&ldquo;The fairground booth is eternal. Its heroes do not die; they simply change their aspects and assume new forms,&quot; the great Russian avant-garde director Vsevolod Meyerhold once said. With its noise, its novelty, its love of the grotesque, and its vivid design of movement, the fairground is a revolt against the deadliness of naturalism and an invitation for the public to play. This spirit has re&euml;merged, improbably, on West Forty-second Street, in the shape of an entire stylized menagerie of animals for Disney&#39;s &quot;The Lion King,&quot; which opened last week at the sumptuously renovated New Amsterdam Theatre, under the bold scenic and sculptural hand of Julie Taymor, an avant-gardist who has been enlisted in the commercial ranks. (She earned her spurs in the early seventies as an apprentice to the Open Theatre&#39;s Joe Chaikin and the Bread and Puppet Theatre&#39;s Peter Schumann; she subsequently lived in Indonesia for four years, studying traditional and experimental puppetry.) With the show clearing a pre-opening advance of about twenty million dollars, Taymor has proved to Disney that taking the high theatrical road can be a good business decision. Here, on a superb protean set by Richard Hudson, she uses a wide range of puppet styles, African-inspired fabrics, Zulu chants, and a grab bag of borrowed but effective avant-garde staging tricks to turn &quot;The Lion King&quot; into a theatrical event far more textured and original than the film. The musical is a series of truly vivants tableaux-part pageant, part puppet show, part parade, with a touch of Las Vegas revue thrown in-telling the story of Simba, a princely lion cub who loses his kingdom, goes into exile, and returns to claim his inheritance from his epicene, malevolent Uncle Scar, a pooftah in the pride. The lineaments of the plot touch loosely on Adam, on Oedipus, and on the prodigal son, but what is really dramatized is not so much the longing for a return to paradise as the longing for a return of theatre to the extraordinary.In film, audiences expect the unexpected, which is manufactured for them. They pay, but they don&#39;t play; their thrill is technological but not, in the fullest sense, imaginative. However, from the moment the animals arrive majestically onstage, called from the wings and down the aisles to Pride Rock for the birth of Simba by a mesmerizing Zulu chant and response led by Rafiki, the mandrill-shaman (well played and sung by Tsidii Le Loka), the story is liberated from its soppy, hidebound cartoon naturalism. In the opening number, &quot;Circle of Life,&quot; Taymor submerges the audience in a mythic universe; it&#39;s like being in a dream awake. Here the stage picture aspires to the sacred as much as to the spectacular. The air fills with the sound of African drumming, marimbas, and balophones, and the saffron sun rises out of a gray daybreak, as the animals make their slow, reverent, astonishing appearance. They are ingenious, beautifully painted constructions, made from materials like fibreglass, rope, clay, and foam rubber, which are harnessed to the actors and guided by them. This poetic interplay between puppeteer and puppet, where the human being is always visible within the animal, is, Taymor says, &quot;a cubistic event, because the audience experiences the art from several perspectives.&quot; On close inspection, for instance, the giraffe&#39;s torso turns out to be a man on stilts, bent forward at a forty-five-degree angle in order to operate the front legs, which are attached to his arms; leaping gazelles are conjured up in miniature on a carrousel of rotating wheels that is pushed across the stage; Scar&#39;s mask is positioned above and behind the actor&#39;s head, and it can tilt forward almost two feet in front of his face to intensify his intrusive menace; and, perhaps best of all, the cheetah-whose back legs are strapped to the legs of its handler, Lana Gordon, while the front of the torso is controlled by her head and hands-glides stealthily across the savanna. Are the animals human or are the humans animal? As in a na&iuml;ve painting, the boundaries blur after a while into a teeming, surreal anthropomorphic universe.Taymor&#39;s scenic genius brings poetry to a story that is, essentially, kiddie pulp. In one exquisite stage picture, the audience stares out at an expanse of grassland; then the grass slowly rises from the ground to reveal an African chorus, with boxes of grass balanced on its many heads. The singers move in diagonals around the stage while puppeteers, racing between the rows of this moving meadow with miniatures of Simba and his father, Mufasa, give the illusion that the lions are running on the plains. It&#39;s an image of overwhelming lyric beauty, and it resonates far beyond the bounds of the story. In another scene, a backdrop of painted wildebeests and a series of rollers on which miniature wildebeests of increasing size revolve create the sensational impression of a wildebeest stampede; there&#39;s also a thrilling visual moment when one of Simba&#39;s sidekicks, a miniature of the motormouth meerkat Timon (well handled by Max Casella, who really gets into it), falls from a limb above a waterfall into a pool of snapping crocodiles. Taymor does lose her way in Simba&#39;s &quot;I Just Can&#39;t Wait to Be King,&quot; a silly fantasia that takes the story nowhere, and in the embarrassing aerial love ballet (a kind of cabaret trapeze turn) that accompanies Garth Fagan&#39;s earthbound choreography for &quot;Can You Feel the Love Tonight.&quot; In general, however, the mind is filled with such an exhilarating sense of wonder that the gee-whizzery of the banal spoken English-&quot;Carnivores. Oy!&quot; Timon exclaims-hardly seems to matter.Indeed, the show&#39;s high visual style is in sharp contrast to its low verbal one. When Zulu words are chanted by the ensemble of twenty-five, the effect is eloquent and magical; when the script falls back into Disneyspeak, it loses some of its lustre and its illusion of authenticity. As a result, the show, for all its excitement, is spectacular without being moving. &quot;Get this thing off me!&quot; the hornbill Zazu bleats at one point, when the curtain falls on him, leaving the unfunny bird unfortunately still conscious. &quot;It looks like a shower curtain from the Guggenheim gift shop!&quot; Where the production really loses ground, however, is in the traditional musical score, by Elton John and Tim Rice. The lyrics are a conventional thesaurus job: they manage to be simple without being fresh. &quot;What did my brother have that I don&#39;t have?&quot; asks Scar, in a lazy, unworthy borrowing of the Cowardly Lion&#39;s &quot;What have they got that I ain&#39;t got?&quot; And for dopiness on Broadway I don&#39;t think &quot;Hakuna Matata&quot;-a Swahili catchphrase that means &quot;No Worries&quot; can be topped:Hakuna Matata! What a wonderful phrase!Hakuna Matata! Ain&#39;t no passing craze!Finally, &quot;The Lion King&quot; turns the predatory anarchy of nature into a fairy tale of harmony-an ersatz Eden, where the lion doesn&#39;t lie down just with the lamb but with an entire zoo. Simba marries Nala (the excellent Heather Headley), and, in the musical&#39;s last beat, an heir is held before the kneeling, reverent kingdom. Paradise, once lost, is regained. Disney&#39;s world is one without shadow, and the production is in keeping with the spirit of the pleasure dome in which it is housed. &quot;I had rather have a fool to make me merry than experience to make me sad,&quot; it says on the ceiling of the New Amsterdam&#39;s restored bar; the stage, whose proscenium arch is sculptured with peacocks, was built expressly for the escape of de-luxe spectacle. Florenz Ziegfeld mounted his lavish Follies here, and &quot;The Lion King&quot; seems to share Ziegfeld&#39;s commercial karma. Ziegfeld used women to eroticize wealth; Disney uses animals to sentimentalize it. The creators of &quot;The Lion King&quot; would probably call this the &quot;circle of life&quot;; I call it brilliant Business Art, and the hell with it.

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