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July 23, 2010
Big cats have a stage turn
The Lion King offers a masterfully designed world.
BASYA LAYE
There really is little better, in my opinion, than a stage full of people dressed as animals singing and dancing. For those with a similar penchant, it’s time to make a date to visit the Queen Elizabeth Theatre where, for the next several weeks, the stage will teem with lions, gazelles, birds, wildebeests, a warthog and a meerkat, a rhino, hyenas, an elephant and giraffes, in the touring Broadway production of Disney’s The Lion King.
Brought to Vancouver by Broadway Across Canada, which presents touring musicals and plays to cities across the country, the play, based on the 1994 animated movie of the same name, has now been seen by an estimated 50 million people worldwide since it opened on Broadway in November 1997. The show has received six Tony Awards, including for best musical and a 1998 Grammy Award for best musical show album.
The Lion King tells the story of royal and filial duty, of the natural order in the animal kingdom and of friendship. It also is one of the few examples of a bildungsroman of the big cat African savannah. Simba, the lion cub who is next in line for the throne at Pride Rock, must come into his own in order to lead his people with confidence and “kitty” righteousness.
A stand-out of this show are the costumes, designed by Julie Taymor, who also co-designed the puppets with Michael Curry. The puppetry was magnificent and complicated – among other examples, I more than once wondered how the hyenas walked on “four legs” and, then, how the actors still had one hand free to move their heads and jaws into curling, snarling, pathologically giggling hysterics. Taymor, not incidentally, is also the director of the show and she’s won many awards for her costume and puppet designs, and her work alone is worth the price of admission.
Other highlights included Richard Hudson’s scenic design, which provided an intensely beautiful world to look at when the story wasn’t grabbing my attention, the lighting by Donald Holder, which was magical, and the staging, which was near perfect. How that many people in complex costumes, with moving parts and heavy headdresses, could navigate the stage without a single tumble is beyond me and is a testament to the performers’ level of physical artistry and the abilities of choreographer Garth Fagan. The lions in the show seemed to embody their feline esthetic, engaging in no end of posturing, head butting, preening, stalking, pouncing and languid lounging.
Overall, the acting was a little over the top, but that’s how I imagine a Disney Broadway musical to be. It might be saying something that, for all the years I lived in New York City, I never once thought to go see this show. There is nothing subtle about a Disney score and the music of Tim Rice and Elton John is a bit dull and mostly forgettable, in my opinion, and the songs don’t have either the pep or the intrigue of musicals like Chicago or West Side Story. Not one of the songs I enjoyed most was one of the five originals written by John and Rice. Instead, I enjoyed the “additional” songs with music and lyrics by Taymor, Lebo M., Mark Mancina, Jay Rifkin and Hans Zimmer.
The best of these included “Shadowland,” sung by Nala (Syndee Winters) and Rafiki (Brenda Mhlongo) at the beginning of Act 2, which showcased the cast’s two strongest singers, as well as “Endless Night,” “He Lives in You” and the lionesses’ “Grasslands Chant.”
I spent a good deal of time watching the two percussion pits, one on each side of the stage, as the percussionists produced flourishes and bits of sonic drama to go along with the soaring orchestral score played by the traveling Lion King orchestra conducted by Rick Snyder. The two percussionists produced djembe and bongo beats that could sound like calloused feline paws padding across the dry savannah or the frenzied sound of a wildebeest stampede.
The script seemed to match the movie nearly word for word, which, I imagine, delighted the children in the audience who have, at one time or another, had the VHS or DVD of the movie playing on repeat. At one point, the king’s advisor/confidante Zazu the Toucan (Tony Freeman), acknowledges this fidelity to the movie and says frantically, as an aside to the audience, “This wasn’t in the movie!” as he loses the cubs in hyena territory and a printed curtain descends.
Comic relief, like in the film, is provided by Puumba the Warthog (Ben Lipitz) and Timon the Meerkat (Nick Cordileone). These two delightful outcasts take Simba under their wing and are a source of wise-cracking humor, but they are also kindly and teach the frightened and selfish lion cub about friendship and courage in the face of adversity. There were several high-pitched squeals of young audience delight when Timon and Puumba were on stage stirring up trouble.
Nicholas Carriere, the stand-in for J. Anthony Crane, played Scar and he was exacting and delightfully evil, a welcome complexity in the midst of flat, underdeveloped relationships and one-dimensional characters.
Waiting in the near-infinite 20-minute long wait for the ladies room at intermission, I overheard a young girl making a case for why the hyenas were her favorite characters – which might have been the case for me had their lines not felt rushed and, at times, unintelligible, their dialogue too loud and punctuated by laughs, shrieks and giggles, to make out what was, no doubt, some funny dialogue.
In the end, it wasn’t Rice and John’s lyrics and score or the Disney story that drew me in – it was the artistry of the masterful world that was created on the Queen Elizabeth stage, the African-music inflected chorus, the intense physicality of the performers and the singular magic of the costumes and puppetry.
The Lion King plays at the Queen E. Theatre until Aug. 8. Visit ticketmaster.ca for tickets and information.
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