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to grace the boards. There was no obvious reason why Disney wouldn’t produce another connect-the-dots show like Beauty and the Beast. But Disney wasn’t producing the new musical: Schneider and Schumacher were. And Schumacher, who was a man of taste but also a company man, found the place where personal taste and corporate strategy converged. He asked Julie Taymor, the sculptor and mask-maker—and then recent winner of a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant—to direct the new play. Taymor was the least “corporate” of figures; she operated on the small, handmade scale of Very Off Broadway. And yet Schumacher recognized that her work, which revolved around myth and ritual, and nonverbal means of presentation—the whole Campbellian substratum—fit very well with the Disney oeuvre. He had, he says, tried to bring her play Liberty’s Taken to the Los Angeles Arts Festival, and followed her work thereafter. And so he asked; and Taymor agreed.

When I asked Schumacher about the choice of Taymor, he said, “There is this impression that it runs counter to what we do. People don’t realize that Salvador Dalí was in residence in the studio. People forget that Walt worked with Leopold Stokowski. People forget how arty Fantasia was. It has never seemed to me a choice outside of what we do as a company, but very much a choice outside of what people expected us to do.” Of course, people forget these things because they took place half a century ago. Among the current generation of Disney movies, some are ingenious and charming—though I wouldn’t have included The Lion King in that group—but most stay well within the Disney comfort zone, which often includes the downright cloying. (Pocahontas, anyone?)

There is, at any rate, no question that the choice of Taymor startled people who thought of Disney as the Standard Oil of children’s entertainment. The news coverage in the run-up to the show’s opening, in the fall of 1997, featured such arch conceits as Julie Taymor as Beauty, and Disney, “the many-tentacled house of mainstream,” as the Beast. Taymor conceded that many of her friends felt that she had, in fact, surrendered to the Beast. And of her new employer she said, “At first they worried that I was too far-out and I worried that they were Disney.” And yet, she found that whenever an aesthetic choice had to be made, the suits from Disney, including Eisner, pushed her to take the bolder and more experimental route. Schumacher says that Disney and Taymor signed a contract permitting either to walk away in case of artistic differences. And then, he says, “we never looked at the deal again.”

The Lion King offered irrefutable proof that “corporate theater” need not be a vaguely disreputable subspecies of the art form, like “dinner theater.” The show bore the stamp of a single creator far more plainly than did the overproduced musicals pulled this way and that by a dozen different investors. It was a Julie Taymor show on a giant scale. And yet what was striking about it was how effectively Taymor had brought Disney’s epic pretensions into human scale. “The grasslands” was indicated not by a great, billowing field of green but by two columns of stately figures rising from beneath the stage with square headdresses of green turf. A single tree with a great, spreading projection of lacy, irresolvable patterns stood for the bounty of nature. These allusive gestures, which Taymor described as “ideographic,” summoned larger associations by virtue of being so sketchy and economical. And then of course there were the masks, also contrived as minimalist objects. A big bird was an actor carrying a rack of wings, a flock of little birds an actor wiggling a mobile hung with birdlike shapes. A leopard was an actor piloting a leopard figure like a wheelbarrow. Man and animal merge and mingle in an enchanted vision of unfallen nature—the Circle of Life, perhaps, without the movie’s Mother Earth pieties. Apart from all the Disney-certified hokum about “Hakuna Matata”—which is to say, apart from much of the actual dialogue—it was an impressive production.

The Lion