Broadway Director Julie Taymor Is Back With a Vengeance

The Daily Beast: The first thing you see at the beginning of The Lion King on Broadway is a giant orange circle. It appears in the form of the sun, the backdrop on stage, and, as the show’s director, Julie Taymor, will tell you, it’s intentional: a “leitmotif, like in opera” for the Circle of Life (which is itself the first song of the show), of giving and taking, of the ways in which we go from high to low and back again. Over the next two hours, terrible things happen: Simba, the young lion at the center of the story, witnesses the death of his father, is driven from the kingdom, retrenches in the wilderness, and learns, ultimately, how to fight back and claim his place at the top of the food chain.