E-Mail This Article to a Friend Big cats’ meow The Lion King as dance BY MARCIA B. SIEGEL

For a production as lavish as The Lion King, the dancing turned out to be surprisingly tame. Maybe what with everything else that was going on — the puppets and masks and singing and drumming and smoke, the shadows, elevators, vegetation growing out of the floor, stampeding wildebeests, duplicitous hyenas, and all those characters searching for truth and mythic adventure — they figured we didn’t need much dancing.

The outright dance numbers in the show seemed abbreviated to me, and limited to a few basic steps. Most of the choruses feature a foot-to-foot stamping phrase that travels, expands into space-covering runs, and gets decorated with balances on one foot and turns that can spring up into barrel jumps. The ensemble of about eight dancers is joined by a wonderful chorus of gospel singers costumed the same way, and moving in more limited rhythmic swaying or rocking processions. There are hints of African dance steps accompanying the African chants, but only hints.

Smaller, specialized numbers include duets for the main characters, who aren’t primarily dancers, I’d guess. The lion cubs (Brandon Kane and Calicia Wilson the night I attended) sing "I Just Can’t Wait To Be King," and their dance is a sort of energetic bopping. Scar (Dan Donohue), the bad uncle, tries to seduce the grown-up Nala (Adrienne Muller) with a tango but gives up after a few bars. Nala and Simba (Alan Mingo Jr.) fight, not very convincingly, then realize they’re not lion kids anymore. Grown up and in love, they embrace a few times, sing "Can You Feel the Love Tonight," then turn the duet over to a pair of unnamed dancers who do a wobbly imitation of a ballet pas de deux while two other couples dance gracefully high above on trapezes.

I can think of a lot of reasons why the dancing in The Lion King looks simplistic or perfunctory, and why that doesn’t really matter in a production that’s so conceptually cluttered and gorgeously executed. Eclectic is too limited a word for this spectacle. Julie Taymor’s animals inhabit rod puppets, shadow puppets, body puppets, stilts, tricycles, and retractable masks, and all the dancing has to work with these stage-impeding herds as well as a floor that at various times rises, tilts, opens up, and gets sliced into layers by the scenery.

Besides, there’s plenty of interesting movement going on that isn’t strictly pegged as dancing: the cartwheeling clowns in floppy suits, the goosestepping hyena army, the butterflies on sticks courtesy of kabuki’s lion dance, Renjishi. My favorite person in the show was the mandrill shaman Rafiki (Futhi Mhlongo), who shook her open palm with the three-inch fingernails like the Balinese witch Rangda, sang African invocations, and conjured up Taymor’s ultimate theatrical vision.

The Lion King strikes me as an ensemble show, regardless of the heroes and villains and faithful family retainers who are its stars. Some of them won me over as music-hall entertainers. The melodramatic Scar reminded me of Jack Buchanan’s broken-down tragedian in The Band Wagon. Mark Cameron Pow, playing Zazu, the lions’ devoted hornbill majordomo, wore a busker’s decorated tailcoat and babbled in a clipped British accent. John Plumpis, dressed and made up entirely in bright green, merged with a person-sized puppet to become the wisecracking meercat Timon, who befriends Simba when he loses his way, like some benevolent Jackie Mason of the savannah.

I suspect that Garth Fagan played a much more important role than simply choreographing the show’s dance numbers. As a native-born Jamaican and former Afro-Caribbean dancer, he infuses his particular vitality into the dancing, and the processions and gatherings of animals too, I’ll bet. No one is credited with stage movement, but Fagan may have contributed to that as well.

Garth Fagan is a distinguished choreographer who’s had his own modern dance company for nearly 35 years. They’ve struggled, like everyone in the concert-dance field. Their changing fortunes are reflected in their name, originally Bottom of the Bucket, But . . . A while later, with their hopes beginning to pay off, they became the Bucket Dance Theatre. After The Lion King made the choreographer a household name throughout the known Disney world, they became Garth Fagan Dance. With the show a seven-year smash hit on Broadway and on tour, Fagan’s earnings have probably helped keep his concert work afloat; this is, after all, one reason legit choreographers take commercial jobs. Hooray for that.