Suddenly, you're 4 years old again, and you've been taken to the circus for the first time. You can only marvel at the exotic procession of animals before you: the giraffes and the elephants and the hippopotamuses and all those birds in balletic flight. Moreover, these are not the weary-looking beasts in plumes and spangles that usually plod their way through urban circuses but what might be described as their Platonic equivalents, creatures of air and light and even a touch of divinity. ...Give the Mouse credit -- by empowering Julie Taymor to take on this project, The Lion King became far more inventive, more striking and more African than it perhaps needed to be -- but that made all the difference between a short-term success and a classic.
Throughout the show's 2 hours and 40 minutes (as against the 75-minute movie), there will be plenty of instances of breathtaking beauty and scenic ingenuity, realized through techniques ranging from shadow puppetry to Bunraku. Certainly, nowhere before on Broadway has a stampede of wildebeests or a herd of veldt-skimming gazelles been rendered with such eye-popping conviction.
Friday, March 26, 2010
UP, SIMBA: ThingThrowers of the Delaware Valley would be well-served to make their way to the Academy of Music over the next month while The Lion King is in town. Took Lucy and a friend tonight, and it remains as visually stunning as when Ben Brantley originally reviewed the musical in 1997:
Oh, man. This show gets me every time. I start blubbering as soon as the animals appear, and I pretty much don't stop til I've gotten in the car to go home. It's so beautiful.
ReplyDeleteThe one problem I have with the show is that the opening "Circle of Life" is so spectacular that the show can't come close to it for the rest of its (fairly long) running time, and the second act is both very dark and kind of slow.
ReplyDelete'I didn't know we could do this, Casey, did you know we could do this?'
ReplyDelete