Festival of the Lion King
Festival of the Lion King is a live stage show at Disney's Animal Kingdom at Walt Disney World Resort in Florida. Presented in the Harambe Theatre in Africa, the roughly 30-minute production celebrates the music of Disney's 1994 animated film The Lion King through live singing, dance, puppetry, acrobatics and large moving floats. Rather than retelling the film in miniature, the show is staged as a festival hosted by Simba and his friends, with the audience seated in the round and drawn into the celebration.
History
Festival of the Lion King opened on April 22, 1998, the opening day of Disney's Animal Kingdom.[1] Its first home was Camp Minnie-Mickey, a rustic summer-camp land created as a placeholder for the planned but unbuilt Beastly Kingdom area, themed to mythical creatures. Both the land and the show were widely described as temporary, yet the production proved so popular that it outlived its interim purpose and became one of the park's signature attractions and its longest-running stage show.
Camp Minnie-Mickey closed on January 5, 2014, to make way for Pandora – The World of Avatar. Rather than retire the show, Disney built a new home for it in an expansion of Africa. After a hiatus of about five months while the Harambe Theatre was completed, Festival of the Lion King reopened there on June 1, 2014.[2] The new theatre brought the production indoors into an enclosed, air-conditioned theatre in the round, with upgraded lighting and audio, while the show itself remained essentially unchanged.
The production was closed during the park's pandemic-era changes and returned in modified form as A Celebration of Festival of the Lion King, before the fuller version of the show was restored. Its survival across a land closure, a relocation and a park-wide shutdown has made it a rare piece of opening-day entertainment still performing at the park.
Show
Guests are seated in four sections, each named for an animal — lion, giraffe, elephant and warthog — and each section is invited to make its animal's sound during the opening. Four lead singers introduce the celebration. Their Swahili names are Kiume, Kibibi, Nakawa and Zawadi, and they carry most of the live vocals throughout the performance.[3]
Large floats enter around the central stage, including Simba on Pride Rock, a giraffe, an elephant, and Timon and Pumbaa. The songs, written for the film by Elton John and Tim Rice, provide the structure for a series of specialty acts rather than a continuous plot.
Timon leads a comic acrobatic sequence for "Hakuna Matata" with the Tumble Monkeys, gymnasts in monkey costume who perform on trampolines and bars. The mood darkens for "Be Prepared", which features a fire knife dancer. For "Can You Feel the Love Tonight", aerial performers costumed as birds perform above the stage. Stilt walkers, dancers and puppeteers fill out numbers such as "I Just Can't Wait to Be King" and "The Lion Sleeps Tonight", and the full company returns for a finale medley closing with "Circle of Life".
Because the staging surrounds the audience, no single storyline carries the show. Its appeal rests on live voices, physical performance and pageantry, which helps explain why a production first mounted as a stopgap has remained a headline offering in Africa for more than two decades.
See also
- Disney's Animal Kingdom
- Africa (Disney's Animal Kingdom)
- Pandora – The World of Avatar
- Tree of Life
- Finding Nemo: The Big Blue... and Beyond!