Photo by Joan Marcus.
By DCist Contributor Riley Croghan
Have you seen The Lion King yet? Maybe you caught one of its nearly 7,000 showings since it debuted on Broadway seventeen years ago. Maybe you’ve seen one of the touring productions—The Kennedy Center is playing host to touring production number 5,000 later this month—or have had a friend tell you breathlessly about how much the opening number “Circle of Life” blew them away. If nothing else, maybe you, along with 17 million other people, saw the YouTube video of the cast singing said song on an airplane. And if you haven’t seen it, then surely a pretty good picture of the production has already seeped into your head via cultural osmosis.
I mention all this, at the risk of painting myself as a blasé, disillusioned grump, so that you fully understand what I mean when I say that the opening number—and the whole musical by extension—still manages to be everything you’ve heard it is, and more. As the Opera House is transformed into the Serengeti, with birds soaring overhead and elephants lumbering down the aisle to the tune of an insistently catchy childhood favorite, it’s impossible not to feel chills. It moves us all, indeed.
There’s simply little that can be said about director Julie Taymor’s vivacious treatment of Disney’s The Lion King that hasn’t been brought up in hundreds of previous reviews (including DCist’s own when the show ran at The Kennedy Center a scant six years ago). There’s even less to say that can’t be mentioned about any experience available in one of Disney’s theme parks: it’s a slick, big budget production; it’s aggressively family-friendly; and it will all but force you to exit through a gift shop. But of course, as advertised, the musical also offers one of the most dazzling nights of theater you could ask for. There’s a reason the show has achieved massive cultural ubiquity.
The production uses the energy of its gangbusters opening to race through most of the familiar songs from the movie (by Elton John and Tim Rice) with a boisterous African remixing (by Lebo M., Mark Mancina, Jay Fifkin, Julie Taymor, and Hans Zimmer) in Act I. The young leads, Jordan Hall as young Simba and Nya Cymone Carter as young Nala, cavort across an imaginatively realized Africa (designed by Richard Hudson) with glee to favorites like “I Just Can’t Wait to Be King” and new, sometimes entirely non-English numbers like the stirring “Nao Tse Tsa.”
They’re complemented by adult actors in roles that largely hew to the familiar but brilliant performances from the original movie: L. Steven Taylor is a commendably gruff Mufasa/James Earl Jones, Patrick Brown provides a campy-evil Scar/Jeremy Irons/Claudius, and Andrew Gorell is a delightfully finicky Zazu/Rowan Atkinson. The notable exception is Tshidi Manye’s Rafiki, the rambunctious, Zulu chanting mandrill who has been transformed from a memorable side-character in the movie to the standout star of the musical. The role was originally reworked and expanded by Taymor and the original Rafiki, Tsidii Le Loka, to create a much larger female presence out of the male-heavy movie. Rafiki has some of the best jokes, with some punchlines delivered while on a vine, swinging on and off the stage.
With almost all of the major movie songs knocked out in the first act, Act II is somber by comparison (a considerable feat, since Mufasa’s tearjerking death happens toward the end of Act I). There’s still plenty of beautiful music to take in, though. Four brand new songs capture the tragedy rolling across the Pridelands after Scar assumes the monarchy, including the stunning “Shadowland.” The song is a deeply moving take on an instrumental track from the movie, where adult Nala (Nia Holloway) bids farewell to the pride as she sets off in search of food.
Of course, a Disney production would never dwell in depression for very long, and the relentlessly optimistic energy is returned to the production with “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” and—naturally—an ending reprise of “Circle of Life.” For those who have recently had their hearts broken by the less family-friendly Side Show, another musical running concurrently at The Kennedy Center, the tirelessly upbeat Lion King is sure to drag a sense of childlike wonder back out by force from even the most jaded theatergoers. Disney finds a way.
The Lion King runs at The Kennedy Center through August 17 at the Opera House stage. Tickets, $40-$195, are available here http://www.kennedy-center.org/events/?event=TOTSD
