On Saturday, January 13th, my Mom, my Dad, my parents’ friend Susan, and I went down to LA to see the stage production of The Lion King at the Pantages theatre.  What I didn’t know at the time we planned the trip was that the theatre is not actually in LA but in Hollywood, at the infamous corner of Hollywood and Vine (I’m not sure why it’s so famous—it’s not particularly spectacular to look at, but hey, now I’ve been to Hollywood and Vine).  Furthermore, our hotel was also in the heart of Hollywood, right on Hollywood Blvd, across from Mann’s Chinese Theatre which is where all the stars have their hand and footprints, and right on the Walk of Fame (as is the theatre—in fact, Andrew Lloyd Weber has a star right in front of the theatre).  Our hotel, I learned later, is also famous.  We stayed at the Hollywood Roosevelt, which is where the first Academy awards were held, where the staircase where Mr. Bojangles taught a dance to Shirley Temple is (or at least was—the hotel’s been remodeled a couple of times), and where the old TV show This is Your Life took place.  They have a very interesting exhibit on the mezzanine which includes old equipment such as a silent film camera and another camera, and clippings and pictures of Hollywood, stars, films, and studios through the years.

So after we got settled Mom, Susan, and I went out to explore.  That part of Hollywood is an interesting place.  First you have the famous Walk of Fame, the Chinese Theatre, the Egyptian Theatre (another famous theatre), several museums (Ripley’s, Guiness, and Hollywood Wax), and then you have tattoo parlors and really low class dives peddling tacky pictures of stars, and places with leather and skulls and all kinds of interesting things.  Quite an experience.  Mom said it was kinda like New York and I said, no, it was completely unique.  We peeked into wax museum and saw Xena and King Kong’s face and fist holding Faye Wraye, and the gang from Wizard of Oz, and very poor likeness of Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet from Titanic, and we saw lots of the commemorative stars on the walk of fame, including Billy Barty, Elvis, William Shatner, Harry Belafonte, Casey Kassem, Sons of the Pioneers, Bette Davis, Tom Cruise, Dionne Warwick, Ray Bolger, and lots of others I can’t remember right now or didn’t recognize.  In front of the Chinese Theatre we saw Harrison Ford’s handprints, a Star Wars exhibit that had the marks of C3P0, R2D2, and Darth Vader, Whoopi Goldberg’s braid marks, Roy Rogers, his gun, and Trigger’s hoofprints, Tom Mix and the hoofprints of his steed Tony, Shirley Temple, Anthony Hopkins (those had just been done Friday and were still set off drying), Jimmy Durante (but I missed his nose print), George Burns, and again, lots of others I forget.  Then we picked up my Dad, had dinner, dressed, and went to the theatre.

Mom had gotten us really good seats, in rows U and V of the orchestra, just to the right of center.  Mom and Dad were in the center of row U, and Susan and I were on the right aisle side of row V.  Quite a bit happens out in the orchestra section, so these were really, really good seats.

For those of you who saw the Tonys in 1998 (or, to a lesser, slightly less impressive degree, Animagic at Disneyland), you’ve seen the opening number, and believe me, that’s just a taste of the whole show.  Just as in the movie, the play starts with the number “Circle of Life”, and begins by spotlighting Rafiki calling the animals to witness Simba’s birth.  When we saw it, Rafiki was the understudy, but man, I don’t feel we missed anything—she was still incredible.  Interestingly, the one major change to the movie plot that was made was to change Rafiki from male to female.  Maybe because it better reflects African culture, maybe for the vocal range, I don’t know.  Anyhow, the number shows all of the animals moving onto stage, and the animals are all done by melding people into puppets.  It’s just a truly amazing spectacle.  There are giraffes on stilts, and a two-person rhinoceros complete with roosting birds, and a huge elphant that comes parading down the center aisle with a baby elephant tagging along, and these two women who play gazelles—3 each—one in each hand and one on their heads, and their legs move in perfect rhythm with their arms.  But my favorite of the minor animals was the cheetah, who just had the movement down perfect, and had this wonderful headshake where her puppet head moved and so did her regular head.  And at one point, a bird comes by (this amazing mechanism of a silk bird cutout on a wire balanced on a bamboo stick that circles around—truly gorgeous), and the cheetah leaps up at it just like a kitten.  Wonderful.  And the effects just get better from there.  They have this human grasslands that moves and the characters weave in and out among it, and a forest that’s the same way, and the costume and make up are just so outrageous that you forget they’re people.  And Timon and Pumba look just like they do in the movie.  Timon is a full sized marionette attached to the man who plays him (marionette in front, man in back), and Pumbaa is a costume that the actor wears around his middle, but it’s just so well done it’s seamless.

The absolutely neatest parts were the deaths of Mustafa and Scar.  The stampede leading up to Mustafa’s death was just a visual masterpiece.  It starts out with a backdrop of wildebeest grazing in the background, then, as the stampede starts, becomes a backdrop with shadow wildebeest flowing down it, then becomes people with small masks of wildebeest in the back of the stage, then medium masks in the middle, and then large masks in the front.  It’s just absolutely perfect.  Dad says that was probably the hardest scene because it was so well done in the movie, but they definitely lived up to the movie and then some.  Scar’s death was much more standard done with lights and timing, but it still gave me chills.

There was some absolutely spectacular acting in the play.  John Vickery (Neroon from Babylon 5) played Scar, and in fact originated him on Broadway, and he is just to die for.  He’s a little weak on singing (and their balance between orchestra, chorus, and lead vocals was off, as is often the case), but his acting was incredible.  Not just the way he delivered his lines, but he had these wonderful little mannerisms and extras that are just so typical of Disney and what makes Disney’s works, particularly animation, so rich.  Young Simba would pounce on his tail, and he’d jerk it away, and during one dance number, first he twirled his tail and then he was doing the Egyptian, and it was just wonderful.  The other fantastic actor was the one who played Zasu.  First of all, the puppet of Zasu was an achievement in and of itself—the actor was dressed in a suit and bowler, and holding a puppet of a bird which he moved all around, with such skill that like Pumbaa you tended to forget it was the person, not the puppet, doing the talking.  It was really great.

Overall, I really enjoyed the play, and I liked it much better than the movie.  The plot and dialogue are lifted almost exactly, but the play evokes the feel of Africa and of the culture much more.  There’s much more spectacle (I need to see the play at least 5 more times to take it all in)—dance numbers and chanting that you won’t get in the movie.  The musical number “I Just Can’t Wait to be King”, which I didn’t like in the movie because it just felt too much like a Broadway spectacular number, worked much better as an actual Broadway spectacular number on stage, naturally.  They also added 8 songs, some of which were very short, and some of which were longer and did add to the play.  The only part that I found didn’t work as well as on screen was the character Ed, who for some reason just didn’t have the charisma on stage that he did in the movie.  Maybe it was because there was no camera to focus on him, so to speak.

The next animation-to-stage project for Disney is apparently Pinochio, which should be interesting.  In some ways I hope it’s more like the movie Gheppetto they did recently, but the classic film would be good, too.  In any case, I hope they can convince Brent Spiner (Data from Star Trek the Next Generation) to play Stromboli as he did in Gheppetto.

The next morning, Mom and Susan explored the streets some more while Dad and I went to the Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum.  Some of it was a bit on the gorey to gross side, like the room of people who’d survived impalement, but some of it was really interesting, like the room of artwork from unusual materials.  There was a matchstick dragster, and a matchstick Golden Gate Bridge, and a statue made out of buttons, and a gum wrapper chain, and a statue of Marilyn Monroe made out of worn out dollar bills, and a picture of John Wayne made out of lint.  They also had a sword cane, and a bone mirror, and a bone dagger, and pictures of tribal women who wore padlocks through their noses as jewelry (it originated when the chieftain padlocked his wife’s nose as a warning to her not to gossip or nag, but the women in the tribe mistook it for jewelry and it caught on).  They also had a Siamese pig with extra limbs and a 6 legged calf, and all kinds of stuff.  It was very interesting.

After that, we drove home, and I spent the night with my folks and came home to write this.
 

Image courtesy of The Animation Factory