Before
you doubt that your correspondent suffers so you don’t have to, remember this:
I went to see Disney’s The Lion King
on Broadway. I am still recovering, and
any small votive lit for my complete recuperation is deeply appreciated.
The Lion
King makes for a completely wretched evening of theater. One arrives at the Minskoff Theater on West 45 prior to curtain – only to have all
bags and some pockets checked by security thugs right out of central
casting. At $155 for Mezzanine seating,
one can only imagine that the Minskoff people are expecting the better class of
terrorist.
Patrons
are then herded like cattle by ushers more at home on the Old Chisholm Trail,
who hector and insult customers already turning off cell phones a good 15
minutes before curtain. (Not that the
patrons on hand deserved better treatment; dressed as if for a hockey game and
behaving much like people waiting on line in Costco, one wonders where they
thought they were.)
And
please never for a moment believe that the Minskoff is a theater … it is
not. It is an auditorium. If you are interested in serious theater, you
are in the wrong place, physically and aesthetically. Vast and drafty, with practically no proscenium
and, if I recall correctly, no orchestra pit, this is a space better suited for
proletarian joys like rock concerts and revival meetings.
Which,
in all honesty, is pretty much what one gets with the now-congealing mess that
is The Lion King. To “bring to life”
various jungle animals and rain forest locales, director Julie Taymor had Disney’s bottomless coffers at her disposal. Sadly, all of Taymor’s directorial decisions
were wrong. First off, this adaptation
of the Disney cartoon is completely devoid of actors. Yes, there are performers onstage, but all
wear body microphones since they can project neither speaking voice nor
song. (One wonders why they bother …
there would be no difference if the poor saps on stage merely moved their lips
to a recording.) Worse still, the actors
are all heavily burdened with pounds of puppetry to simulate animal life – it
is impossible to connect with any of them in any human way. Imagine wanting to be an actor and becoming,
instead, a walking special effect.
The
internal politics of The Lion King are also of special interest. The entire enterprise is infused with a
faux-African PC chic, as if the doings of jungle fauna represented a great
cosmology of the universe. The sole
non-African accent on hand is that of Patrick
R. Brown, who plays the villain Scar.
(Naturally.) Imagine, if you
would, a lisping Boris Karloff aping
Quentin Crisp and you get the
idea. No doubt oceans of self-loathing
Upper West Siders nod in appreciation and abnegation; I merely shrugged in
disbelief.
The
book, by Roger Allers and Irene Mecchi, jumps (literally) all
over the place. I had a thought for many
of the screaming children careening through the aisles, wondering how they
would understand anything that was going on.
Then, I realized that was never the intention – the real plan was simply
to overwhelm them with noise.
Noise,
of course, is probably the best word to describe the score by Elton John and Tim Rice. I cannot say if
the score is consistently wretched throughout, but what I did hear sounded
rather like subway drummers pounding on plastic paint cans. After sitting through such first act numbers as
Chow Down, Be Prepared and I Just Can’t
Wait to Be King, the audience was treated to the big first act curtain
number, Hakuna Matata. I think Hakuna Matata was probably Ugandan
for “please be sure to visit our gift shop,” but I never waited to find
out. As the curtain fell, I fled for the
nearest exit. The second act of The Lion
King will forever remain a mystery to your correspondent.
Clearly
we were not the only sufferers. Several
ushers congratulated us on our sound judgment as we made for the doors, hurrying
away from hoards of singing lions, dancing chimps, wailing children and suffering
parents.
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