The Lion King Musical @ the Lyceum
After a Busy weekday. It was time to chill and I mean Chill in every sense of the word. London was getting colder day by day and the days are getting shorter.
Man... I really love the cold weather. Walking out in Shorts and a T-Shirt is definitelky better. and Again the Cold weather is definitely better than the Hot, Sticky, Sweaty Chennai.
Saturday, started off well and then a short stint at reorganizing my files on my etxrenal Hard Disk and then getting ready to go to the Royal Lyceum Theatre to watch the Lion King Musical.
The tickets booked by Smrithy George we left the YMCA at 1320 and reaching the Lyceum, I guess by Indian Standards on time. 2 more guys followed us Kabin George and Kashyap Muthuswamy (late but was true to what he said i.e. leaving home at 1330. He arrived on time but yeah I skipped a Heartbeat.)
We rushed on to the Theatre and man the Theatre was really Royal. The theater was really nice and lot of tiny tots with eager parents to watch the Lion King.
The Musical was fantabulous by all standards. The sets, the play, the screenplay, the dialogues were just too wonderful and words cannot explain what I would like to tell about the play.
The haunting chants for the grassland and the lionesses are by South African musician Lebo M, who also co-wrote four songs, with Mark Macina and three others. The wonderful Shadowlands, with its blend of European and African rhythms and orchestration, is their best. The sets are by the Zimbabwe-born Richard Hudson: their sense of broad spaces, high, cloud-fringed skies, and the brilliant reds, oranges, browns and deep yellows of the African landscape will haunt you for weeks to come. But it is finally Julie Taymor's show. She has directed it, designed the stunning costumes, and collaborated with Mark Curry on the even more stunning masks and puppets...
The Lion King is a wonderful, wonderful musical: thrilling, warm-hearted, inventive and origianl. It has a pulsating, teeming sense of animal life effortlessly at home in its rich, dangerous natural habitat, and a seamless blend of story and spectacle."Julie Taymor, the American director and designer, has brought to The Lion King puppets whose origins lie in the Far East an Africa... and no attempt is made to conceal the technically humble devices which drive them... This gorgeous carnival of hybrid creatures - part-beast, part-human - is emphatically, triumphantly theatrical. It never tries to mimic the special effects or verisimilitude of film. It is playful and ingenious, drawing attention to pretences.
The Lion King is a ravishing spectacle, the cat's whiskers no less, and an unmissable treat for the whole family... I can hardly wait to see it again or, more tantalising, to see the effect of the breathtakingly opening few moments of pure animal magic on the faces of the my children. A more imaginatively concieved carnival of creatures is impossible to conjure... An intensely theatrical experience.
The Lion King - Musical is an indisputable triumph - in the stage-version, at least, because Disney has entrusted the show to a director (Julie Taymor) and a creative team with exceptional imagination and a rare grasp of theatrical resources. You are gripped from teh first scene: a magnificent rippling sunrise, the chanting of a much-bedaubed and bedizened shaman, fabricated animals trooping down the aisle and flocking across the stage... It is so well done that you wonder where they can go from there, but scene after scene proves equally impressive...
What makes the spectacle so entrancing is that we are invited to enter into it as a game - to enjoy the means by which it is produced rather than goggling as the simulated reality... At every stage we are made aware of the actor behind an animal... The visual splendors of the show are never allowed to swamp the drama. The storyline remains clear and compelling... The Lion King is superlative entertainment, and puts most other mega-musicals in the shade.
If You get a Chance Do Make it a Point to watch it...
Man... I really love the cold weather. Walking out in Shorts and a T-Shirt is definitelky better. and Again the Cold weather is definitely better than the Hot, Sticky, Sweaty Chennai.
Saturday, started off well and then a short stint at reorganizing my files on my etxrenal Hard Disk and then getting ready to go to the Royal Lyceum Theatre to watch the Lion King Musical.
The tickets booked by Smrithy George we left the YMCA at 1320 and reaching the Lyceum, I guess by Indian Standards on time. 2 more guys followed us Kabin George and Kashyap Muthuswamy (late but was true to what he said i.e. leaving home at 1330. He arrived on time but yeah I skipped a Heartbeat.)
We rushed on to the Theatre and man the Theatre was really Royal. The theater was really nice and lot of tiny tots with eager parents to watch the Lion King.
The Musical was fantabulous by all standards. The sets, the play, the screenplay, the dialogues were just too wonderful and words cannot explain what I would like to tell about the play.
The haunting chants for the grassland and the lionesses are by South African musician Lebo M, who also co-wrote four songs, with Mark Macina and three others. The wonderful Shadowlands, with its blend of European and African rhythms and orchestration, is their best. The sets are by the Zimbabwe-born Richard Hudson: their sense of broad spaces, high, cloud-fringed skies, and the brilliant reds, oranges, browns and deep yellows of the African landscape will haunt you for weeks to come. But it is finally Julie Taymor's show. She has directed it, designed the stunning costumes, and collaborated with Mark Curry on the even more stunning masks and puppets...
The Lion King is a wonderful, wonderful musical: thrilling, warm-hearted, inventive and origianl. It has a pulsating, teeming sense of animal life effortlessly at home in its rich, dangerous natural habitat, and a seamless blend of story and spectacle."Julie Taymor, the American director and designer, has brought to The Lion King puppets whose origins lie in the Far East an Africa... and no attempt is made to conceal the technically humble devices which drive them... This gorgeous carnival of hybrid creatures - part-beast, part-human - is emphatically, triumphantly theatrical. It never tries to mimic the special effects or verisimilitude of film. It is playful and ingenious, drawing attention to pretences.
The Lion King is a ravishing spectacle, the cat's whiskers no less, and an unmissable treat for the whole family... I can hardly wait to see it again or, more tantalising, to see the effect of the breathtakingly opening few moments of pure animal magic on the faces of the my children. A more imaginatively concieved carnival of creatures is impossible to conjure... An intensely theatrical experience.
The Lion King - Musical is an indisputable triumph - in the stage-version, at least, because Disney has entrusted the show to a director (Julie Taymor) and a creative team with exceptional imagination and a rare grasp of theatrical resources. You are gripped from teh first scene: a magnificent rippling sunrise, the chanting of a much-bedaubed and bedizened shaman, fabricated animals trooping down the aisle and flocking across the stage... It is so well done that you wonder where they can go from there, but scene after scene proves equally impressive...
What makes the spectacle so entrancing is that we are invited to enter into it as a game - to enjoy the means by which it is produced rather than goggling as the simulated reality... At every stage we are made aware of the actor behind an animal... The visual splendors of the show are never allowed to swamp the drama. The storyline remains clear and compelling... The Lion King is superlative entertainment, and puts most other mega-musicals in the shade.
If You get a Chance Do Make it a Point to watch it...
posted by Arvind Krishnan at
4:30 PM
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