Fun Facts
- Tony Award-winning director and designer Julie Taymor, along with designer Michael Curry, hand sculpted and painted every prototype mask that now appears in the iconic “Circle of Life” opening of the show. Their department of skilled mask makers, sculptors, puppeteers, and artisans spent 17,000 hours to build the characters for the original Broadway production.
- The tallest animals in the show are the four eighteen-foot exotic giraffes from “I Just Can’t Wait to Be King.” The two giraffes in “Circle of Life” are fourteen feet high. Two actors trained in stilt walking climb six-foot ladders to fit inside the puppets, mount stilts and enter stage left to cross the stage.
- The most complicated set piece is Pride Rock, which appears five times during each performance. Pride Rock is a battery-powered set piece that expands out like an accordion to eighteen feet wide at its fullest position onstage and compresses to eight feet when offstage in the wings.
- There are six indigenous African languages spoken in the show: Swahili, Zulu, Xhosa, Sotho, Tswana, and Congolese.
About the Show
More than 85 million people around the world have experienced the phenomenon of Disney’s THE LION KING, and now you can, too, when Cincinnati’s best-loved musical returns to the Aronoff Center. Winner of six Tony Awards, including Best Musical, this landmark musical event brings together one of the most imaginative creative teams on Broadway. Tony Award-winning director Julie Taymor brings to life a story filled with hope and adventure set against an amazing backdrop of stunning visuals. THE LION KING also features some of Broadway’s most recognizable music, crafted by Tony Award-winning artists Elton John and Tim Rice. There is simply nothing else like THE LION KING.
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