The Lion King

Inspired by Osamu Tezuka’s Kimba the White Lion, Disney’s 1994 animated feature The Lion King was a huge success at box offices nationwide. In 1997, it debuted with ridiculous success as a Broadway musical thanks to the songwriting talents of Elton John and Tim Rice, who also scored the film. The show prowls through the Milwaukee Theatre this month in a nearly sold-out series of performances.

The Lion King is engineered for families, but the musical, though based on a 90-minute animated feature, is 2 hours and 45 minutes long, an expansion so drastic that the kids who would get the most out of the show couldn’t possibly sit through the whole thing. Take a cue from our own First Stage Children’s Theatre, one of the biggest professional children’s theatre companies in the country: you can do amazing thing with a 90-minute stage musical for families. But people would probably be less inclined to pay for an extravagantly priced show if it was only as long as a feature film, and regardless, stretching out the story gives it some artistic clout. The extra 75 minutes make for the best parts of the show. The exotic traditional African folk music and dance added to the stage musical may feel out of place next to highly-produced, glossy Eton John/Tim Rice music, but they impart a new life to the story.

Gugwana Dlamini, in the role of the monkey Rafiki, gives this show’s single most impressive performance. She sings around the borders of the musical’s glossiness, giving the production a beautifully jagged edge. Dlamini’s African vocals call to something very primal that is rarely heard by an audience this big. The South African vocalist’s hypnotic song elevates the musical beyond its heavily commercial identity.

The production design is predictable given the size and expense of the production – a fairly crude distillation of traditional African folk art. An impressive collection of animal puppets and costumes captures some of the feel of the wild, but completing the illusion requires a great deal of imagination on the part of the audience. The perfect seats for this visual feast are somewhere in the middle of the ground floor. Get too close to the stage and it’ll look kind of ridiculous. Get too far away and it just looks like a bunch of people in a well-choreographed musical wearing strange apparatuses.

But wherever you sit, and no matter how many fidgety kids are surrounding you, somewhere in the distance you can hear Dlamini’s voice resonate the same sort of primal sound that might have inspired Osamu Tezuka to sketch his first lion. VS

Broadway Across America’s production of The Lion King runs through March 2 at the Milwaukee Theatre. Tickets can be purchased in advance by calling the box office at 414-273-7206 or online.