The Lion King Musical

Like everyone else from my generation, I have quite the soft spot for Disney. My favorites are Aladdin and the Lion King – so naturally I had no objections to seeing the Broadway Musical (in London) of Lion King.

The play itself was pretty damn good. It stuck with most of the same dialogue and songs, but added a few new things. The play did a good job of putting in the best parts, while memories of the animated movie supplemented their performances.

Though I wanted to be surprised, I couldn’t help flipping through the deluxe program with big pictures of all the cool costumes. They were elaborate and highly stylized for each character – which was awesome. There was also a mixture of African art and Eastern Chinese art. Some characters had vaguely Samurai-esque costumes, and Mufassa had a pair of Shaolin(sp?) curvey swords. The actor was not nearly as powerful as James Earl Jones, but Jones is busy acting in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Pumbaa had a full-body suit that turned the actor into the warthog, and Timon’s actor was painted green to let his life-sized Timon-puppet take the focus. He wasn’t quite as great as Nathan Lane, but he did okay. Adult Simba had a strange accent that sometimes took away from the scenes of dialogue.

Zazuu was the best at vocally mimicking the cartoon counterpart, but was the strangest to watch. The actor was dressed up and had makeup and a bowler hat, but he also had a lively puppet which he controlled and sometimes put on his head. At one point, the puppet gets separated from the actor, and he says “where’s my bird?” so what the heck is that about? Is the bird the character? Is the actor the character? I thought they both together were! He broke the fourth wall (or in theater terms, the fourth curtain) and addressed the audience once in a while.

I thought the coolest costume was the giraffes, because the actors walked around on stilts. There were those annoying bird’s on sticks flying around once in a while, but there were enough impressive costumes to make up fir them. It was a million times better than War Horse, that’s for sure.