E-Mail This Article to a Friend Lion queen Understanding the art of Julie Taymor BY CAROLYN CLAY

Julie Taymor is looking at The Lion King from the tail end now, and from some distance. It has been nine years since the director/designer became the unlikely recipient of the assignment to translate Disney’s 1994 animated film about a prodigal cub into a Broadway spectacular. And it has been seven years since her multiple-Tony-winning vision of the work was unveiled. Taymor personally supervised the touring production that will inaugurate Boston’s newly resplendent Opera House this week. But even that was two years ago. Meanwhile, she has directed two feature films, Titus and Frida, and has several other irons in the fire, including a re-imagining of The Magic Flute, which she directed in Florence in 1993, for Los Angeles Opera and Lincoln Center, and an original opera, Grendel, created with her long-time companion, composer Elliot Goldenthal.

Still, curled up barefoot in a suite at Boston’s Four Seasons Hotel, the slim, attractive Taymor, doing serious damage to a plate of cookies, can still wax enthusiastic and profound about The Lion King. The first woman ever to win a Tony Award for direction of a musical, she transformed Disney’s likeable 89-minute cartoon into a mythic, multicultural extravaganza in which the African savannah rises from the stage on dancers’ heads, the sun is made of striated silk, and the animal kingdom is a billowing, encircling puppet parade before which Macy’s clunking Thanksgiving effort pales.

"The beauty," says Taymor, "is that people who come to the theater do suspend their disbelief and are with you on it and don’t question whether it’s real or not, like they would if they see Troy or Titanic. You know, we want it to be real in the movies; we really should be in Troy. Here we go, ‘I get it; it’s the savannah in Africa. On their heads are grasses on trays.’ Or the sun — we could have done a projection of the sunrise; there are movies out there. But I insisted. I said, ‘Look, I want to do just a bunch of silk strapped to bamboo poles, and the audience will watch it rise, and what they’ll get is not just that it’s the sunrise, but they’ll get that thing of the striation, and the shimmer of the silk will remind us of the heat if you see it on a desert.’ And it’s so much more magical because it’s just silk, because we know it’s silk. So the power of the inanimate object that’s animated, the power of the material all of a sudden having a life — that’s the origin of theater for me."

There are two miracles at work here. One is Taymor herself. The act of writing about her, Lion King choreographer Garth Fagan told American Theater magazine in 1999, should be easy. "Just start with genius," he said, "end with genius, and make sure all the words in between are genius." Taymor, a past winner of the prestigious MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant, had that label conferred on her long before The Lion King. And the 52-year-old Newton native was never conventional. The daughter of a gynecologist and a Democratic activist, she went from putting on shows in her back yard to the venerable Boston Children’s Theatre. Upon graduation from high school (which had included a year of travel in India and Sri Lanka with the Experiment in International Living), she went to Paris to study at the famous mime school, École Jacques Lecoq. At Oberlin College, she enrolled in a program that allowed her to study with the legendary Joseph Chaikin’s Open Theater and Peter Schumann’s Bread and Puppet Theater, returning to Ohio only when the school signed up intellectual avant-garde director Herbert Blau, with whose experimental troupe, Kraken, she became a performer.

Upon graduation at 21, Taymor traveled on a Watson Fellowship to Eastern Europe, Japan, and Indonesia. She remained in the latter for four years, immersing herself in mask and puppetry technique and founding a theater company, Teatr Loh. She returned home only once, downed by a lava injury incurred while climbing a volcano. Back in the States at last, Taymor wrote her unique signature as sculptor/designer/director on such works as Andrei Serban’s The King Stag for American Repertory Theatre, for which she created the puppets and costumes; Fool’s Fire, a Boschian-looking PBS film based on Edgar Allan Poe’s Hop-Frog; an adaptation of Thomas Mann’s The Transposed Heads (which she now hopes to turn into a film); and Juan Darién: A Carnival Mass, a dark, skeleton-inhabited fantasia from a story by South American writer Horacio Quiroga that finally brought her to Broadway, at Lincoln Center, in 1996.

The bigger miracle, considering her background, is that Disney Theatrical Productions tapped Taymor for The Lion King. The corporate giant had entered the theater world in 1994 with its lavish but stupefyingly slavish live reproduction of the 1991 animated film Beauty and the Beast. Beauty was directed by the unknown Robert Jess Roth. Not that it was a flop; the show, which won only one Tony Award (for Ann Hould-Ward’s costumes), is still running on Broadway 10 years later. But clearly, the corporate behemoth wanted to hear critical applause and not just the jingle of cash in the register. Nonetheless, Taymor admits she was "stunned" when she got the call from co-producer Thomas Schumacher, who had tried, 10 years earlier, to bring Taymor’s big, bawdy musical-theater take on the American Revolution, Liberty’s Taken, created for Ipswich’s Castle Hill Festival, to Los Angeles. (In the end, he decided he couldn’t afford it. "They all say that," responds Taymor.)

First, she had to watch the movie, which features songs by Elton John and Tim Rice, voices by James Earl Jones and Jeremy Irons, and the sweet tale of a King of the Jungle in Training who, tricked by an evil uncle into thinking himself responsible for his royal dad’s death, flees the kingdom, only to return and roar his way to his birthright. In the bouncy coming-of-age cartoon, Taymor found "mythic power, definitely. Some people would say it was Hamlet. Well, it has that psychology of the evil uncle taking over. You have that classic tale of the son’s vengeance and his claim to the throne and the destruction of the evil. But where did Shakespeare get his themes? It goes way back into human psychology, to what it is to be human, to the great myths of Western and Eastern culture." Indeed, Taymor has been known to compare The Lion King to The Mahabharata or The Odyssey, though she means only that since the story is familiar to most of the audience, "the art of the telling is as important as the story itself."