Broadway/San Diego Blog

Julie Taymor, director and designer of the Broadway production of The Lion King, gives the following account of casting procedure and rehearsals for that production.

PREVIEWS

Two days later our first audience had taken their seats in high anticipation. By this time our whole crew, including producers and performers were a little frazzled, exhausted, and not quite sure how it all would play. We’d become inured to the beautiful pictures, the delicate nuances of performances, and the lowbrow jokes. Anything could happen with the functioning of the computer which operated the set; it seemed to have a mind of its own. So, with headset on, Michele [Steckler, assistant director] sits on my left, notepad in hand, ready to take the technical notes. And Dan [Fields, assistant director] sits on my right, ready to take the sound and actor notes. Butterflies.

The curtain rises and Rafiki starts her chant.

From the balcony Lebo and Faca, under their antelope headdresses, chant back. Clouds float upward one at a time to reveal the sun rising. Two giraffes emerge and slowly move across the stage, silhouetted by the large golden globe.

The audience starts to clap and cheer. The large elephant lumbers down the aisle followed by the wildebeests and bird ladies. Heads are turning madly all around us. More applause. And again, for the gazelles that leap across the stage.

Another wave of applause from the balcony as they finally are able to see the elephant as he climbs up onto the deck. Rafiki starts to sing the familiar refrain “Circle of Life” and they cheer again. We can hardly hear the song through the racket of the audience. It is overwhelming after two years of work and anticipation. I turn to Dan and Michele. We are stunned.

There are plenty of technical notes that night but we know that the basic performance was there. Our goal over the next three weeks of previews was to make certain cuts in some of the dance numbers, to work on the balance of sound, to reorchestrate some of the songs in order to achieve the desired climax, to fiddle with dialogue, and to rehearse the new scene that would eventually replace the pause in Act One. There were also technical glitches during those early performances that needed to be worked out. A few examples of these stomach-churning events:

·         The mountain wouldn’t rise (due to computer malfunction) causing Pride Rock to look like a mole hill that night.

·         Mufasa had to climb the canyon wall using his own strength because the fly lines which support him had gotten tangled.

·         The cactuses wouldn’t inflate on cue.

·         The king curtain, which is supposed to drop from the flies, got caught halfway and a stagehand, unbeknownst to the audience, had to climb out onto the grid during the show to untangle it.

And so on. These are the normal crises that eventually work themselves out. But the hardest challenge for everyone was the flow backstage. For a week or so, I declined the invitation to watch the chaos from the wings. I suspected that if I was confronted with all the misery up close it would be hard to keep pushing everyone to achieve the desired quick costume changes or complicated set changes. I knew that eventually they would get the rhythm down.

When the dust seemed settled and the look of confusion and despair had disappeared from the dresser’ faces, I ventured backstage to see the “other show.” In an odd way I was more moved by that experience than in watching the musical from the house. It was so utterly real. So dangerous. An intensely beautiful ballet of human and mechanical interaction without an inch of space unoccupied. While the children san their “I Just Can’t Wait to Be King” song downstage, in front of the black drop, the stagehands, in time to the music, would be setting up the huge bones of the elephant graveyard. The absurd juxtaposition was startling  but the incongruity had created an other performance all of its own. From the audience’s perspective, a perfect illusion was being performed, but from backstage the reality of making that illusion work was palpably raw, happening-in-the-moment, fundamentally live theater.

At the conclusion of the performance, I felt I had to go to the intercom to tell the company, both crew and performers how moved I was by how they had surmounted the mechanics of running such an extremely difficult show. I’m sure I got quite maudlin over that intercom as I thanked them for helping to bring all of our visions to fruition, but that night was one of the most profoundly moving theater experience I have ever had.

Posted on September 22nd, 2009 under From Broadway/San Diego Staff. Tags: broadway san diego, broadway san diego tickets, Broadway Tickets, Civic Theatre, Civic Theatre Tickets, Director, Disney, Disney's The Lion King, Julie Taymor, san diego tickets, the lion king, The Lion King Musical, The Lion King San Diego, The Lion King Tickets, tickets. RSS 2.0 feed. Leave a response, or trackback.