Adapted from Disney's 1994 animated film, The Lion King swept 6 Tony Awards in 1998, including Best Musical, and made Julie Taymor the first woman to win the Tony for Best Direction of a Musical.
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Disney's instinct after the 1994 film was a stage replica of it. Julie Taymor, hired to direct, delivered puppet theatre that never conceals its own machinery. The masks she designed with Michael Curry sit above the actors' faces rather than over them, and the animal bodies are visibly worn, wheeled or carried. The audience watches the performer and the creature at the same moment, and the production simply assumes both can be held in mind at once.
The score is broader than the film's. Elton John and Tim Rice's original songs remain, but the stage version folds in choral and percussion material from Lebo M, Mark Mancina, Jay Rifkin, Tsidii Le Loka and Hans Zimmer, much of it sung in Zulu and Swahili. That is why the show opens on a call rather than a downbeat: 'Circle of Life' begins with a single unaccompanied voice, and the animals are already coming up the aisles before the orchestra has said anything.
The 1998 Tony Awards gave it six — Best Musical, direction and costume design for Taymor, choreography for Garth Fagan, scenic design for Richard Hudson, lighting for Donald Holder. Taymor's win made her the first woman to take the directing award for a musical. The production opened at the New Amsterdam Theatre in November 1997 and moved to the Minskoff in June 2006, freeing the older house for another Disney title.
It is sold as family entertainment and fills that role, but its visual grammar is borrowed from Indonesian shadow puppetry, Japanese bunraku and West African mask traditions rather than from Broadway spectacle. Fagan's choreography draws on modern dance rather than musical-comedy vocabulary, which is why the movement tends to read as strange before it reads as animal. Both choices were considered risky for a Disney property in 1997; both are the reason the show has outlasted its own genre.
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The Lion King is a stage musical with a book by Roger Allers and Irene Mecchi based on the 1994 Walt Disney Animation Studios' film of the same name. Directed by Julie Taymor, the musical features actors in animal costumes as well as giant, hollow puppets. The show is produced by Disney Theatrical Productions and features songs from the original film by Elton John and Tim Rice, while the majority of new songs were contributed by Lebo M, Mark Mancina, Jay Rifkin, Tsidii Le Loka, Taymor, and Hans Zimmer.
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