STAND UP AND ROAR

By Richard Zoglin

Every big Broadway musical these days has the obligatory souvenir stand in the lobby, where happy patrons can buy a Cats T shirt or a Les Miz CD on their way out. But the gaudily restored New Amsterdam Theatre on 42nd Street, where Disney's stage version of The Lion King opened last week, boasts nothing less than an entire store filled with sweatshirts, stuffed animals and other Simba memorabilia. Has there ever been a Broadway show more confident that it will run forever? It has to; how else are the kids going to pass the time before loading up on merchandise?

So 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, it's not just an awe-inspiring sight, it's also a notice to kids and adults alike: Broadway theater is alive again.

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.

It's a gorgeous, gasp-inducing spectacle. And most of the time, it works dramatically. The fable of Simba the lion cub, who believes he has caused his father's death and exiles himself out of shame, is perhaps the most powerful of all the Disney latter-day cartoon myths. The story still depends too much on the exaggerated villainy of Simba's uncle Scar (John Vickery, nicely reprising Jeremy Irons' silky voicing of the character in the film); can't a kid disobey his father without help? And some of the comedy here, especially Geoff Hoyle's hammy-English-butler routine as Zazu, is more labored than in the film. But the show has few longueurs, some good new songs (Tim Rice and Elton John added three to the five they wrote for the film), and elaborately staged climaxes that really pay off. When Mufasa falls to his death from a cliff, he floats to the ground (suspended on wires) with a slow-motion grandeur that no movie special effect could top.

The musical has a touch of Broadway pizazz (Scott Irby-Ranniar, perhaps a bit too show-biz as the young Simba) and some welcome multicultural flavoring (the African choral numbers, written by Lebo M and Mark Mancina.) Most important--and against all odds--it has innocence. The show appeals to our primal, childlike excitement in the power of theater to make us see things things afresh. See this Lion King--and skip the store.