Tarzan: Call of the Jungle

Tarzan: Call of the Jungle
Park	Shanghai Disneyland
Land / area	Adventure Isle
Type	Live acrobatic stage show
Opened	June 16, 2016
Closed	August 6, 2019
Status	Closed

Tarzan: Call of the Jungle was a live acrobatic stage show at the Storyhouse Stage in Adventure Isle at Shanghai Disneyland, the Disney park at Shanghai Disney Resort in Pudong, Shanghai, China. An original production based on Disney's 1999 animated film Tarzan, it retold the story of the boy raised by apes through Phil Collins's songs, Chinese acrobatics and large-scale staging, with no spoken dialogue. It opened with the park on June 16, 2016, and gave its final performance on August 6, 2019; it is permanently closed, and remains closed as of November 2026.

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History

Adventure Isle, Shanghai's counterpart to Adventureland, needed a headline show, and Disney built one around Tarzan — a film then seventeen years old and not a major property in China, but a natural fit for a jungle land. The Storyhouse Stage itself was dressed as a storehouse for expedition supplies, placing the theatre inside Adventure Isle's story of explorers and a lost world. The production shared DNA with earlier Tarzan stage shows, Tarzan Rocks! at Disney's Animal Kingdom and Tarzan: The Encounter at Disneyland Paris, but was staged as a new, original production for Shanghai.

The show's run was not without incident. On December 22, 2016, a performer playing Jane Porter fell approximately four to five metres during a performance; the show was stopped, the audience was asked to leave, and the performer was reported to be without life-threatening injuries.

No reason for the closure was publicly given. The final performance was on August 6, 2019, after a run of just over three years, and nothing immediately replaced it — the Storyhouse Stage stood without a resident production for several years. The venue returned to use much later with a different, limited-time production, The Adventure of Rhythm, which played the Storyhouse Stage from June 3 to October 7, 2024, and returned briefly for the 2025 Spring Festival — a successor use of the theatre, not a revival of Tarzan.

The show

The performance began with animation from the film, rendered in black and white, playing across giant curtains around the stage. The curtains then rose on an elaborate set with moving scenery and a company of roughly twenty-five performers, and the story was carried visually — the songs from the film were performed in Mandarin, and there was no dialogue to follow. Shanghai Disneyland's own description at the time called it an uplifting, eye-popping musical built on Phil Collins's iconic score, with powerful staging, visual effects and breathtaking acrobatic stunts.

The animal characters were costumed in a humanoid style comparable to the Broadway production of The Lion King, keeping the animals' colours and character while leaving performers free to move — essential, because the show's reputation rested on its acrobatics. Reviewers compared it more to a Cirque du Soleil production or a rock concert than to a conventional Disney stage show: high rope work, flips, jump-rope routines performed on other performers' backs, and at one point a stilt walker launched into the air by catapult. It was, in short, a fusion of theatrics, Chinese acrobatics and concert energy built around Tarzan, Jane, Terk and their friends.

See also

• Adventure Isle
• Roaring Rapids
• Camp Discovery
• Shanghai Disneyland
• List of Shanghai Disneyland attractions
• List of defunct Disney attractions