineered, from Rushmore-like countenances to sprightly shadow puppets, by Taymor — is ingenious and evocative, producing dramatis personae that are both human and animal-like. Without thinking, the audience comes to accept both the mask or puppet and the human actor/manipulator, in tandem, as the character. But whereas the lions are imbued with a stony, feisty feline dignity, other animals — notably, meerkat Timon and warthog Pumbaa — seem to have stepped right out of the cartoon (along with the fart jokes that accompany them). Some of the elaborate, surprisingly low-tech effects imagined by Taymor, however, take your breath away, among them a multi-layered wildebeest stampede that begins as a silhouette on a ridge, then rumbles forward from a scrolling cave painting to charging animals on rollers to masked performers stampeding in place. The two-years-out tour that has settled at the Opera House lacks little from the Broadway staging (though the hydraulic Pride Rock has been replaced by a more portable version). The miking renders some of the lyrics fuzzy, but the pageantry is in place, and Lebo M has conspired to add a genuine African underlay to the music, not only in his own songs but also in the perkier hangovers from the film. The performers, too, are energetic, joyous, and skillful — though not even diminutive dynamos Brandon Kane and Calicia Wilson (on opening night), as young Simba and his childhood love interest Nala, can steal the thunder from Taymor. This is one artist who need not heed W.C. Fields’s warning never to share the stage with animals or children.
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