The Lion King continues at the Birmingham Hippodrome until 16 September 2023 before moving on to Dublin where it runs until 11 November 2023. Further tour dates are expected to be announced.
Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩
Disney’s The Lion King has ruled Broadway and the West End for over 25 years, bringing the beloved 1994 animated film to the stage. Acclaimed at the time for its ground-breaking staging, visuals and costumes (leading Julie Taymor to become to first woman to win Best Director of a Musical at the Tony Awards), the show was an immediate hit with audiences and critics, and became the blueprint for how to bring the seemingly unadaptable to life. As part of its UK tour, the musical is spending its summer at the Birmingham Hippodrome, where it plays until September.
The ‘Circle of Life’ opening remains one of the greatest scenes in musical theatre, certainly one of the most creative, with staggeringly inventive use of costume, masks and props to bring the animal kingdom to life. Unfortunately this jaw-dropping high point isn’t matched again in the rest of the show, and it feels like the more the show goes on, the less impressive it becomes.
Sets (design by Richard Hudson) become sparse, simple and used repeatedly, and choreography (Gareth Fagan) goes from initially dynamic to feeling overdone and used to fill time. Sometimes it just looks out of place, namely when the stampeding wildebeest start doing Riverdance-style kicks out to the side, and the supposedly-sinister hyenas who are given a ‘Magic Mike’-style dance break in the middle of ‘Be Prepared’. There’s definitely an overarching feeling of padding throughout, perhaps inevitable when trying to turn an 80-minute animation into a 130-minute stage show. This becomes particularly obvious in the show’s second half, which feels like mostly filler aside from ‘Can You Feel the Love Tonight’ and the final fight.
As the new live action films are also finding out, there’s no way to replicate the magic of animation, and the more real something becomes, the less magical it is. Still, The Lion King at least fares better than other Disney stage adaptations (Aladdin and The Little Mermaid, in particular).
Taymor’s strong creative vision remains, with masses of attention paid to detail and capturing the spirit of African culture and style. It’s a great story (famously dubbed “Hamlet with lions”), and the score still sounds fantastic, although the newer additions by Lebo M and Mark Mancina are nowhere near as strong as the Elton John/Tim Rice originals.
All of the key scenes from the film are delivered, some more successfully than others, and it’s a testament to what can be achieved on stage with the right creative minds behind it. But it doesn’t land the emotional heart of the story. Millions of us sobbed at the key death in the film that shatters the kingdom and acts as the catalyst for Simba’s journey, but on stage it doesn’t hit anywhere near as hard. The flow of the show feels very “play the scene, deliver the key moment, move on”, with all of the emotional power stripped away.
This isn’t helped by some perfunctory acting from several of the leads, extending further the feeling of just going through the motions. There are standouts who do give great sense of their characters, namely Alan McHale (Timon) and Carl Sanderson (Pumbaa) who are great fun and give heaps of personality, along with Nosipho Nkonga (understudying Rafiki on press night). Richard Hurst also makes for a decent villain as Scar, perhaps veering too close to panto at times, but gets the job done.
However, John-Luc Guizonne (Mufusa), Kyle Richardson (Simba) and Janique Charles (Nala) give little depth or personality to their roles beyond saying their lines, which again robs the story of its power at multiple times.
The Lion King will remain popular for decades to come, and while it’s undoubtedly enjoyable and a wonderful thing for children to experience, it gets too much credit purely because of its grand beginning. It’s a five-star opening to an otherwise three-star show that needs to put more thought into delivering the story’s emotional heart and becoming a more rounded piece of theatre.
Rob Bartley
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