The Lion King
Wednesday night, Diana and I went to see The Lion King touring show at the Keller Auditorium. Upon entering the lobby, there was no doubt whatsoever that this was a big production put on by a company that truly understands the power of a captive audience. The lobby was dotted with merchandise booths in which the least expensive item was a $10 infant shirt emblazened with “My First Musical.” Truth be told, the markup wasn’t as rediculous as I’ve seen it other places. The original cast recording, on sale for $20, is available on amazon new for $13.49. Considering that shipping isn’t included in the Amazon price, $6.50 is a reasonable price to pay for the convienence and the thrill of having something to take away from the show.
I’d heard that the opening number was one of the high points of the show and it did not disappoint. Shortly after the house lights dimmed the aisles and stage were filled with a fanciful procession of animals (in puppet form, of course). Among the highlights were giraffes that were controlled by people wearing stilts for both their feet and hands and a close to life size elephant.
All of the puppets were outstanding, but I think my personal favorite was a cheetah. It was operated by a woman who stood behind it, and controlled the two front legs with poles. The thing that made it really stand out was that the puppet’s head was connected to the operator’s head with monofilamnet. This allowed for an almost invisible connection between puppeteer and puppet that added a huge amount of expressiveness to the creature.
The performance was a fantastic spectacle overall, as you can read many, many other places. I really enjoyed it, but I’m not going to go into detail scene-by-scene. Some of the musical material that was added wasn’t quite up to same level as the original material, but Shadow Land at the opening of act two was really beautiful. I Just Can’t Wait To Be King in act one was a bit of a disappointment to me because it strayed rather far from the look of the rest of the show, bringing in garishly colored puppets that looked more circusy and less savannahy (the spell checker will let me get away with circusy, but it doesn’t believe savannahy). This was mainly because this song was covering up for the massive scene change into the elephant graveyard that would be used for the next few scenes, but it still bothered me.
Okay, I’m going to get a bit techieish now:
From what I could tell from my seat, glancing over at the booth that had been erected in the back of the auditorium, they were using an Obsession II to control their conventional fixtures and a separate console for the intelligent fixtures. Four LCD displays for lighting, two for sound. There were four of what looked like VL7s hanging from the second balcony. I tried to notice a time during the show that they were being used, but I never did. A lot of extra cabling had to be run to handle all of the fixtures that they had installed on the balcony and it snaked in large black bundles up from both sides of the stage and from the booth.
When the curtain lifted, the first thing I noticed were the legs. On either side of the stage were three legs which looked like they were hollow rectangular columns of white cloth which were lit from within. They also could have been L shaped and backlit. Either way, the end result was that their color could be easily changed, usually to extend the cyc color, to work with the scene. The bottoms of them were printed with a rough grassy pattern which stood out as a great contrast to the rest of the column.
The central rock set piece entered and rotated as actors climbed the stairs in the opposite direction as the rotation. This both distracted from the rock’s entrance and lengthened the climb while keeping the actors center stage. In addition to the tracks for set piece movement, the stage floor was fitted with hydraulics that raised the rear 2/3 of the stage at about a 30° angle to the rest of the floor. This was used in large crowd scenes to increase visibility and later to create the effect of a hill. One interesting thing about it is that the central circle of the stage could either remain flat or be included in the rise. One of the most visibly stunning moments in the show came at the start of the second act where a large circular piece of silver cloth was spread out on this incline and smoothly pulled through a hole in the stage floor from its center. The scene was accentuating the devastation of the savannah and the combination of this effect with stark white cyc lighting got the point across very well.
Another truly amazing piece of scene design was the stampede in the canyon. The legs are masked with black slip covers and huge L-shaped units come in from the side, converging to form a canyon. There are four rows of these, in decreasing size, creating perspective. At the top of the furthest unit, a solid wall representing the back of the canyon, was a cutout silhouette of wildebeest. When the stampede begins, this silhouette is removed and a projection of wildebeest running down the canyon wall begins. It is followed by the appearance of a marvelous contraption of wildebeest puppets on a series of wheels that rises from between the next two canyon sections. Finally, actors portraying wildebeest appear on the lower levels to complete the filling of the canyon. Truly spectacular, though my 2:44 am description writing might not be sufficient to express this.