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“The Lion King” tour’s local visit opens Aug. Between the launch of “Beauty and the Beast” in 1993 and the shutdown of Broadway due to the pandemic in early 2020, overall Broadway attendance rose 55 percent. They have been seen by 200 million theatergoers worldwide and every three seconds a ticket to a Disney Theatrical production is purchased somewhere on the planet.ĭisney musicals have been credited with reviving the moribund Broadway industry in the 1990s by creating a new family audience that expanded theater tourism to New York. It takes five hours and 10 minutes per show to do all the makeup for the cast.ĭisney Theatrical has produced 10 Broadway shows, beginning with “Beauty and the Beast” in 1993. 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. Although 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.