November 19, 2022

 

Julie Taymor became the first woman to win a Tony Award for directing a musical.Kenneth Van Sickle

‘The Lion King’ at 25

After almost 10,000 performances, more people have seen “The Lion King” than any other show on Broadway. But a quarter century ago, when it premiered, that success was far from guaranteed.

After a tepid reaction to the strait-laced stage adaptation of “Beauty and the Beast,” Disney’s executives took a gamble and collaborated with the avant-garde artist Julie Taymor. “When they mentioned her name,” the puppet designer Michael Curry said, “the first thing that went through my mind was, ‘Are you ready for her?’”

Taymor, Curry and others spoke to The Times for an oral history.