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America's love-hate
relationship with Disney goes something
like this:
Love the animated features. Take the
children five times, buy the
videos and action figures. Hate the
treatment of history ("Pocahontas")
and literature ("The Hunchback of Notre
Dame").
Love the chance to see "The Little
Mermaid" on the big screen again.
Hate the two-week limited engagement,
which seems like a cynical
attempt to whip up interest just in time
for the holiday buying season.
Love the theme parks in California and
Florida. Hate the idea of
Disneyfied history in a park in Virginia
(what on earth would the takes
on slavery and the Civil War have been
like?).
So it goes on Broadway, where director
Julie Taymor's remarkable stage
version of Disney's animated hit "The Lion
King" opened last week. The
Broadway crowd hated the idea of Disney
crashing its turf several years
ago with a technically impressive but
charmless "Beauty and the Beast,"
which is still running at the Palace
Theater.
And the Disneyfication of 42nd Street,
part of an effort to spruce up
the seedy thoroughfare, is a decidedly
mixed bag. The Disney Store
there is so big it has entrances on 42nd
Street and Seventh Avenue, and
it even has an entire room dedicated to
merchandise celebrating
Disney's theatrical ventures. For $100,
you get a denim jacket with the
"Lion King" logo embroidered on the back;
$180 gets you a bomber-style
cloth jacket with the logo embossed on the
back. Buy buy, baby.
On the other hand, the newly refurbished,
Disney-owned New Amsterdam
Theatre is an undeniable jewel in
Broadway's crown. The lobby is filled
with reliefs of scenes from Shakespeare.
Four peacocks surround
classical figures on the theater's
ceiling. Every arch and wall surface
seems to be carved. Decorative touches are
simply everywhere, even on
the textured patterns of the seats.
Apparently, this is how the Amsterdam
looked when it was constructed in
1903. It has since gone through the
now-familiar cycle of conversion to
a movie house, then disuse, until its
re-emergence earlier this year.
Now, it is hard to imagine a lovelier
setting for a show; the whimsical
environment is perfect for the fanciful
"Lion King."
Trumping all criticism of Disney as a
player on Broadway is the
puppet-driven "The Lion King" itself. It
is a bold work of art, and
stylistically the most daring piece of
theater to hit mainstream
musicals in years. You gotta love it - and
judging by the roars at a
preview performance for critics and
insiders last week, Broadway does.
* * *
The rapturous New York reviews were
already out when Julie Taymor
described herself as a "theater maker"
during a talk about her career
Monday night at the Corcoran Gallery. She
recounted her years studying
theater in Bali and Japan, and showed
video clips of some of her
generally dark avant-garde work. The
audience caught glimpses of the
magical, mask-filled "Juan Darien," a
gruesome staging of "Titus
Andronicus," the peculiar "Fool's Fire" (a
film that used puppets and
dwarf actors), and som e of the grand and
startling images from her
staging of the Stravinsky opera, "Oedipus
Rex."
Yet Miss Taymor was able to tell the
Corcoran audience that the $15
million "Lion King" "is more experimental
than anything I've ever done,
quite frankly."
Miss Taymor acknowledged that she and
Disney - known more for its
cuteness than for its daring - are an odd
couple. But, she said, "We
started on a good fundamental ground,
which is that they wanted what I
do."
What she does is tell epic, mythical
stories and create strong images,
often with masks and puppets. She knows
how to make theatrical magic,
as she proves in the first 10 breathtaking
minutes of "The Lion King."
The blue stage changes to red as a large
sun rises and two giraffes -
actors on stilts and cloaked in Miss
Taymor's ingenious costumes - lope
onto the stage. That image alone is so
beautiful, and so perfectly
paced, that the crowd gasps and applauds.
They ain't seen nothin' yet. As the music
to "Circle of Life" fills the
theater, a parade of African animals
saunters down the aisles and onto
the stage - elephants, gazelles, lions, a
cheetah. The place teems with
animal life, and the actors are remarkably
in tune with their unusual
puppets - even though, or perhaps because,
many of the costumes
deliberately leave the actors' faces
visible. By the end of the number,
the audience is completely transported
into a sumptuous fantasy world.
The sheer mechanics of the puppetry are
part of the show's fascination.
The lion actors wear tan tights and have
lion masks on top of their
heads. You can watch the actors talk and
sing, but at strategic moments
the lion masks drop in front of the
actors' faces, and all you see is
lion. It happens early in a brief showdown
between Mufasa (the Lion
King, played with calm majesty by Samuel
E. Wright) and his evil
brother Scar (John Vickery, in a slithery
George Sanders mode). Scar's
singular mask cranes forward on what seems
to be a mechanical neck
(there is actually a cable that is
connected to a trigger hidden in the
actors' hands). The effect is very
catlike, and quite menacing.
Other animals are as intriguingly
composed, with the actors often half
in and half out of their puppets
(co-created by Michael Curry). The
puppets are the starting point of each
character, but the performers
are free to bring a lot of personality to
bear. Max Casella and Tom
Alan Robbins provide plenty of comic
relief as Timon (the wisecracking
meerkat) and Pumbaa (the flatulent
warthog), and Tracy Nicole Chapman,
Stanley Wayne Mathis and Kevin Cahoon do
fascinating work as the
hilariously stupi d hyenas that are Scar's
henchmen.
The visual wizardry goes way beyond the
puppetry. Miss Taymor creates
wonderful action scenes using little more
than silks and scrolls. In
one swift sequence, Timon gets swept away
by a flooded river and
plunges down a waterfall. In another, Scar
instigates a wildebeest
stampede that leads to Mufasa's death.
Is the story as good as the storytelling?
Not always. For starters, the
movie's best-known songs (the ones by
Elton John and Tim Rice) don't
adapt very well to the stage. "Hakuna
Matata" still sounds jolly, but
it's a curiously shapeless song that has
no snap here. And the ballad
"Can You Feel the Love Tonight," in which
Simba (Mufasa's son, played
with wide-eyed energy by Jason
Raize) and Nala (the elegant
Heather Headley) fall in love, is such an
inert stage ballad that Miss
Taymor and choreographer Garth Fagan
resort to aerial ballet.
Scar's songs are particularly dull,
especially the peevish, formulaic
"The Madness of King Scar" that opens the
second act. But it is
followed by Nala's haunting "Shadowlands,"
a song that pulses with
African rhythms and a lovely Hans
Zimmer-Lebo M. melody.
The tale itself, about how the frightened
young Simba comes of age and
finally claims his kingdom from Scar,
comes together in a startling
sequence in the middle of the second act.
An African shaman named
Rafiki (played with wit and sung with
proud force by Tsidii Le Loka)
guides Simba to a pond and reminds him
that his father was a king.
Meanwhile, what appears to be a group of
fish floating in the darkness
behind Simba - our view of Simba's watery
reflection - suddenly takes
the shape of Mufasa's face. It's a
stunning sight, and Simba's
revelation (accompanied by the driving,
lordly refrain of "He Lives in
You") could hardly be more moving.
"The Lion King" - arguably the most
expensive puppet show in history -
is a long, imperfect musical. But it is
also dazzling, one-of-a-kind
entertainment. Usually critics' raves that
"There's nothing like it on
Broadway" don't mean much, because there
is so little on Broadway. But
heck, commercial American theater has
never seen anything like this.
Disney now not only occupies the forefront
of movie musicals - where,
Fox's latest challenge of "Anastasia"
notwithstanding, it essentially
has no competitors - it can also claim to
rule the cutting edge of
musical theater. Who would have guessed?
***** THREE AND ONE-HALF STARS
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