Hear Her Roar
Town & Country|November 2017

The lion king is every kid’s favorite musical, but 20 years into its billion-dollar run, the show’s creator is still learning the law of the jungle.

Elysa Gardner
Hear Her Roar

Once upon a time, a ferociously inventive artist with a background in experimental theater was tasked with directing and designing puppets, masks, and costumes for a stage adaptation of Disney’s animated musical The Lion King. One of Julie Taymor’s original concepts for the show involved placing masks atop the actors’ heads,effectively giving their characters two faces, but there was concern that this might disrupt the audience’s focus.

“So I decided I would do two or three characters in four or five different ways,” Taymor recalls, more than two decades later. Ultimately Michael Eisner, then CEO of the Walt Disney Company, told Taymor to follow her instincts. “He said, ‘Let’s go with your first idea. The bigger the risk, the bigger the payoff.’ And that’s the way I think it’s worth living as an artist—and living in general.”

Indeed, as The Lion King, which made Taymor the first woman to win a Tony for directing a musical (she earned another trophy for costuming), celebrates its 20th anniversary this November (a 25th international production is set to open in Manila next March; the show’s total worldwide gross is $7.9 billion), Taymor is beginning another daunting venture: the first Broadway revival of David Henry Hwang’s eyebrow-raising 1988 play M. Butterfly, which was inspired by the real, but stranger than fiction, relationship between a French diplomat and a Peking opera singer.

This story is from the November 2017 edition of Town & Country.

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This story is from the November 2017 edition of Town & Country.

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