&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.

Animal Magnetism

English

Spanish(español)

Bengali(বাঙালি)

Gujarati(ગુજરાતી)

Hindi(हिन्दी)

Malayalam(മലയാളം)

Tamil(தமிழ்)

Telugu(తెలుగు)

The New Yorker

NOTE TO SELVES

THE ORCHESTRA IS THE STAR

HEAD CASE

LOVE FOR SALE

EACH OTHER'S BACK

NO ROOM FOR A MASTERPIECE

THE BATTLE FOR FRANCE

BOOK A STRESS-FREE GETAWAY

LEG WORK

BASIC INSTINCT

1. You agree that the use of Magzter.com, the application and its services, are at solely at your own risk. Neither Magzter.com nor its associates nor employees nor third party content providers guarantee that the service will be completely uninterrupted or error-free or foolproof against miscreant activities. Nor do they warranty that you will get the exact results as expected or promised by the website or product.

11. THE SERVICE AND ALL PUBLICATIONS ARE PROVIDED ON AN 'AS IS' AND 'AS AVAILABLE' BASIS. MAGZTER, ITS AFFILIATES, SUPPLIERS, LICENSORS AND AGENTS EXPRESSLY DISCLAIM ALL WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, WHETHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NON-INFRINGEMENT. WITHOUT LIMITING THE FOREGOING, NEITHER MAGZTER NOR ITS AFFILIATES, SUPPLIERS, LICENSORS OR AGENTS, MAKES ANY WARRANTY THAT (I) THE SERVICE WILL MEET YOUR REQUIREMENTS, (II) THE SERVICE WILL BE UNINTERRUPTED, TIMELY, SECURE, OR ERROR-FREE, (III) THE INFORMATION THAT MAY BE OBTAINED FROM THE USE OF THE SERVICE OR THAT MAY BE CONTAINED IN THE PUBLICATIONS WILL BE ACCURATE OR RELIABLE, OR (IV) THE QUALITY OF ANY PUBLICATIONS OR THE SERVICE WILL MEET YOUR EXPECTATIONS. YOU ARE SOLELY RESPONSIBLE FOR OBTAINING AND MAINTAINING RELIABLE INTERNET CONNECTIVITY AND YOUR DEVICE. MAGZTER IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR INABILITY TO DOWNLOAD CONTENT. ANY MATERIAL DOWNLOADED OR OTHERWISE OBTAINED THROUGH THE USE OF THE SERVICE IS DONE AT YOUR OWN DISCRETION AND RISK AND YOU WILL BE SOLELY RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY DAMAGE TO YOUR COMPUTER SYSTEM OR MOBILE DEVICE OR LOSS OF DATA THAT RESULTS FROM THE DOWNLOAD OF ANY SUCH MATERIAL. NO ADVICE OR INFORMATION, WHETHER ORAL OR WRITTEN, OBTAINED BY YOU FROM MAGZTER OR THROUGH OR FROM THE SERVICE SHALL CREATE ANY WARRANTY.

2. You will maintain and promptly update that information to keep it true, accurate, current and complete. You are responsible for maintaining the confidentiality of your account and password and for restricting access to your computer, and you agree to accept responsibility for all activities that occur under your account, including the selection and use of all content and services.

2.You will maintain and promptly update that information to keep it true, accurate, current and complete. You are responsible for maintaining the confidentiality of your account and password and for restricting access to your computer, and you agree to accept responsibility for all activities that occur under your account, including the selection and use of all content and services.

3. In no event will Magzter.com or any person or entity or third party involved in the creation, production and distribution of the content on the website and the application be liable in contract or legally for any damages, including and not limited to, direct, indirect, incidental, special, and consequential incurred to you while or on using Magzter.com. By registering on the website or downloading the application, you agree that the provisions mentioned in this section shall apply to all use of and content on the website and the application.

3. Without prior written or authorised permission from Magzter, you should not modify, copy, distribute or sell any content obtained from Magzter as everything published here is the proprietary property of Magzter or its licensors. As such unauthorised use may also violate applicable laws including copyright and trademark laws, Magzter strictly prohibits these and will terminate your access and account if any such illegal activity is proved or detected. You should also stand liable for the damages caused by these unauthorised activities. Except as permitted by the Publication's lawful owner, you acknowledge that you do not acquire any ownership rights by downloading Publications accessed through the Service. Except as explicitly required under copyright law or permitted by the features of the Service you may not modify, reverse engineer, publish, transmit, display, participate in the transfer or sale, create derivative works of, or in any way commercially exploit or provide to a third party the content of the App, the Publications, or any portion of them without the express permission of Magzter and the owner of such content. We do not grant you any licenses, express or implied, to the intellectual property of Magzter or Magzter's licensors.

5. You specifically acknowledge that Magzter.com is not liable for any kind of defamatory or offensive or illegal conduct of other users or third parties or their content and that the risk of injury from the foregoing rests entirely with you.

8. Magzter reserves all rights to monitor the content published and inputted by you for the purpose of determining whether you are compliant with these terms and conditions and other operating rules determined by Magzter. Magzter has the right to take decisions about the content and delete them at its own will.

9. Magzter is a distributor and NOT a publisher of the Publications and so Magzter has no editorial control over the content, including opinions, advice, statements, services, offers etc., that is represented in the magazines. So Magzter will not take responsibility for the accuracy or the reliability for any information or facts provided therein or that is made available through the service, by anyone other than authorised Magzter employees who are acting on their official capacities. Accordingly, we have no editorial control over the Publications. Any opinions, advice, statements, services, offers or other information or content expressed or made available by third parties, including those made in Publications offered by the Service, are those of the respective author(s) or publisher(s) and not of Magzter. Magzter will not be liable for any loss or damage caused by your reliance on information obtained through the Service or from the Publications. The Service may contain links to other Internet sites and third-party resources and Magzter does not assume any responsibility or liability for communications or materials available at such linked sites. These links are provided for your convenience only. You are solely responsible for understanding any terms and conditions that may apply when you visit or place an order through a third-party site.

Choose your favorite titles from 40+ exciting categories

Details of the objectionable content, including its link on our platform

Download your favorite titles and read them offline, anytime and anywhere

Gift your loved ones with a Magzter Gift Card instantly and give them the freedom to read their favorite magazines and newspapers from thousands of best-selling titles.

Gift your loved ones with a Magzter Gift Card instantly and give them the freedom to read their favorite magazines from thousands of best-selling titles.

Gift your loved ones with a Magzter Gift Card instantly and give them the freedom to read their favorite magazines from {{magCount}} best-selling international titles.

Girish Ramdas is the Co-founder and CEO of Magzter, a New York based startup that has been making waves in the global digital publishing business. Magzter has crossed 80 million users since its inception in 2011 from more than 150+ countries with 1000s of magazines, newspapers and books from more than 4,500 publishers worldwide. He has more than 25 years of experience in cross-platform publishing, including print, mobile, and Web development. During this period, he has co-founded and run three successful start-up businesses. He has enabled magazine companies to go digital and helps them monetize their content across the digital world. Girish's deep industry experience in online, mobile and publishing ecosystems has made him an expert in acquisition, marketing and monetizing digital content across platforms globally.

In the event that you encounter any objectionable content on our platform, we have put in place a grievance redressal policy to address your concerns.

Magzter Inc. (“Company”, “we”, “us” or “our”) knows that you care about how your personal information is used and shared. Please read the following privacy policy (the “Policy”) to learn more about our privacy practices. By visiting any of the websites operated by the Company, and any sub-domains thereof, or using any of our mobile applications and other methods of content distribution (collectively, the “Service”), you acknowledge that you accept the practices and policies outlined in this Policy, and you hereby consent that we will collect, use, and share your information in the following ways.

Magzter Inc. is the World's largest and fastest growing self-service, cross-platform digital newsstand with over 80 million users since its inception in 2011 and thousands of magazines and newspapers across 40+ categories and 60+ languages. Headquartered in New York, Magzter has its local presence in Amsterdam, London, Mexico City, Chennai, Mumbai, New Delhi, Bengaluru, Singapore, and will soon be expanding to other countries. Founded by global entrepreneurs, Girish Ramdas and Vijay Radhakrishnan in June 2011, Magzter enables magazine and newspaper publishers around the world to create and deliver digital editions of their titles to global consumers.

Magzter is committed to providing a safe and secure platform for our users. Please note that Magzter is merely a platform for publishers to distribute their content. We do not control or endorse the content published on our platform. We cannot be held responsible for the actions of our publishers or their content.

Magzter is not responsible for compensating any party that has suffered damages or incurred costs due to any content, or part of the content, that violates their rights. Magzter is not liable to face any legal action in civil court for any violation of rights caused by any content, or part of the content, that infringes the rights of a third party.

Magzter offers the world’s largest {{allyoucanread}} subscription service called {{gold}} which gives digital readers unlimited access to 9,000+ magazines and newspapers for a monthly subscription price. Magzter also has the largest number of stories in the world with its game-changing ezRead 2.0 feature for its apps, which enables smartphone and small-screen mobile users to enjoy magazine content the way it was meant to be enjoyed, with article text that is easy to read and is accompanied by stunning videos and high resolution photography.

Magzter offers the world’s largest “All-You-Can-Read” subscription service called Magzter GOLD which gives digital readers unlimited access to 9,000+ magazines and newspapers for a monthly subscription price. Magzter also has the largest number of stories in the world with its game-changing ezRead 2.0 feature for its apps, which enables smartphone and small-screen mobile users to enjoy magazine content the way it was meant to be enjoyed, with article text that is easy to read and is accompanied by stunning videos and high resolution photography.

Name

Note: This will only share the cover and the publication information, but not the content.

Please fill out this form if you need any help regarding publishing your content on Magzter

Prior to Magzter, he was the President of Dot Com Infoway (DCI) and Galatta Media. His duties included strategic marketing, partnership development, and monetizing content globally. DCI grew from a small team of 3 in 2000 to 300 by 2011 and was dealing with web, software and app development for clients globally.

Since we launched, Magzter has been committed to partnering with global organizations to provide the greatest possible newsstand technology & service to our customers. Whether you are looking to offer magazine subscriptions to your customer database or just want to learn more, Magzter is committed to helping your business grow. To find out more, please fill out the questionnaire below:

The DMCA allows us to restore the removed content if the party filing the original DMCA Notice does not file a court action against you within ten business days of receiving the copy of your Counter Notice.

This Policy covers Company’s treatment of personally identifiable information (“Personal Information”) and other information about you and your computer or device that Company gathers when you are accessing the Service. We may collect Personal Information from you, as explained in more detail below, and we use this Personal Information internally in connection with our Services, including to personalize, provide, and improve our products, services, content, and advertising, and to allow you to set up a user account and profile, to contact you, to fulfill your requests for certain products and services, and to analyze how you use the Services. In certain cases, we may also share some Personal Information with third parties, but only as described in point 4.

This title is included with your Magzter GOLD subscription

To analyze the quality of content and provide appropriate feedback to publishers

We have designated a Grievance Officer to address any complaints related to objectionable content.

We request that any complaint related to objectionable content be sent to the Grievance Officer through email to the above-mentioned email address. We also request that you provide the following details when making a complaint:

and the App that provides you the capability to order, subscribe to and receive the delivery of various magazines, books, news and magazine and publication related content (collectively known as 'Publications') and to have these digital versions of the Publications delivered to you

c. We also collect information associated with your use of the application in order to make personalized recommendations. If you provide your third-party account credentials to us, you understand some content and/or information in those accounts (“Third Party Account Information”) may be transmitted into your account with us if you authorize such transmissions, and that Third Party Account Information transmitted to the Service is covered by this Policy.

f. The Personal Information we collect allows us to respond to your requests, improve our products and services, customize the advertising and content you see, and communicate with you about new products.

is the World's largest and fastest growing self-service, cross-platform digital newsstand with over 87 million users since its inception in 2011 and thousands of magazines and newspapers across 40+ categories and 60+ languages. Headquartered in New York, Magzter has its local presence in Amsterdam, London, Mexico City, Chennai, Mumbai, New Delhi, Bengaluru, Singapore, and will soon be expanding to other countries. Founded by global entrepreneurs, Girish Ramdas and Vijay Radhakrishnan in June 2011, Magzter enables magazine and newspaper publishers around the world to create and deliver digital editions of their titles to global consumers.

n. We will also use usage information in order to ensure users adhere to our Terms of Use. For example, a user’s usage information will help us confirm that a user only downloads a magazine or other content a permitted number of times or to a permitted number of devices.

which gives digital readers unlimited access to 9,000+ magazines and newspapers for a monthly subscription price. Magzter also has the largest number of stories in the world with its game-changing ezRead 2.0 feature for its apps, which enables smartphone and small-screen mobile users to enjoy magazine content the way it was meant to be enjoyed, with article text that is easy to read and is accompanied by stunning videos and high resolution photography.

{{magzter}} is the World's largest and fastest growing self-service, cross-platform digital newsstand with over 87 million users since its inception in 2011 and thousands of magazines and newspapers across 40+ categories and 60+ languages. Headquartered in New York, Magzter has its local presence in Amsterdam, London, Mexico City, Chennai, Mumbai, New Delhi, Bengaluru, Singapore, and will soon be expanding to other countries. Founded by global entrepreneurs, Girish Ramdas and Vijay Radhakrishnan in June 2011, Magzter enables magazine and newspaper publishers around the world to create and deliver digital editions of their titles to global consumers.