This article was originally published in Applause magazine for the national touring premiere of The Lion King in Denver in 2002.

Almost from the moment Julie Taymor was born — in 1952, into a comfortable upper middle class Boston family — she was destined for a career in the theatre she could never have foreseen. This director, choreographer, writer, and designer has managed what no one else has in the Western Hemisphere (with the possible exception of France’s Ariane Mnouchkine and our own Robert Wilson): She has successfully blended Eastern and Western theatrical traditions to create new forms that are exclusively her own. And, with the emergence of the musical of The Lion King, which she directed and whose costumes, masks and puppets she designed, she is the first artist to have brought her unique, idiosyncratic talents to a huge commercial hit.

Taymor’s interest in theatre manifested itself early in the usual ways — the backyard productions, the theatre classes. But before she was 21, she had studied with an assortment of world masters, including Jacques Lecoq of the LeCoq School of Mime in Paris and Peter Schumann of the Bread and Puppet Theatre in Vermont. Aside from Western and Eastern Europe, her travels had taken her to Bombay, Madras and Sri Lanka.

Julie Taymor. Photo by Marco Grob.

“Ceylon at the time,” she reminded her interviewer. “I was 15 or 16. Lived with a family. I was there with the Experiment in International Living. And not just for the arts. I was interested in cultural anthropology. That’s what I thought my major would be in college and, actually, I went to Columbia one semester to study with Margaret Mead.”

We were having this conversation in Taymor’s light-filled studio, lodged in one of those ancient lower Manhattan buildings where you wonder if the asthmatic elevator will ever make it to the tenth floor.

Taymor attended Oberlin College, drawn there largely by the presence of director/teacher Herbert Blau, under whose tutelage she flourished, both as a student and later as a member of his company. In her junior year, she got a chance to study in Seattle with the American Society for Eastern Arts.

“It was a whole Asian arts summer program,” she said, that happened to include Idonesian topeng (masked dance-drama) and wayang kulit (shadow puppetry). “My major at Oberlin was in folklore and mythology. That shows you where the anthropology part connects.”

Seeds were planted. Upon graduation in 1974, Taymor received a Watson Traveling Fellowship. “My specific course was to go to Eastern Europe, Indonesia and Japan and study visual theatre and experimental puppet theatre. And…whatever. To go. I planned on spending a year at the Awaji folk-Bunraku theatre in Japan [an ancient puppet theatre form]. But I went to Indonesia first.”

The theatre in Indonesia so overwhelmed and inspired her that she went for three months and stayed four years. Because there was virtually no television or film, “theatre operated in its original manifestation,” she said, “not just entertainment, but as educator, as mediator between the gods, for religious purposes, socializing purposes. I completely immersed myself in it with Indonesian artists — Javanese, Balinese, Sundanese, Sumatran. W.S. Rendra was one of the most famous contemporary poets and playwrights of Java, a very political man who would do subversive theatre via the classics. I lived in Yogyakarta and Jakarta and worked and choreographed for him, until he encouraged me to do my own work and that’s when I started to put forth the ideas I had.”

Overcoming a daunting variety of obstacles (practical, financial, lingual and cultural) and using mostly Javanese artists, Taymor created her first piece, Way of Snow, an elaborate three-part affair about shamanism and spiritual and physical starvation. Encouraged by its reception, she created her own international company, Teatr Loh, from the ancient Kali or Javanese Sanskrit word meaning “The Source,” but also commonly used as an exclamation, as in “Loh!” (“Omigod!”). Taymor likes its double entendre so well, she named her New York studio LOH.

The company of ten or 11 artists — Balinese, Sundanese, Javanese, French, German — lived communally in Bali on a Ford Foundation grant she had obtained, in a house with dirt floors, no running water, no electricity.

“My Watson [grant] was only for a year, but I ended up stretching it out,” she said, speaking in her usual rushing, elliptical sentences. “We toured, performed. I tried to bring my company to the States. Could never get the money. Everyone was China-oriented at the time. Where’s Indonesia? It’s only the fifth largest population in the world. So, I came back.”

That was 1980. Where was an iconoclast of such exotic talents to find work in America? Mostly at the more experimental not-for-profit venues such as LaMaMa (where in 1981 she did a second version of Tirai, created in Bali) and the New York Public Theatre (where she did The Haggadah with Elizabeth Swados in 1980). In 1984 Robert Brustein invited her to design puppets and masks for Carlo Gozzi’s The King Stag at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, MA.

“Then the costume designer backed out and Brustein suggested I do everything, so I designed the costumes and did the choreography. I worked with the company and helped them perform [with] the puppetry and masks.” — Julie Taymor

As with so much of her work, The King Stag drew wide admiration from theatre insiders. There was an attempt among resident theatres to join forces and host it around the country, but costs defeated the plan.

Taymor continued to develop what was distinctly her own style, eliciting raves, but not finding many companies able—or willing—to afford such original and demanding work. She also knew by then that she really wanted to direct and began branching out into opera and film. The world had begun to notice, especially Europe, which found readier kinship with her sensibilities. If markets at home were scarce, there were markets abroad.

The phone call from Tom Schumacher, head of Disney Theatricals, was a bolt from the blue. Taymor remembered him as a line producer for the Olympic Arts Festival in Los Angeles who, in 1984, had wanted to bring a piece of hers, Liberty’s Taken, to the Festival. It never happened, but when Schumacher joined Disney some years later, and after the success of Beauty and the Beast as a stage musical, he was urged by Michael Eisner to find someone who could do the same for The Lion King. The only name that came to mind for what Schumacher considered an unfeasible project was Taymor’s. And she hadn’t even seen the movie.

“I wasn’t very interested,” she said. “The odd thing is that the material itself, the myths that they create their animated cartoons from, is not far from what I am interested in. It’s just that I don’t do family theatre — didn’t — and, really, aesthetically, in an incredibly different style than Disney.

“I looked at the animated film and thought it was a tremendous challenge. I thought, ‘Hmm. I could put the wildebeest stampede on stage and maybe work to get the story a little richer and better…’.” — Julie Taymor

She agreed to think about it.

“I took a while. I went off to direct Salome for the Kirov in Germany and Russia, and then I was in L.A. doing The Flying Dutchman. And after that four months I decided, ‘Well, let’s try this.’ We had a good set-up. Both parties could leave at any time if things didn’t work. It wasn’t as if I was looking to do a really commercial show. I wasn’t. I liked what I was doing. Juan Darién had been on Broadway and nominated for a number of Tonys. Did you see that? It’s an unusual piece. And that’s me, and Elliot [Goldenthal, the composer and her long-time professional and personal partner].

“But I got tremendous support from Disney and when I say Disney I mean individuals — Tom in particular — and they kept saying, ‘Do what you do; that’s why we hired you.’

“I think if they’d hired someone younger, less experienced, they probably would have meddled more. [And then it] becomes this messy compromise. I never got that from them. Always Tom would say, ‘Do it the Taymor way.’ What he meant was we can do it so it costs a fortune, but my work doesn’t cost a lot of money necessarily. Not at all. The mouse shadow puppet costs a dollar fifty. Originally, the masks of Mufasa and Scar I created as this concept of shields you moved with your hand.”

But she was working with her long-time associate Michael Curry, as much a wiz in the technological engineering of the puppets and masks as she is in the sculpting of them. For years they have jointly created the panoply of invented creatures that constitutes their amazing body of work.

Together they explored all kinds of possibilities and finally came up with the movement of the masks as headgear, up/down, backwards/forwards, operating on an intricate technology.

“I could never afford to do that in any other playground,” Taymor said flatly. “I thought, ‘Disney is game to support these experiments. We should take advantage.’ ”

THE BOOK

The first thing she did was develop a book with the writers and determine what should be musicalized. There were only five songs in the film. She needed around 15. Some were done by Elton John and Tim Rice, but the majority of the new work came from South African composer Lebo M.

Company of The Lion King on Broadway. The Lion King. Disney. Photo by Matthew Murphy

“I was adamant about that,” she said, “and, thank God, they supported it. He’s a great artist. This is a specific composer who draws upon the choral traditions of his culture as the Beatles drew on a pop tradition. I have been fighting for that recognition, wonderful songs like ‘Shadowland,’ ‘He Lives in You,’ ‘Endless Night’… I love ‘Circle of Life,’ don’t get me wrong, but without Lebo’s contribution to ‘Circle of Life’…?”  Taymor followed this with a good imitation of the African whoop that constitutes The Lion King’s dazzling opening salvo.

How, with so many ethnically different composers, did she maintain a unity of tone?

“Lebo gives it the unity. Everything has his choral touch. I was lucky,” she said. “They had put out this album called Leader of the Pridelands after the Lion King movie opened. It was all this choral music Lebo had done with Hans Zimmer. It had been background. My plan was to bring [it] to the foreground and make the chorus as principal as the principals, have the percussionists seen, have the visuals of the people… I said to Tom, ‘You can’t hide the actors. This piece is about humanity. It’s human, not animal.’ ”

THE PUPPETS

She then experimented with the puppet concepts. Among her first designs were the zebra and the giraffes, always keeping uppermost in her mind “where to place the human being, making sure we didn’t lose the human.

“I’m the designer and director of the look of it. I worked closely with Richard Hudson on the set until we complemented each other. He knew what he was creating was almost like a magic lantern, a light box, because even though it’s a big, expensive show, it also is very minimalist.”

The first jungle Hudson made had trees and palms. “I went, ‘Richard, I hired you because I’ve seen your minimalist work.’ So, what does he do for a jungle? Slashes. A repeating slash. Brilliant! His jungle with the way the nets come down? That’s it. You get it.

Erick D. Patrick as Simba. The Lion King. Disney. Photo by Matthew Murphy

“The circle is a strong symbol throughout. Before I even hired Richard, I wanted Pride Rock to be more like the Circle of Life. I worked on a concept of a kind of turn table that would rise up like a wedding cake with the animals on it. Too symmetrical and boring. Richard came up with this jutting thing, but how it comes out of the earth is circular. Mufasa’s head is circular. The wheels of the gazelles, the sun that rises in the beginning, the pool of water in act two—many, many things came off of this dynamic symbol. As a designer you look for an ideograph—the absolute simple abstraction of the whole. Even if it’s subliminal for the audience, it’s much more than you know.”

She also enjoyed the luxury of time. “We did workshops. Things had to be proved. That was fine by me. A lot of money was being invested.”

But the first workshop was not reassuring. “The heads were a little too big, the masks oversized, cumbersome. We hadn’t gotten the scale right. We hadn’t gotten the technology right. The actors were upstaging the puppets. You didn’t know where to look. The Disney folks were 20 feet away. No lights, just daylight. Not everybody got it. Not everybody could see what I saw.”

Taymor talked them into letting her refine four of the characters and present three versions of each, fully costumed, under proper lighting, giving the actors enough time to practice the movement. “It takes 80 years to become a master Bunraku performer,” she pointed out, “let’s give [these actors] a few weeks.”

Taymor developed the characters as make-up, as half-masks, as full masks.

“The least to the most — and all three methods worked. All of them,” she said. “Michael Eisner came. Top of the food chain. He looked at it. He said,

‘They all work, but the one that you first conceived is by far the riskiest. The pay-off will be bigger.’ — Michael Eisner, former CEO of Disney

It was exciting. We had done our work.”

Taymor’s willingness to accommodate to whatever suited Disney was the mark of a mature and confident artist, but also smart. It removed tension. The choice grew easier. The Disney brass knew it could trust the outcome.

Taymor, who says she doesn’t do puppets much any more, did sculpt the Lion King puppets and masks herself. “I had two or three people working with me. It was about two years of development.”

THE THEATRE TECHNIQUES

But what really excited her were the virtually unlimited possibilities, “the idea of the old-fashioned theatrical techniques, the forced perspective, the mechanical doll theatres. I love that stuff. I knew I would use a lot of traditions from Asia and Africa as well as our own theatre devices that have so much charm but are not hi-tech. Even if we put in hi-tech methods to make things [work] it’s from a low-tech, old-fashioned concept.

“Everything about me doing this was to do it in pure theatre style, having the audience be surrounded, having the strings and wires visible. I’ve talked a lot about the double event, the human and the animal. The audience completely does really, really suspend its disbelief.” — Julie Taymor

Suspension of disbelief is a prerequisite. Taymor likes the large gesture, large metaphor. You see it in her crossover work for theatre, opera or film, most recently the monumental opera Grendel, which she directed and co-created with Goldenthal, and Titus, based on Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus.

“It’s a movie-movie,” she said of the latter, “done in hundreds of locations, but it also has — it’s Shakespeare, so well it should — very theatrical concepts, totally from the language.”

Opera she loves for its heightened theatricality and dislikes for its short rehearsal schedules. “You have these incredible concepts and you get four weeks. Very tricky to pull off, especially if the singers are terrified or unwilling to give themselves over.” About Grendel, however, based on the Boewulf legend from the monster’s point of view and based on John Gardner’s novel, she said, “It will have taken 20 years — 20 years — to get this piece on.

“Film is a whole other excitement, in the controlling of the images, in the framing of the pictures. Incredible. You’ve got the actors, but you’re also looking at the projected photography very closely.

“In theatre, I love to play with cinematic techniques — the big wide long shots. On a human level, I like theatre best. There’s nothing like being in that one room, working with the artists. And then, once it’s on the stage, for the director it’s a nightmare, because the actors don’t do it the same way twice. Actors are human. They’re going to ebb and flow. But I can go back every night and see Titus. Unless the projectionist has screwed up, it’s perfect!”

“I like the different mediums for the different possibilities. What I really like, is the balance of the three.”

DETAILS
The Lion King
Oct 23-Nov 16, 2025 • Buell Theatre
Tickets