Word: taymor
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...Lion King The Broadway audience might have settled for the animated feature plopped directly (and predictably) onstage. But director and costume designer Julie Taymor wanted to create a different kind of fascination. Through puppetry, shadow figures and masks, Taymor makes her Lion King--at the renovated New Amsterdam Theater (see above)--the master of a powerful realm, ancient and African, full of ritual, magic...
...much for the cynicism. It evaporates about 30 seconds after the house lights dim and director Julie Taymor's menagerie starts appearing on the stage and in the aisles. A pair of spindly giraffes (with men on stilts hidden inside) parade regally in front of a golden sun. A cheetah prowls the stage, manipulated by a fully visible actor as if she were pushing an anthropomorphic wheelbarrow. Birds "fly" on the end of a pole waved around like a kite, while a huge elephant galumphs down the aisle. As they converge to the strains of Circle of Life...
Disney seemed to be taking a risk when it hired Taymor--an avant-garde director who uses puppets, masks and other non-Western theater techniques--to adapt its most popular animated film for the stage. It turns out to have been a masterstroke. Taymor has brought the same kind of let's-start-from-scratch inspiration that Walt and his fellow animators must have had when they created Mickey and Snow White and virtually invented the art of movie animation...
...Taymor's imaginative ideas seem limitless. Actors wear masks atop their heads and manipulate life-size puppets, in bold defiance of conventional stage literalism. Dance numbers brim with vibrant, African-carnival colors; the big action sequences, like a wildebeest stampede conveyed by wheels and masks, dazzle with their allusive originality. Some of the most striking images are the simplest. Women with grass headdresses stand in a row and sway to manifest wind in the African savanna. When the lionesses grieve over the death of their King, Mufasa, they pull ribbons of fabric from their eyes to suggest tears...
...actors are feeling some wear and tear too. Though the puppets and masks have been made as lightweight as possible, a physical therapist has been kept busy treating sore backs and muscles. Then there's the challenge of learning to act while playing second fiddle to Taymor's models. Says Casella, who once played Doogie Howser's best friend on TV and didn't know the show involved puppets when he went to audition: "The first thing Julie told us was, 'Don't upstage the puppet.' As an actor, that's the last thing you want to hear." Taymor...