The Lion King’s National Touring Company roared into San Francisco with all the creativity, color and excitement the show has always given audiences. A big part of its success is Julie Taymor’s genius direction, which won her Tony Awards in 1998 for direction and costume design. She also was the mask/puppet co-designer and composer of additional music and lyrics.
The production combines exquisite movable African masks of shadow and bunraku style puppets with colorful costumes and sets that draw the audience into mind-spinning wonderment. The stage undulates to give the feeling of space and time, the creatures become real as the actors blend their masks or puppets with an openness for all to see.
Creative, unique, elegant, artistic, inventive would be understated descriptors for this The Lion King production. “Pushing the envelope” also applies. Here is theatre as has not been seen before, a production where the star is the director, using her vast talents to bring forward a story most of us are familiar with but still find mesmerizing. With her outside-the-box imagination, it took three years to bring this spectacle to the stage.
While the San Francisco show is definitely a smaller scale production than the New York one, and the cast has large shoes to fill, but the energy and effort is there without the edge of Broadway. The Lion King’s music features choral arrangements from South Africa and songs by Elton John and Tim Rice. “Circle of Life,” “Hakuna Matata” and the Oscar-winning “Can You Feel The Love Tonight” are familiar pieces from the movie, but it’s the African chants and songs added to the stage version by Lebo M. Mark Mancina that astonish and Garth Fagan’s choreography that sets the mood throughout the performance.
Taymor, along with Michael Curry, created hundreds of masks and puppets with a sensitivity that gives the characters believability.
The opening is almost a spiritual experience, as the animals of the Savannah make their way down the aisles of the theatre toward the stage to the African chant announcing the birth of the baby lion to the lion king.
Keep in mind punctuality for this performance is a must. No one will be seated during the entrance of the animals and it is one of the many highlights of the show.
The Lion King is a unique event of pure genius at work and will remain a glowing experience in your memory.
‘The Lion King’
Orpheum Theatre, 1192 Market St (at Eighth), San Francisco.
Playing Through Dec. 31.
For tickets and information call (888) 746-1799 or visit www.shnsf.com.
