The Guardian
Arifa Akbar · Chief theatre critic
"A genuine theatrical event. Twenty-seven years on, it still feels like the first time."
Few shows define London theatre quite like The Lion King. Since it first opened at the Lyceum Theatre in October 1999, Disney’s stage adaptation has become a permanent fixture of the West End, handed down from one generation of families to the next and now well into its third decade in the capital. What keeps audiences coming back is not simply the story they know from the film, but the way that story is told on stage: with towering puppets, hand-carved masks and a design that turns the whole auditorium into the African savannah.
The plot will be familiar to anyone who grew up with the film. Simba, a young lion cub, is heir to the throne of the Pride Lands until his uncle Scar engineers the death of his father, Mufasa, and drives the guilt-stricken cub into exile. Far from home, Simba grows up without a care alongside the meerkat Timon and the warthog Pumbaa, until old friends, painful memories and his own sense of duty finally call him back to reclaim what is his. It is a coming-of-age story about grief, courage and belonging, and in the theatre it carries a weight the cartoon only hints at.
The Lion King Musical: From Screen to Stage
Turning a much-loved animated film into live theatre could easily have been an exercise in nostalgia. Instead, director Julie Taymor treated the 1994 movie as raw material for something far bolder. Rather than hide the mechanics of her puppets, she leaves them in full view: you can see the performers who operate each animal, and somehow that openness makes the illusion more moving, not less. Taymor drew on African and Indonesian performance traditions, shadow play and mask work to give the production a visual language entirely its own.
The gamble paid off. When the show opened on Broadway in 1997, Taymor became the first woman to win a Tony Award for directing a musical; the London staging followed in 1999 and collected a string of Olivier nominations of its own. More than 25 years on, the West End production is still regarded as some of the most inventive stagecraft the city has to offer.
Why It’s Worth the Watch
Plenty of long-running shows coast on their reputation. The Lion King does not. Here is what still sets it apart:
- The opening. Before a line of dialogue is spoken, ‘Circle of Life’ sends life-size elephants, giraffes and gazelles processing down the aisles of the Lyceum, past your seat and up onto the stage. It is regularly named one of the great opening numbers in theatre, and it lands every single time.
- The score. Elton John and Tim Rice’s film songs - ‘Circle of Life’, ‘Hakuna Matata’, ‘Can You Feel the Love Tonight’ and ‘I Just Can’t Wait to Be King’ - are joined on stage by numbers such as ‘They Live in You’, ‘Shadowland’ and ‘Endless Night’, wrapped in a score that blends Western orchestration with traditional African rhythm and vocals.
- The craft. The production uses more than 200 puppets, from a tiny mouse to a full-size elephant, each designed so that a human performer and an animal character share the same body in plain sight of the audience.
- The reach. The Lion King is the highest-grossing stage production in history, seen by well over 100 million people across every continent since it first opened.
