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When Disney made its
first assault on Broadway with "Beauty and
the
Beast," we were dispirited by the laziness
of sprawling
corporate-culture ambition. Instead of
some state-of-the-art Hollywood
wizardry or even ordinary modern Broadway
know-how, the best we got
from the legendary entertainment giant was
a tracing-paper blow-up of
the cartoon hit - just creaky old
children's theater at Broadway prices.
That show is in its fourth year now, with
cash-happy clones around the
planet, and Disney would seem to have no
possible reason to change the
formula. With the world flattening into
one big sanitized theme park,
the theater district must be just a few
real-estate deals from being
one more pre-fab ride.
But time out. Hold on to your Mickey
souvenirs. Disney opened "The Lion
King" at its restored New Amsterdam
Theatre on 42nd Street and both -
the show and the playhouse - are
enchanting.
If this is the dreaded Disneyfication,
well, come on down. Disney has
taken a huge risk and dug far into the
theater's parallel universe to
hire the unlikely Julie Taymor, visionary
director-designer of rarified
folkloric extravaganzas, for her first
Broadway venture. The
unprecedented production, rumored to cost
around $15 million, is worth
every penny of trust.
The opening scene unfolds with moment
after giddy moment of
astonishment. A gigantic golden
contraption of a giraffe - we know
there are human legs up in there somewhere
- teeters exquisitely onto
the stage. South African choral harmonies,
with their calming and yet
exuberant rhythms of attack and release,
seem to come from everywhere
in the darkness. Then, as a huge
rice-paper sun unfurls elegantly up
before us, a parade of part-people,
part-jungle creatures - including
grand mountainous elephants with ears of
flapping African batik - comes
lumbering down the aisles of the
meticulously restored 1903 rococo
palace.
Little in the 2-hour, 40-minute musical is
quite as breathtaking as
those opening minutes that introduce the
"Circle of Life," but we are
not greedy. Unlike most theater for
children - and for everyone else -
this "Lion King" constantly finds ways to
keep from spoon-feeding
audiences with the obvious and literal.
Yet Taymor, whose visually
brilliant work has sometimes had the
emotional emptiness of an artsy
puppet show, uses all her nonstop
gorgeous, stylized, African,
Indonesian and Asian images this time to
tell a story as rich and
immediate as it is adorable.
Don't worry. All the animals from the
75-minute animated film are
present and identifiable - though most of
the cute little cartoon
friends have been wildly re-imagined in
intentionally clashing styles.
And the big vibrant cast won't let you
miss the movie's voices of
Jeremy Irons, Whoopi Goldberg or Nathan
Lane for long. There are, of
course, the familiar pop songs by Elton
John and Tim Rice, which all
sound pretty treacly against the more
authentic numbers inspired by the
movie's spin-off album, "Rhythm of the
Pride Lands." There is also lots
more African music by the invaluable Lebo
M, who also wrote the Zulu
chants and performs and leads the
all-important, enveloping sounds of
the chorus.
The temptation is to keep describing these
irresistible puppets and
masks (by Taymor and Michael Curry),
almost a sensory overload that
includes at least three entirely different
kinds of giraffes plus
antelopes that leap - three at a time -
from ingenious attachments on a
single person's body. And what about the
lush varieties of ambulatory
savanna plant-life, including plots of
tall grass on top of people's
heads, or the way set designer Richard
Hudson makes the magisterial
face of Mufasa, the young lion's dead
father, come together piecemeal
from a vast speckled sky and then
disappear again? Magic.
But Taymor is not about to let the scenery
overwhelm the story - at
least not when Disney can help it. As
Simba, the young lion as curious
cub, the gifted Scott Irby-Ranniar, 13,
has all the alert, playful
charm of a little prince and a great
street kid. Simba and the girl
lion Nala (the delightfully self-possessed
Kajuana Shuford) are the
only creatures who don't wear animal masks
above their heads. Their
more conventional older selves (played by
the fine Jason Raize and
Heather Headley) do wear them. Taymor
seems to be saying that, like the
rest of us, they acquire their masks with
the years.
Taymor's esthetic, based on centuries of
non-European tradition, wants
to show - not to hide - the human beings
in the illusion. Simba's
father, King Mufasa (played with fierce
goodness by Samuel E. Wright),
has the carved lion's head above the
actor's. So do the choruses of
sublimely serene lionesses, lead by
Simba's mother (Gina Breedlove),
who weep yards of ribbons at the death of
their king.
John Vickery's unctuous Scar, Mufasa's
Richard III of an older brother,
is deliciously wicked - his twisted soul
made visible by Taymor in his
bony back. His disciples, the hyenas, lurk
and cackle through rodent
faces that jut from their chests. The
comic characters are pure Disney
(though each in a completely different
puppet style), including Max
Casella's Timon the Meerkat with the New
Joisey accent; Tom Alan
Robbins' Pumbaa, the sweet gaseous
Warthog, and Geoff Hoyle's
British-bowler clown, Zazu, the king's
servant bird. Holding things
mystically together is Rafiki, a male
monkey in the movie and here a
female non-puppet shaman (the ebullient
South African singer Tsidii Le
Loka).
Garth Fagan's choreography is surprisingly
pat, with a kitschy pas de
deux for aerialists during "Can You Feel
the Love Tonight?" that makes
us prefer puppets to people. We can live
without the smarty asides
(including the jokey reference to "Beauty
and the Beast"). But the
lyricists have some fun with the grownups
by rhyming "pride" with
"fratricide," "sordid" with "rewarded."
Difficult questions about the
cruel food chain and the life cycle are
confronted as straightforwardly
as possible, though the child in us is
still not comforted. If this is
Disney's idea of a theme park, however, we
are delighted to report that
the theme is quality.
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