THE LION KING AT THE BIRMINGHAM HIPPODROME
Theatre Run: Friday 28 June - Saturday 28 September 2013
Performance Reviewed: Friday 28 June (Opening Night)
Reviewed by Kyle Pedley
Film to stage adaptations can be quite the challenge to get right. It may seem an obvious point that theatre and cinema are two wildly different mediums and creative forms, but it’s often overlooked in the hopes that merely replicating the images that we watched on-screen onto the stage will rekindle the same emotions, impact and fire in an audience. The opposite is a far easier and more liberating experience - the scope and breadth of film, the luxury of the edit and the canvas of cinematography can often open up a previously stage-bound tale to new sights and heights, yet so often film-to-theatre is a much bumpier process. Slavishly loyal adaptations fail to explore and utilise the unique strengths and opportunities of the medium or, sometimes worse, do so in horribly egregious and detrimental ways (see the recent Broadway failure of The Little Mermaid, another Disney offering).
