Today we’re taking a quick look at everyone’s favorite Disney movie turned Broadway musical based on a Shakespeare tragedy: The Lion King!
The success of The Lion King on Broadway can be attributed in many ways to the typical reasons: it embraces the strengths of the original, it isn’t afraid to expand in a few places to accommodate the longer runtime, etcetera, etcetera. But what I want to focus on today is the factor that distinguishes The Lion King from most other musicals out there: the masks and puppets.
For those who have never seen it, The Lion King is a show focused entirely around animals. Many are lions, but there’s also hyenas, warthogs, birds, and most animals you could find in the African savannah. To make sure that the audience is always able to tell which characters are which animals, the show developed incredibly elaborate costumes.
These costumes include masks that generally go above the actor’s head, so that the audience can see, for example, a lioness face atop the actress playing Nala, while still being able to see the actress’s face. (More on the importance of that in a sec.) The costumes in some cases, like the case of the bird Zazu also have the actor operating a puppet that represents the animal.
This is an interesting way of addressing the fact that the cast are playing animals. As I mentioned before, the masks and puppets allow the audience to see the animal face at the same time as the actor’s face. Given how musical theatre is a performance medium, not covering the actors’ faces allows them to perform without hindrance and still get the benefits that the masks and puppets allow.
As a result, the audience is able to be engrossed in the illusion that the cast are the animals they portray, while also enabling them to witness the emotions and body language of the performers.
The masks and puppets also allow the clothes the actors wear be more indicative of what the character in the question might wear if they were human. Take a look at this image of Mufasa and Sarabi:
The clothes Mufasa's actor is wearing is very much what Mufasa might wear if he were a human African king instead of a lion. Similiar for Sarabi. The show can do this instead of a more typical "lion" costume because through the headpieces the costumes already convey that these characters are lions. Now the rest of the costume can express more of the character, and not just the animal species.
The costuming is what takes an already solid classic story and ensures that it stays unforgettable as a musical. It's such a simple thing on paper, but the masks and puppetry of The Lion King really do make all the difference.
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