Hi all,

This review appeared in one of our national newspapers today:

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THE DAILY TELEGRAPH (14/11/97)

Disney Stakes claim to musical crown

The long-awaited musical of *The Lion King* opened on Broadway last
night. And, amazingly, it's as good as the film.

By Charles Spencer in New York

A BROADWAY musical based on the Disney cartoon *The Lion King*
sounds like a contradiction in terms. The whole point of animated
films is that they can achieve things that aren't possible in the
real world. Animals talk. Humans fly. Anything you can imagine can
happen. 

The theatre doesn't work like that. Compared with the wonders of the
movies, stage special effects seem cumbersome and contrived. Yet
amazingly, against all the odds, the stage version of *The Lion
King* works superbly. It is one of the freshest and most consistently
imaginative musicals since that other feline triumph, *Cats*. 

Earlier this year Peter Schneider, the president of Walt Disney
Theatrical Productions, told me he hoped that *The Lion King* would
extend the boundaries of what was possible in the theatre. This
seemed unlikely at the time. Disney's previous theatrical productions
have been *The Beauty and the Beast*, enjoyable but little more than
a spectacular pantomime, and *King David*, a somnolent biblical epic
that harked drearily back to the pop operas of the Sixties and
Seventies. 

*The Lion King*, however, really is original and, more remarkably
still for Disney, which is regarded as the most play-safe of cultural
organisations, daring. With a budget of more than $15 million (about
£9.4m), it is the most expensive show ever seen on the Great White
Way, yet it is no slick, soulless, high-tech blockbuster.  The most
remarkable thing about this animal show, in fact, is its humanity. 

The director, Julie Taymor, comes from the experimental side of
American theatre and is famous for her use of masks and puppets.  I
have to confess that masks and puppets usually bring me out in a
rash of irritation--they are at once creepy and pretentious--but here
they work. 

The reason is that Taymor lets you see how her marvellously inventive
visual devices work. (As well as directing, she has been involved
with costumes, masks and puppets.) We know the giraffes are people
with stilts on their hands and feet. You can't help responding with
childlike delight when a procession of graceful zebras, aggressive
rhinos and a lumbering, life-size elephant make their way down the
aisle and climb up on to the stage at the start but there's no
attempt to disguise the humans inside. There's something home-made
and rough-hewn about it all. 

The principal characters wear masks not over but above their faces,
so you simultaneously see the animal and the actor. Unlike a cartoon,
with its cuddly anthropomorphism, the effect is rich, strange and
primitive. 

Which brings me to the other major change from the film. The movie
took place in a twee Disneyfied fantasy country.  Here the location
and the atmosphere is distinctly African. 

The songs are pleasing enough, as middle-of-the-road pop songs go,
especially the Oscar-winning *Can You Feel the Love Tonight?*.  And
Elton John and Tim Rice have contributed three new songs to the five
that appeared in the movie. 

The real addition, however, is a great deal of stirring African
chanting, and several new numbers by a chap called Lebo M and others
that combine Zulu tradition with the vibe of the South African
townships. There is now a sense of ritual and tribal identity about
the score, and haunting African-inflected numbers such as
*Shadowland* and *He Lives in You* send shivers down the spine. 

Taymor comes up with magical moments of staging. Most impressive is
the stampede of wildebeest in the gorge, involving the use of sets
like Rothko paintings, silhouettes, an unravelling back cloth,
revolving models, actors and massive masks. There's no attempt to
conceal how it is done, but the ingenuity and the use of perspective
are extraordinarily satisfying. Almost as fine is the moment when
Mufasa's face suddenly emerges out of a psychedelic nightmare of
quivering green spots.


THE KEY to The Lion King's success (the film is Disney's most
profitable ever, with a worldwide gross of more than $750 million --
about £470m) is the story.  It's *Hamlet* set among the lions.  Poor
confused Simba must come to terms with his Father's death and take
revenge on his wicked uncle Scar.  It is a rites-of-passage story,
though unlike Shakespeare's it has a happy ending.  The father/son
relationship is most touchingly observed. 

With the distinclively African atmosphere of this production,
however, a wider dimension has been added. Though Taymor doesn't
labour the point, it is impossible not to see parallels with South
Africa in the story of the Pridelands, suffering under Scar's tyranny
and ultimately redeemed and regenerated by Simba, like a leonine
Nelson Mandela. 

All of which might make *The Lion King* sound insufferably po-faced,
and certainly I could happily live without all the sub-mystical
claptrap about "the great circle of life". 

Happily the book, by Roger Allers and Irene Mecchi, has some
excellent jokes and in Scar the show has a comic villain, to employ
his own phrase, to die for. John Vickery plays the wicked uncle with
a mixture of resonant authority, ingenious cruelty and a nice line in
craven camp. And, surprise, surprise, like almost all baddies in
American entertainment, he has an English accent. 

Twelve-year-old Scott Irby-Ranniar is young Simba -- an engaging
streetwise urchin--though Jason Raize is a touch bland as the
grown-up Simba and the love interest with Heather Headley's
strong-voiced Nala never really ignites. Samuel E Wright has a
massive dignity as Mufasa, Tsidii Le Loka is wonderfully bizarre as
the shamanic baboon Rafiki. Max Casella and Tom Allan Robbins offer
welcome comic relief as Timon and Pumbaa (the savvy meerkat and
smelly wart-hog). The obscenely giggling hyenas are memorably
repellent. 

*The Lion King* isn't perfect.  The pace sometimes flags in the
second half, the finale could be more exciting and the whole show
exudes a faintly self-congratulatory air of political correctness. 
Nevertheless, with its strong narrative, superb visual effects and
genuine warmth of heart, this is a show that will enchant both adults
and children.  I hope it makes the Atlantic crossing soon. 

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