This King's OK

Last night we went to the Academy of Music to see Lion King with friends, along with Moe, Larry & Curly (a/k/a, the Three Stooges -- my daughter & her 2 best buddies). Nice evening -- good food (family style dinner at Maggiano's), good show & good friends.

The Lion King is a truly enjoyable show. I concur with the review in Philadelphia City Paper, King of the Jungle:

Under the hot African sun, two enormous giraffes amble by. Surely this is one of the great curtain-up images in modern theater history, and the audience greets it with a shout—not the cynical huzzah reserved for chandeliers and helicopters, but genuine joy in the face of true art. (I'm sure many theatergoers at the Academy were seeing Lion King for the fifth or even 10th time, but the power remains.)

And it's not just giraffes. There are gazelles, cheetahs, even elephants and of course lions—all courtesy of the remarkable visual imagination of Julie Taymor, Lion King's director and so much more. You see, Taymor also designed the costumes and (with Michael Curry) the astonishing masks and puppets that are the basis of Lion King's visual world. Let me reiterate what many have already said—you will be simply knocked out by what Taymor does, as she creates creatures that are at once animal, human and iconic. In critic's school, they teach us never to use the word "genius"—but what Taymor does here is the closest thing to it.

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I should report that Lion King fares very well in its opulent Philadelphia incarnation. The cast is fully up to every challenge, especially L. Steven Taylor (Mufasa, the father-king), Chaunteé Schuler (Nala, the love interest) and the clarion-voiced Phindile Mkhize (Rafiki, who serves a double-function as narrator and a kind of prophetess).

We've seen Lion King several times, although my recollection when we saw the Broadway Show was a bit off. I thought it was 2-3 years ago, while Dave thought it was 10 years ago. Our daughter remembered seeing it, and she said she was in 6th Grade.

My calendar on my Palm Pilot goes back 10 years, so I did a search & it was October of 2000. Young memory wins.