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Said art is where Taymor, who personally created the masks for The Lion King in her New York studio, comes in. First, believing that lion cub Simba is not sufficiently tested according to the rules of folklore (in which she majored at Oberlin) in the film, she needed to darken the story. Then, she says, "the female parts were very limited, almost nonexistent, because you can’t have a strong mother if the child has to leave home." Discussing the quandary with a friend, a South African singer who had appeared in Juan Darién, and learning that there are medicine women as well as men, "I had a light bulb go off in my head," Taymor recalls. "I went, ‘Rafiki.’ First of all, there’s the song ‘The Circle of Life,’ which, in the animated film, is an anonymous female voice. So you can’t have an anonymous female voice in the live theater. Someone has to be on stage singing. So, who is that woman? And all of a sudden it became clear to me that Rafiki could become the guardian of the piece, the storyteller; she could be the female soul of the piece." So it was that the dotty baboon shaman of the film became the "comical, spiritual, all-knowing character" who introduces the righteous if carnivorous circle of life that is the nexus of the musical.

Much has been written about the opening of Broadway’s The Lion King, a graceful and dazzling parade in which the animals — many of them large, colorful puppets whose human manipulators are clearly visible within the costumes; Taymor calls this "the double event" — are called to bear witness to the newborn Simba. Taymor has said that what she wanted to do here was what film and television cannot: namely, surround the audience. And so she does, with a 13-foot-long elephant wafting down the aisle, cheetahs and zebras melded to dancers, birds on poles, lion heads above human faces, and a bicycle-like "gazelle wheel" that makes the fleet creatures appear to lope across the stage.

Like the rest of The Lion King, that opening is both visually poetic and big. But Taymor insists the scale of the show was not daunting to her. "I had done enough in my life, even if it hadn’t been commercial, but in Off Broadway, avant-garde, and opera. I had gone off to do Oedipus Rex in Japan with Jessye Norman and Seiji Ozawa. I had done The Flying Dutchman and Salome. Oedipus was bigger than The Lion King, with 120 men in the chorus. So the scale wasn’t an intimidation.

"The thing that worried me most was losing my own aesthetic style. And I think that they [at Disney] were really wonderful to work with, because Tom [Schumacher] was insistent I could do my own aesthetic. Both Disney and I — two different beings — had dealt with myth, folklore; we had traipsed on the same hunting/stomping grounds in our quest for good stories. Mine were darker, more sexual, edgier, not for children. I hadn’t done anything for children. But I said from the beginning, ‘I’m not going to do this for children. Children will love it, but that’s not where I’m going to gear it.’ I mean, I hope children will love it. But for me it was very important that this be theater that I would enjoy going to, that my colleagues and adults would like. And if the story is good and colorful — take Shakespeare; kids love Shakespeare — they don’t have to get every single nuance, every single level."

The other thing that required deepening in The Lion King was the score; the film had offered just five songs by Elton John and Tim Rice (who wrote three more for the Broadway show). Taymor "wanted the music of Lebo M, the South African composer who did all the choral music for the score. I wanted him to come to the forefront, and I wanted to include those other languages." (Parts of the score are in Zulu and Xhosa.) "Obviously, the inspiration for the visual style is African fabrics and African landscapes. And there’s a tremendous amount of Asian influence because of my experience in Indonesia. I never went to Africa. But the most authentically African thing in The Lion King is the music that Lebo M contributed."

Despite its numerous bedazzlements, The Lion King, with its iconic masks and bunraku and shadow-puppet techniques, is surprisingly, refreshingly low on technologically generated effects. Says the director, "The power of it is partially because it is low-tech — because we are so technologically overwhelmed now that when you see a person in the second act with a kite that’s a bird, and you know it’s just two pieces of silk and a tail, yet it’s flying in the air because that’s what silk does when it’s off a fishing pole, then it’s magical again. Or, at the end of that giant opening, you see this teeny little two-dollar shadow puppet of a mouse with a circle of light that’s practically no bigger than a flashlight, then you go, ‘Oh my God, the circle of life now has become this small.’ I wanted to show that the power of live theater is that it doesn’t tell you everything.

"I think the artist out there — the artist in the good sense, the artist as communicator, as the shaman for the spiritual-entertainment health of the nation, of the culture — is out there not to put a direct mirror and say, ‘Look at yourself, that’s what you look like’ but to put the mirror here and here and here — " She gestures at her own body every which way, before continuing, "and be much more Cubistic, to show you another way of looking at what’s familiar." Art, Taymor adds, "has become The Scarlet Letter, hasn’t it? People think that means distance, cold. And what I think The Lion King kind of jolted with people is that you can still have that and be very accessible, be able to communicate with people without losing the artistry."

The Lion King is at the Opera House, 539 Washington Street, in Boston, July 16 through December 26. Regular tickets are $22.50 to $87.50, and Premium Package tickets are $132.50, available at the Colonial Theatre box office, 106 Boylston Street, Boston, or through Ticketmaster at (617) 931-2787. Carolyn Clay can be reached at cclay[a]phx.com