Everything you've heard about the first five minutes of The Lion King is true. When a golden sun rises on Richard Hudson's orange set, when birds on poles flitter about the audience's heads, when lion-masked actors prowl and wooden antelopes lope across the stage, when giant papier-mache'-style elephants galumph down the aisle—all this to the unforgettable voice of Tsidii Le Loka, her face painted up as an African mask—the only rational response is to cry a little and wonder at the glories of life and art. But being New Yorkers, at the sixth minute we ask ourselves: where does a show go when its opening minutes are perfect? The answer, alas, is mostly down-down-down in act one; up down and up in the better second act. The problem is not that Disney has dumbed down another 19th Century classic for the masses. After all, The Lion King is based on a pop-culture animated cartoon. What rankles is that the high artistry that informs so much of the show must stand hoof-to-hoof with a book that, with every other one-liner, insults the audience's intelligence. Timon and Pumbaa offer delightful comic relief, but what are these jungle animals doing making puns based on titles of TV shows? Much of the traditional-sounding African music (by a quintet of composers, including Lebo M), augmenting the Elton John and Tim Rice film score, also thrills. However, these soul-stirring numbers often segue into poppish stuff that would be catchy under other circumstances but here sound like a crude lowering of standards. This mix of dazzling greatness and purposefully low-tier rubbish frustrates all night, but to the last, director/designer Julie Taymor shows extraordinary imagination, in everything from a thrilling waterfall rescue (just a branch and rippling canvas) to an effect where a round piece of cloth vanishing into a hole in the stage somehow conveys the passing of years. Samuel E. Wright's proud, life-filled papa Mufasa almost singlehandedly holds the show's first hour together. After that, enough goes right again with The Lion King that one can—at least when in the theater—shrug off the flaws with a jaunty "Hakuna Matata" and join the circle of life.
