Post by Talissa on Jun 16, 2003 14:07:49 GMT 11
This isn't exactly new news, but I thought I might as well put it up for you
There's also an article about the children who were cast as young Simba and Nala here:
www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/06/15/1055615679186.html
Roaring success
June 16 2003
After six solid years on Broadway, The Lion King will soon bring Sydney the enchanting mix that gives it universal appeal, Colin Rose writes.
At 10am yesterday, Thomas Schumacher, the president of Disney Theatrical Productions, stepped onto the stage of the Capitol Theatre in Sydney and introduced the cast of The Lion King.
This is the latest milestone in Disney's campaign to publicise the blockbuster musical in the run-up to the show's first night at the Capitol on October 16. (Tickets go on sale today.)
Not that the show needs hyping.
Some king-size facts and figures: The Lion King opened on Broadway in October 1997. Nearly six years later, the production hasn't faltered: it remains Broadway's top earner, raking in almost $US1million ($1.5 million) a week at the box office. The show won six Tony Awards and a swag of other accolades.
The Sydney production will join several others playing around the globe, including shows in London, Chicago, Hamburg and Tokyo. Adding them all up, The Lion King is well on its way to selling its 18 millionth ticket.
Yet, looking back at the show's origins, this phenomenal success seems improbable. The Lion King was, of course, adapted for the stage from an animated film, not the most literary of sources when compared with, say, Victor Hugo's Les Miserables.
Disney is well known for animation, but had only one previous Broadway credit to its name: Beauty And The Beast. And The Lion King's director, Julie Taymor, is a darling of the avant-garde, not an expert at the Broadway musical.
Somewhat surprisingly, several of Disney's chiefs are steeped in theatre culture. Disney chairman Michael Eisner grew up going to Broadway, graduated in theatre and English and was once an aspiring playwright. And studio executives Peter Schneider and Schumacher, who would lead Disney's foray into live theatre, both cut their teeth in the performing arts.
The animated version of The Lion King was released in 1994: at the same time, Beauty And The Beast became a hit on Broadway.
"It seemed logical to Michael [Eisner] - 'Let's put another one on Broadway,"' Schumacher recalled. "I said, 'Oh, that's a bad idea."'
Schumacher thought the movie was "inherently non-theatrical" and couldn't see how it would work on stage.
"Michael said, 'I don't care how you do it, just go do it.'
"That's when I called Julie [Taymor] and said, 'Let's throw this wide open. If you could do it any way you wanted, how would you do it?."'
To anyone but Schumacher, Taymor must have seemed an unlikely choice. She trained as an actor with physical theatre guru Jacques Lecoq and lived in Asia for several years, studying Japanese and Indonesian theatre and puppetry. When Disney approached her, she was directing a Strauss opera in Russia. She was sceptical about how well her background would fit in at the home of Mickey Mouse.
Yet recruiting Taymor, and giving her more or less free rein, proved to be a stroke of genius. Her knowledge of myth and ritual, of masks, physical theatre and puppet-making transformed a cartoon into an epic, cross-cultural and inventively theatrical spectacle that would be an equal wow with kids and adults, and with audiences from North America to Japan.
The critics were wowed, too. Bruce Weber, theatre critic for The New York Times, wrote that if he could keep just 15 minutes of theatre it might well be Circle Of Life, The Lion King's opening number. Its "stunning loveliness", he wrote, "makes the child in every adult go giddy".
When the first of the show's "spectacular, life-size puppets - a stilted and quilted giraffe - lumbers in from the wings in front of a shimmering, layered backdrop in the burnished pastels of a savanna sunrise, it is the harbinger of the now-famous parade down the aisles of elephants, hippopotamuses, antelopes and their wild kingdom pals".
The look of The Lion King's costumes, masks and puppets, all of which Taymor designed, is African, tribal and handcrafted.
These rough-hewn and hand-operated virtues are also essential to the show's staging, the opposite of slick, high-tech special effects.
"Magic can exist in blatantly showing how theatre is created rather than hiding the 'how'," Taymor wrote about her approach to theatre-making.
"Showing the mechanics, revealing the rods, ropes and wires that make it all happen, is something the theatre can do that film and television cannot.
"Theatre functions best as a poetic medium. The audience, given a hint or suggestion of an idea, is ready to fill in the lines, to take it the rest of the way. They are participants in the entire event."
Such apparent ease and simplicity don't come cheaply, of course. Nor did Disney stint in the other creative departments. To the pop music and lyrics of Elton John and Tim Rice, carried over from the film, were added African-sounding music, rhythms and choral arrangements by Lebo M., a singer and composer from Soweto, South Africa.
It took Taymor two years of experimentation to develop The Lion King for Broadway. In Australia, The Lion King's casting director, Egil Kipste, had half that time to find the show's 52 performers.
"When I started, I thought, 'What am I going to do for 12 months?,"' Kipste said. "Well, it's gone too quickly."
Finalising the casting took him right up until today's announcement, such was the difficulty in tracking down performers with the right mix of acting, singing and dancing skills and who could work with puppets.
"When we did the first round of auditions, I got really worried," he said."Normally you have choices and we didn't have choices. So we had to look into alternative ways of casting, like going into the community, buttonholing people on the street, wherever we saw people that we thought would be right for the show."
Kipste held an impromptu audition at the airport - "to the bemusement of everyone around", he said - when he spotted a flight attendant who looked as though she had what ittakes.
One cast member was discovered in a Pizza Hut.
"We saw about 2000 people throughout Australia," he said.
"There are people in the cast who are household names and people who have never performed on a professional stage before. That's because we have simply gone for the best person for the job."
The Sydney production of The Lion King looks set to knock the spots off the competition, as it has done everywhere else it has opened.
Who would begrudge Disney or Taymor their success? Disney's deep corporate pockets bankrolled a visionary artist. And she gave Disney artistic credibility and a show that has whopping popular appeal.
Tickets for The Lion King go on sale today from 6am in person at the Capitol Theatre box office and from 8am at all Ticketmaster 7 outlets. Tickets will also go on sale via the internet at www.thelionking.com.au and The Lion King hotline, 1300855445.
This story was found at: www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/06/15/1055615674682.html
June 16 2003
After six solid years on Broadway, The Lion King will soon bring Sydney the enchanting mix that gives it universal appeal, Colin Rose writes.
At 10am yesterday, Thomas Schumacher, the president of Disney Theatrical Productions, stepped onto the stage of the Capitol Theatre in Sydney and introduced the cast of The Lion King.
This is the latest milestone in Disney's campaign to publicise the blockbuster musical in the run-up to the show's first night at the Capitol on October 16. (Tickets go on sale today.)
Not that the show needs hyping.
Some king-size facts and figures: The Lion King opened on Broadway in October 1997. Nearly six years later, the production hasn't faltered: it remains Broadway's top earner, raking in almost $US1million ($1.5 million) a week at the box office. The show won six Tony Awards and a swag of other accolades.
The Sydney production will join several others playing around the globe, including shows in London, Chicago, Hamburg and Tokyo. Adding them all up, The Lion King is well on its way to selling its 18 millionth ticket.
Yet, looking back at the show's origins, this phenomenal success seems improbable. The Lion King was, of course, adapted for the stage from an animated film, not the most literary of sources when compared with, say, Victor Hugo's Les Miserables.
Disney is well known for animation, but had only one previous Broadway credit to its name: Beauty And The Beast. And The Lion King's director, Julie Taymor, is a darling of the avant-garde, not an expert at the Broadway musical.
Somewhat surprisingly, several of Disney's chiefs are steeped in theatre culture. Disney chairman Michael Eisner grew up going to Broadway, graduated in theatre and English and was once an aspiring playwright. And studio executives Peter Schneider and Schumacher, who would lead Disney's foray into live theatre, both cut their teeth in the performing arts.
The animated version of The Lion King was released in 1994: at the same time, Beauty And The Beast became a hit on Broadway.
"It seemed logical to Michael [Eisner] - 'Let's put another one on Broadway,"' Schumacher recalled. "I said, 'Oh, that's a bad idea."'
Schumacher thought the movie was "inherently non-theatrical" and couldn't see how it would work on stage.
"Michael said, 'I don't care how you do it, just go do it.'
"That's when I called Julie [Taymor] and said, 'Let's throw this wide open. If you could do it any way you wanted, how would you do it?."'
To anyone but Schumacher, Taymor must have seemed an unlikely choice. She trained as an actor with physical theatre guru Jacques Lecoq and lived in Asia for several years, studying Japanese and Indonesian theatre and puppetry. When Disney approached her, she was directing a Strauss opera in Russia. She was sceptical about how well her background would fit in at the home of Mickey Mouse.
Yet recruiting Taymor, and giving her more or less free rein, proved to be a stroke of genius. Her knowledge of myth and ritual, of masks, physical theatre and puppet-making transformed a cartoon into an epic, cross-cultural and inventively theatrical spectacle that would be an equal wow with kids and adults, and with audiences from North America to Japan.
The critics were wowed, too. Bruce Weber, theatre critic for The New York Times, wrote that if he could keep just 15 minutes of theatre it might well be Circle Of Life, The Lion King's opening number. Its "stunning loveliness", he wrote, "makes the child in every adult go giddy".
When the first of the show's "spectacular, life-size puppets - a stilted and quilted giraffe - lumbers in from the wings in front of a shimmering, layered backdrop in the burnished pastels of a savanna sunrise, it is the harbinger of the now-famous parade down the aisles of elephants, hippopotamuses, antelopes and their wild kingdom pals".
The look of The Lion King's costumes, masks and puppets, all of which Taymor designed, is African, tribal and handcrafted.
These rough-hewn and hand-operated virtues are also essential to the show's staging, the opposite of slick, high-tech special effects.
"Magic can exist in blatantly showing how theatre is created rather than hiding the 'how'," Taymor wrote about her approach to theatre-making.
"Showing the mechanics, revealing the rods, ropes and wires that make it all happen, is something the theatre can do that film and television cannot.
"Theatre functions best as a poetic medium. The audience, given a hint or suggestion of an idea, is ready to fill in the lines, to take it the rest of the way. They are participants in the entire event."
Such apparent ease and simplicity don't come cheaply, of course. Nor did Disney stint in the other creative departments. To the pop music and lyrics of Elton John and Tim Rice, carried over from the film, were added African-sounding music, rhythms and choral arrangements by Lebo M., a singer and composer from Soweto, South Africa.
It took Taymor two years of experimentation to develop The Lion King for Broadway. In Australia, The Lion King's casting director, Egil Kipste, had half that time to find the show's 52 performers.
"When I started, I thought, 'What am I going to do for 12 months?,"' Kipste said. "Well, it's gone too quickly."
Finalising the casting took him right up until today's announcement, such was the difficulty in tracking down performers with the right mix of acting, singing and dancing skills and who could work with puppets.
"When we did the first round of auditions, I got really worried," he said."Normally you have choices and we didn't have choices. So we had to look into alternative ways of casting, like going into the community, buttonholing people on the street, wherever we saw people that we thought would be right for the show."
Kipste held an impromptu audition at the airport - "to the bemusement of everyone around", he said - when he spotted a flight attendant who looked as though she had what ittakes.
One cast member was discovered in a Pizza Hut.
"We saw about 2000 people throughout Australia," he said.
"There are people in the cast who are household names and people who have never performed on a professional stage before. That's because we have simply gone for the best person for the job."
The Sydney production of The Lion King looks set to knock the spots off the competition, as it has done everywhere else it has opened.
Who would begrudge Disney or Taymor their success? Disney's deep corporate pockets bankrolled a visionary artist. And she gave Disney artistic credibility and a show that has whopping popular appeal.
Tickets for The Lion King go on sale today from 6am in person at the Capitol Theatre box office and from 8am at all Ticketmaster 7 outlets. Tickets will also go on sale via the internet at www.thelionking.com.au and The Lion King hotline, 1300855445.
This story was found at: www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/06/15/1055615674682.html
There's also an article about the children who were cast as young Simba and Nala here:
www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/06/15/1055615679186.html
And being over East meant chances were slim. I hope it comes to Perth, eventually I've heard great things about it. 
I will be travelling to see it.
