![]() “Because of The Lion King, gave me the chance to be in Aida. “ The Lion King didn’t influence the other pieces, but The Lion King made it possible, because of its success, to open a lot of doors,” says Schumacher. You have to approach everything as if it’s the first time.” Taymor adds: “If you don’t take risks and are willing to fail, then you won’t come up with something that’s fresh and that breaks boundaries.” After The Lion King opened on Broadway, Aida, Tarzan, Mary Poppins, The Little Mermaid and Aladdin (which is still running) followed. “If you think you know how to do it, you’re in a terrible position. “The biggest lesson is: The recipe for success is the formula for failure,” advises Schumacher. “When we perform it all over the world, all the humor gets adapted to local culture and local contemporary jokes,” Taymor reveals.īut the formula that made The Lion King a blockbuster success isn’t what producers use to mold a hit today. “A lot of things then aren’t funny today.” The changes aren’t just in New York City. “A lot of things culturally change,” Dlamini explains. At one point, Zazu sang “Be Our Guest” from Beauty and the Beast. “Every couple of years it’s that song that people roll their eyes at if they have to hear it one more time,” Taymor says. At one point, Zazu sings to Scar a butchered version of Frozen’s “Let It Go.” When the show originally opened, the bird sang “It’s a Small World (After All),” making reference to the long-running Walt Disney Parks ride. “There were things on reflection we could tighten up and so we did,” Schumacher says. Nine minutes of scenes, songs and dances were cut for time. Two decades into The Lion King’s run, parts of the show have subtly changed. Steven Taylor as Mufasa, and Jelani Remy as Simba You get to sit here and watch while we take our necessary time to set up the next scene behind the curtain.’” That scene between Mufasa and Zazu, as it turns out, is now what Taymor describes as a touching and crucial scene between the characters. “So during the first few performances, while we were writing a new scene, Tom and Peter Schneider would go on stage and say to the audience, ‘Aren’t you the lucky ones. ![]() “We couldn’t get the stampede up as fast as we needed to,” Taymor remembers. “We thought we were destined for disaster.” Sometimes set pieces like Pride Rock wouldn’t move, so the actors would have to improvise around it. ![]() “It never worked,” composer Mark Mancina says of the show’s initial issues with the set. When the show began its out-of-town tryouts in July 1997 at the Orpheum Theatre in Minneapolis, there were plenty of kinks at the start.
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