Animal Magnetism

Disney takes the high road to profit.

- By John Lahr

“The fairground booth is eternal. Its heroes do not die; they simply change their aspects and assume new forms," the great Russian avant-garde director Vsevolod Meyerhold once said. With its noise, its novelty, its love of the grotesque, and its vivid design of movement, the fairground is a revolt against the deadliness of naturalism and an invitation for the public to play. This spirit has reëmerged, improbably, on West Forty-second Street, in the shape of an entire stylized menagerie of animals for Disney's "The Lion King," which opened last week at the sumptuously renovated New Amsterdam Theatre, under the bold scenic and sculptural hand of Julie Taymor, an avant-gardist who has been enlisted in the commercial ranks. (She earned her spurs in the early seventies as an apprentice to the Open Theatre's Joe Chaikin and the Bread and Puppet Theatre's Peter Schumann; she subsequently lived in Indonesia for four years, studying traditional and experimental puppetry.) With the show clearing a pre-opening advance of about twenty million dollars, Taymor has proved to Disney that taking the high theatrical road can be a good business decision. Here, on a superb protean set by Richard Hudson, she uses a wide range of puppet styles, African-inspired fabrics, Zulu chants, and a grab bag of borrowed but effective avant-garde staging tricks to turn "The Lion King" into a theatrical event far more textured and original than the film. The musical is a series of truly vivants tableaux-part pageant, part puppet show, part parade, with a touch of Las Vegas revue thrown in-telling the story of Simba, a princely lion cub who loses his kingdom, goes into exile, and returns to claim his inheritance from his epicene, malevolent Uncle Scar, a pooftah in the pride. The lineaments of the plot touch loosely on Adam, on Oedipus, and on the prodigal son, but what is really dramatized is not so much the longing for a