The tour also travels with two child guardians, since 48 babies have been born to cast members while they were on the road over the past 20 years. The tour travels with a small army of 134 people, including 49 cast members, 19 wardrobe staffers, 15 carpenters, five makeup artists and 12 musicians. Sixteen of those trucks are 53-foot-long semi-trailers. The North American touring production uses 17 trucks to transport the puppets and set pieces from city to city. Since its launch in 2002, the North American touring production of “Lion King” has traveled 155,000 miles between stops, the equivalent of six trips around the globe, and played more than 9,000 performances. In 2011, “Lion King” became the first Broadway musical to offer a sensory-friendly performance. The largest animal is the elephant, which is 13 feet long, 12 feet high and nine feet wide, and requires four actors to operate. The tallest animals in the procession - each operated by a stilt-walking actor-puppeteer fully visible to the audience, are the two 14-foot-tall giraffes. (Courtesy of Deen van Meer/Disney Theatricals) To create a center aisle for the parade at the Civic Theatre, dozens of seats must be removed from the center of each row from the orchestra pit to the dress circle seats. The show famously begins with the animal procession to celebrate the birth of the future lion king, Simba, at Africa’s Pride Rock. Today, “Lion King” is the highest-grossing musical in Broadway history and it has beaten out all musicals and films worldwide for total box-office gross, according to Disney Theatrical Productions. The Broadway production won six Tony Awards, including Best Musical and Best Direction for Taymor, who became the first woman in Tony history to receive the musical directing prize. The show’s animal menagerie includes 22 wildebeest, 39 hyenas, 15 gazelles, 12 bird kites and three zebras. Among the show’s most unique costume elements are the 20 grassland headdresses, which must be rebuilt with 3,000 stalks of grass each year. The character of Simba, who ages from newborn to adult king during the story, is represented in six ways during the musical, including three puppets, a child and adult actor and as a painting that Rafiki creates on a tree.Īlthough the actors playing lions in the musical wear lightweight silicone rubber masks on their forehead so their faces aren’t obscured, the puppet for Puumba the warthog weighs 45 pounds. The musical’s opening song, “Circle of Life,” begins with the character of the wise mandrill Rafiki calling out in Zulu: “ Nants ingonyama bagithi Baba Sithi uhm ingonyama.” This translates as: “Here comes a lion, father, Oh yes it’s a lion.”
The musical’s script and score feature words from five Indigenous African languages: Zulu, Xhosa, Sesotho, Setswana and Swahili.
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