THEATER: NO DANCING TEAPOTS

The first characters to appear onstage are a pair of copulating jaguars–or, rather, a pair of copulating life-size puppet jaguars manipulated by people hidden in the stage blackness. The animals produce a cub, which later turns into a human child–which still later changes from a puppet into a real live boy. Oversize masks hide most of the remaining actors, from the stern-faced schoolteacher with his crooked, elongated finger to a snarling, flamenco-dancing tiger tamer. Butterflies float across the stage, a miniature church breaks apart when leaves erupt from inside it, and a dancing skeleton in a bowler hat is a macabre emcee.

These are just a few of the images that greet visitors to Juan Darien, a self-described “carnival Mass” being staged at New York City’s Lincoln Center. Adapted from an Uruguayan story by innovative stage director and designer Julie Taymor, it is a visually dazzling and utterly original piece of stagecraft. But perhaps more startling is what its creator is doing next. Taymor, a leading light of New York’s experimental theater scene, has been picked by Disney to turn its all-time biggest movie hit, The Lion King, into a Broadway show.

It might appear that Disney has hakuna matata’d right off the deep end. Taymor’s highly stylized theater work–using masks, puppetry, mime and other non-Western techniques–seems as far from classic Disney animation (and from those dancing teapots in Broadway’s Beauty and the Beast) as one can imagine. Taymor admits she was surprised when Thomas Schumacher, a Disney vice president, first asked her if she would like to develop a theatrical concept for The Lion King. “I’m sure if they find something that doesn’t work, they’ll tell me,” she says. “But they asked me for a reason. They want what I do.”

What she’ll do for The Lion King (scheduled to open in Minneapolis next July, then move to Broadway in the fall) is create a world of animals onstage without hiding the theatrical trickery needed to do so. It’s an approach that Disney chief Michael Eisner and other company execs grasped instantly, she says, when she presented it to them. “I showed them gazelles leaping across the horizon–and also the wheels turning the gazelles, and the person pushing the wheels. We’re not hiding anything. You’ll see it happen in front of your eyes.” Eight new musical numbers have been added, ranging from African-style choral music to new songs by Elton John and Tim Rice, the movie’s original composer and lyricist. “It will be a tactile, visceral event,” Taymor says, one that will break new ground for both Broadway and its creator. “The idea of reaching a large audience is thrilling to me.”

Taymor, 43, who has the long-haired, unadorned look of a college student and a precise but passionate way of describing her work that recalls your favorite professor, started acting at the age of 11, studied mime in Paris and worked in theater while majoring in mythology and folklore at Oberlin College. Her theatrical vision was shaped most decisively by a four-year stay in Indonesia, where she absorbed a whole non-Western ethic of theater. “I was so inspired by being in a culture where theater was the fundamental form of communication,” she says. “In Bali, ritual performances are as important as going to school. Theater is not something you pay to see; everyone participates.”

Back before paying customers in the U.S., Taymor began as a designer at Joseph Papp’s Public Theater and went on to direct imaginative productions of Shakespeare and opera as well as such fablelike works as Juan Darien (first staged in 1988) and The Green Bird. She frequently collaborates with composer Elliot Goldenthal, with whom she lives in a spacious Manhattan loft. The two are currently working on a new opera called Grendel, based on John Gardner’s novel, retelling the Beowulf legend from the monster’s point of view, and are hoping to revive Liberty’s Taken, a picaresque musical set in the American Revolution, which they wrote and first staged in 1985.

“I love epic theater,” says Taymor, “theater that exposes the strings and the manipulations, theater that can only be done as theater. Realism has spoiled people. Much of what I see onstage might better be done in another medium; you could just as well be at the movies.” An evangelist for theater in a multiplexed world. Disney may be ready for Taymor, but is America?