A Roaring Success and Its Effects on Broadway
'Lion King' Changed Everything, and the Stampede Isn't Over

By Nelson Pressley
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, June 29, 2008

Even if you've never seen the musical "The Lion King," you might have heard rumbles about why for so long it's been, um, a rather Big Deal:

· It's a tireless Broadway phenomenon, so beloved (and still selling all its tickets) that it opened the Tony Awards telecast this year a full decade after it opened.

· It's such a precious treat, reducing young and old to blubber, that only now is it reaching Washington (the better to keep pilgrims flocking to New York, plus the tour was tricky to engineer). The widely lauded masks, puppets and mythic sensitivity of director-designer Julie Taymor are finally on view at the Kennedy Center.

· It's the crown jewel of the increasingly prominent Disney Theatrical Productions, which has three cash cows on Broadway, with "Mary Poppins" and "The Little Mermaid."

But did this lord of the Broadway jungle also spark a wave of creative and economic changes?

Depends on whom you talk to. Curiously, Disney Theatrical Productions President Thomas Schumacher says no.

"We're successful at it, and for the most part it's going well," Schumacher says. "But we didn't invent anything. If you say we invented [technical] vocabulary, I say, 'Cats.' If you say we invented going after this audience, I'll say, 'Annie.' "

Broadway 10 years prior to "The Lion King," in fact, looked remarkably as it does today. June 1988 and June 2008 both featured a Stephen Sondheim musical, a David Mamet play and a "Macbeth," along with an exuberant, culturally specific musical hit ("Sarafina!" then, "In the Heights" now). And 20 years ago, Broadway was no stranger to theme-park extravaganzas ("Starlight Express") and whiz-bang megamusicals ("Cats" and "Phantom"). Plus ca change. . .

But "Lion King" Technical Director David Benken thinks that the show "really opened up a lot of people's eyes as a different way to treat material." That's been the consensus: Animated-movie hits for kids could be made into surprisingly sophisticated theatrical fare for everyone, if a visionary such as Taymor took the reins.

Although Disney has since hired world-class directors (Richard Eyre for "Mary Poppins") and designers (Bob Crowley, who also made his directing debut with "Tarzan") and still often netted only mixed or poor reviews from critics, it's hard to argue that the company's impact over the past decade has been anything short of enormous. Just walk down tourist-friendly 42nd Street, or gape at the company's outsize share of the weekly Broadway grosses; Disney claimed more than $3 million of the nearly $22 million total during the week ending last Sunday.

Now its success has attracted a few more big kids to the playground. The newly minted DreamWorks Theatricals will produce "Shrek the Musical" on Broadway this fall, and even Marvel Comics is getting into the game. "Spider-Man" is targeted for sometime in 2009, and it's already much-anticipated: The composers are Bono and the Edge of U2, and the director is none other than Taymor.

Amy Petersen Jensen, author of "Theatre in a Media Culture: Production, Performance and Perception Since 1970," says that the current "viral" world of instant access and ready connections stimulates "our interest in the reinvention of things we're already familiar with." If that makes commercial spinoffs sound less like opportunistic marketing than like basic human nature, Jensen replies, "Marketing strategies play into our human nature, if they're very good."

She notes that Disney literally changed the face of Broadway with its renovation of 42nd Street, and credits the company with elevating theater to "vacation status -- it's the only way you could get them to buy an $80 ticket [a high price on tour] to something that was going to last two hours."

Indeed, one spectacular element of "The Little Mermaid" is the percentage of prepubescent girls, many clutching dolls and wearing sea-toned dresses, occupying $120 seats. (Booster cushions are available and are widely used -- a distinction even from the high-priced heyday of Andrew Lloyd Webber and "Les Miz.") The audience gets what it comes for: a familiar story made new onstage, with technical wonders to impress even the grown-ups and, in many cases, advance the industry standards.

The engineering of "Poppins" and "Mermaid" looks cutting edge, and Benken contends that's no illusion.

"Purely from a technical side, yeah," says Benken, who served as technical director on both "Lion King" and "Little Mermaid." "Everybody always wants to push the envelope a little bit farther."

Schumacher says: "Of course we're going to try to push that, and try to do some things you might not have seen before."

With "Mary Poppins," it's the extravagant flying that's drawing applause each time Ashley Brown (in the title role) lifts off in the New Amsterdam Theatre. For good measure, the show also offers a jaw-dropping dance that takes chimney sweep Bert up the sides and across the underside of the proscenium arch.

For "Little Mermaid," Disney had to find new technical talent to master the automation necessary in George Tsypin's set design, which perpetually shifts between deep sea and dry land. Tsypin's set is largely composed of plastic, which is intensely colorful, shiny and unusually hard to clean. (Apparently it's prone to a static charge that attracts dirt.) Before the show goes out on tour, technicians will make sure it won't crack in cold weather as the set is toted from city to city.

Benken notes that industry-wide, computer-driven systems now far outstrip those that motored the previous generation's megamusicals. Anyone who's ever been underwhelmed by the slow-falling chandelier in "Phantom of the Opera," he says, might want to check out the show in Las Vegas, where Benken just installed a system that drops the fixture at 17 feet per second.

"You couldn't have done that 10 years ago," Benken says, "or at least not for a reasonable amount of money." He also cites rising safety regulations, which is surely on Disney's consciousness in the wake of a seriously injured actor who last month fell off the tall, slender ship in "Little Mermaid" and is suing for damages.

Clearly, these complicated shows take longer to put together than, say, "Damn Yankees."

"Absolutely," says Mary Peterson, an associate costume designer on "The Lion King" and the upcoming "Spider-Man." "I know people who have been involved with 'Spider-Man' for years," Peterson says.

If Disney feels threatened by the oncoming competition, Schumacher isn't letting on. "Animation's not a genre, it's a technique," he says, adding that his offerings have the advantage of familiar music that audiences connect with. "Who's my competition? Me, right? I've got three shows competing for a similar kind of audience."

But that audience might have had its appetite whetted for the kinds of popular film characters and exciting new sights Disney has proved can be delivered anew on the stage. Of the looming "Shrek" and "Spider-Man," Benken says: "I'm familiar with some of what's going on with those shows. They're both very big shows. You're going to see some new ground broken, I think, with both of them."