In 1997, Julie Taymor pulled off the 'impossible' with The Lion King musical

Nearly 30 years ago, American theatre director Julie Taymor was approached to adapt The Lion King into a stage musical. At the time, she had never seen the hit Disney movie.

"I think they were shocked I hadn't seen it," Taymor tells Q's Tom Power in an interview. "I was just busy. I was doing lots of things, but when I did see it — they sent me a video — I loved it."

Today, The Lion King musical is the highest-grossing production of all time, in theatre or in film,  taking over $10 billion US worldwide. But many thought it couldn't be done due to the massive challenge of adapting an epic animated film for the stage.

After watching the movie, Taymor says there was one particularly challenging scene that convinced her to take on the project.

"It was that stampede that was the turning point for me to go, 'Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've got to do this,'" she says. "Because it's so not theatre, because it's impossible."

Drawing on her knowledge of puppetry and theatrical traditions from all around the world, Taymor knew she would find a way to pull it off using a combination of different techniques.

"You start with a piano roll and all of the wildebeest are painted — teeny-teeny on a back piano roll going down," she explains. "That's the wide long shot. And then in front of that, looking towards the audience, is a big rolling barrel with small, about 12-inch relief sculptures of wildebeest…. In front of that, we had the female dancers each holding two larger masks of the wildebeest heads … and then finally, the closest to the audience, are these eight-foot masks of wildebeest that are used like shields by the male dancers. It looked like hundreds and hundreds of wildebeest. That was fun to figure out."

The production features more than 200 puppets, including rod puppets, shadow puppets and full-body puppets. With the more elaborate puppets, the audience can see the performer inside operating them. Taymor calls this approach the "double event." It allows the audience to watch the animal puppet as well as the performer's facial expressions.

"What we have is this appreciation of the art of making theatre," Taymore says. "If I'm going to take it from a 2D animated film, we need to do what theatre can do better than film. Better in the sense of being totally enveloping and the idea that you can appreciate the story and the technique simultaneously, that they're both rich experiences."

The Lion King musical is playing now at the Princess of Wales Theatre in Toronto. It runs until Aug. 30.

The full interview with Julie Taymor is available on our YouTube channel and on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and follow wherever you get your podcasts.

Interview with Julie Taymor produced by Ben Edwards.