Ever think, deep down, that you might be – you know, a genius? Think again. Julie Taymor is a genius. So, at least, say the people at the MacArthur Foundation, who awarded her one of their five-year, envy-inducing fellowships in 1991.
But you can judge for yourself by proceeding to the Vivian Beaumont Theater and taking in Juan Darien, the musical created by Taymor and her longtime collaborator, the compose Elliot Goldenthal. Actually, to call Juan Darien a musical – the same term you’d apply to Guys and Dolls and Cats – is misleading. “A Carnival Mass” is how Taymor and Goldenthal bill their adaptation of a Uruguayan tale about a jaguar who turns into a boy, is crucified, and turns back into a jaguar.
Heady stuff – and a dark, relentless, intermissionless 90 minutes that pulls out all the world-theater stops to tell its story. Taymor uses hand puppets and techniques inspired by Japanese bunraku, in which large, eerily lifelike puppets are manipulated by figures shrouded in black. The show has almost no spoken words, only music with Latin and Spanish lyrics. All the human characters but one – Juan – wear masks designed by Taymor, haunting, oversize heads reminiscent of primitive art and tribal carvings. And the staging resembles a kind of theater-cinema, suggesting the three-dimensional equivalent of pans, tracking shots, and close-ups as full-scale characters and sets shift to miniatures that turn and move through stage-space.
In short – genius.
Genius that has no problem recognizing itself. When I told Taymor, as she directed a technical rehearsal at the Vivan Beaumont one afternoon recently, that I’d never seen anything like Juan Darien, she said, “There isn’t anything like it.” She’s a brisk, exotic-looking woman with luxuriant dark hair, highly expressive black eyebrows, a stubborn, jutting chin, and what might be called a nonrecessive personality. At work, she has a bracing air of command. “Listen, everybody! Listen up!” she called sharply at one point, clapping her hands at a lollygagging group of actors. They listened. Taymor is a director’s director, and a name to conjure with in the theater. If you haven’t heard of her, you’re not alone, but she’s doing something about it.
The 44-year-old director and designer of puppets, masks, and costumes has been synthesizing and perfecting her techniques for two decades, building a reputation as a theater wizard by mounting startlingly innovative productions, frequently adaptations of stories from other media: a version of Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex, conducted by Seiji Ozawa and starring Jessye Norman and Bryn Terfel; a hallucinatory short film for PBS called “Fool’s Fire”, based on a Poe short story, with a cast of dwarfs and puppets; a bloody Titus Andronicus for the Theatre for a New Audience.
But most of her stage productions have been all the more legendary for their transitoriness, even their obscurity. Taymor and Goldenthal’s first original collaboration, Liberty’s Taken – a kaleidoscopic, picaresque human-puppet-mask musical extravaganza about the American Revolution – played for less than two weeks at the 1985 Castle Hill Festival in Massachusetts. The first incarnation of Juan Darien, produced by the Music-Theatre Group at St Clement’s Church in 1988, ran for only 21 performances. Oedipus Rex played for precisely two nights, in 1992, in Japan. Her 1993 production of The Magic Flute, in Florence, ran for fewer than a dozen performances.
The question is whether the present Juan Darien will arouse enough fervor to extend past its limited run. Recent evidence indicates that a Carnival Mass about jaguar transformation and crucifixion may be a little rich for the blood of the membership audiences at the Vivian Beaumont. “They just sat there,” Taymor said of a matinee crowd the other day. Then quickly tried to put a better face on things: “It’s thrilling to present this to audiences that are unprepared,” she said.
The show may be the apex of her art, the essence of genius, but its perfection may be said to impress more than enthrall. So far, it hasn’t been selling out most nights. “It’s an extraordinary experience,” says the television producer and cultural philanthropist Norman Lear, a longtime friend and supporter of Taymor’s work (in 1987, he gave Taymor and Goldenthal a personal grant to go to Mexico to do research for Juan Darien). “But I would understand it better if I saw it again. It’s everything she’s about – there’s enough to excite, and also enough to intimidate. It’s so brilliant.” Lear pauses a second. “Intimidate is not a box-office word,” he says.
All this is about to change, however. A year from now, Julie Taymor should be drawing mammoth crowds, crowds that had better not, that in in all likelihood won’t, just sit there. For Julie Taymor – legend, genius, darling of the theater avant-garde – is going to direct The Lion King. And then we’ll see whether the talent that leads so many people to speak of her with awe can sell some tickets.
The stage version of the animated Disney megahit (more than $770 million in worldwide grosses), which will open next fall at the renovated New Amsterdam Theatre on 42nd Street (right next to the Disney Store), will be, in practically every way, Taymor’s show. She won’t just direct. She will design the costumes. She will co-design (with her technical counterpart, Michael Curry) the puppetry and masks. She has contributed to the show’s greatly-expanded second act. She may even write lyrics for one or two of the production’s half-dozen new songs.
Why The Lion King? “I’ve worked in all these different media – theater, opera, film – in all these different styles, from high seriousness to low comedy,” Taymor says. “Elliot does the same thing. He writes symphonies and ballets; then he does the score for ‘Batman’. It’s fun. As far as The Lion King is concerned, it’s not just that it’s a lot of money – that wouldn’t do it for either Elliot or me. It’s that it’s challenging.”
Taymor is sitting next to Elliot Goldenthal, at the sunny kitchen table of their downtown loft – a place whose theatrical, funkily-elegant expanse has evolved into the subject of some negotiation. Taymor initially asked me not to describe the place in detail; fair enough. People, even newly-famous and well-off people, have a right not to let the magazine-reading public, in effect, lounge around their living quarters. But now it appears that something more than privacy is at issue.
Goldenthal – a compant, magnetic, bracingly uningratiating man of 42, with interesting, irregular teeth and a slick mane, a man who looks like a composer – puts it succinctly. “[You] say we live in this big place, and people get envious, and then we have no friends anymore.”
He seems to be about one-third joking. But suddenly he turns entirely serious, put out that the press is here at all: Now he’s insisting that the fact that he and Taymor live as well as work together (though they won’t be working together on The Lion King) not be mentioned – though, as far as the public record is concerned, that cat is thoroughly out of the bag. “It’s irrelevant,” he insists grumpily.
But isn’t their living together, I ask, of a piece with their collaboration?
Goldenthal looks me in the eye. “No,” he says.
Taymor tries to smooth things over. “I can talk to you about how our collaboration is so excellent because it never stops,” she offers. “If we get excited about a project, it can go all through the night – that’s thrilling.”
Goldenthal’s not having any of it. He shakes his head, frowning.
“We’re gonna get it a lot, sweetie,” Taymor tells him.
Indeed they are, and more of it every day. Goldenthal matches Taymor’s impressive list of accomplishments – her MacArthur, Guggenheim, Emmy, two Obies, and so on – with a list of his own. He has collaborated with Taymor on about fifteen works, and his own compositions – chiefly Fire Water Paper: A Vietnam Oratorio – have received wide recognition. His ballet Othello, choreographed by Lar Lubovitch for the American Ballet Theater, will premiere at the Metropolitan Opera House this May.
And a few years ago, after filmmaker Gus Van Sant saw and loved one of the early performances of Juan Darien, Goldenthal began a new and lucrative career writing dark-toned movie scores, beginning with Van Sant’s Drugstore Cowboy and proceeding to Interview with the Vampire, Batman Forever, Heat, and Michael Collins. Still, something about this recent success doesn’t quite sit well with him: “The critics have really dogged me because of my cinema work,” Goldenthal says. “There’s a tremendous snobbery because of accessibility. But I always like to say that Shostakovich did over 40 films.”
The subject of selling out seems to hover, edgily but insistently, in the air. (Even Goldenthal’s outfit – plush, Italianate sport jacket and knit shirt above, black jeans and scruffy cowboy boots below – seem unresolved). When I ask Taymor whether she had seen the movie of The Lion King before Disney approached her with the movie project, she makes a face. Did she have any misgivings about taking on the show?
Now it’s her turn to be uningratiating. “Things get so twisted in the press – I’m not going to tell you I had misgivings,” she says curtly. “The question is more, how can I remain true to my artistry and stay in the fold of this gigantic company? That will remain a question to the end.”
And it’s a legitimate question, despite the fact that in building its new theater business, Disney appears to be making unprecedented efforts to hew to the artistic high roads, or at least the middle-high road: efforts that emanate from thec ompany’s executive vice-president for feature animation and theatrical productions (and the executive producer of the Lion King movie), Thomas Schumacher. “It’s not like I’m working with film people who don’t know what they’re talking about,” Taymor says. “Tom’s a real mind.”
A combat-hardened veteran of the nonprofit world, Schumacher worked as assistant general manager for the Los Angeles Ballet, spent five years on staff at the Mark Taper Forum, and, as co-founder of the 1987 Los Angeles Festival, was instrumental in presenting the American premieres of such high-cult landmarks as Ingmar Bergman’s stage production of Miss Julie and Peter Brook’s production of The Mahabharata.
“I’d known Julie’s work for a long time – she was legendary,” Schumacher says. (There’s that word again.) “When I was with the L.A. Festival, I saw Liberty’s Taken on videotape and was knocked out by it. I called her in the hopes of getting her to do something for the festival, but it fell apart, and that was the end of it.”
Fast-forward eight years. “When we started to look at The Lion King, I couldn’t think of how to do it, so I just called her up. She immediately knew who I was – she’s phenomenally adept at stuff like that. We chatted; then we flew her to L.A.”
“Her first reaction was, why her?” he recalls. “But really, when you look at Julie’s work, she deals with mythic material, legends, stories that have something deeper at their roots, and then she finds literally fantastic ways of telling them. The Lion King is mythic at its core – it’s about this kid who has to find out who he is.”
After the initial meeting, Schumacher gave her a CD called Rhythm of the Pride Lands, of songs based in part on the film score, including choral work orchestrated by South African singer Lebo M. Inspired by the music – as well as, conceivably, by initial business discussions – Taymor warmed to the project.
“She just busted out of the box,” Schumacher says. “It didn’t take some kind of convincing on our part. She came back in and pitched an approach. Her fundamental idea was to expand the bridge from late Act II into Act III – what happens to Simba after ‘Hakuna Matata’, the crisis he experiences. In the movie we quickly moved through that – animated movies use a kind of shorthand.”
Taymor worked with the film’s original director and writer on strengthening the book, and came up with the idea of adding a half-dozen new songs to the play – much of the material to come from Rhythm of the Pride Landsi – in order to beef up the story. “In the show,” Taymor says, “the songs are like arias in an opera: Time stops, and you get inside the character’s emotion.”
But her chief contribution would clearly be to the look of the play – a look that must preserve the essence of the story’s franchise characters, yet at the same time be Taymoresque.
“In the case of [Disney’s firs tthatrical production] Beauty and the Beast, you could go two directions,” Schumacher says. “You could either mount a show that looked and felt like the movie, or go a different way. We went way one. But with The Lion King, you don’t have that option. From the get-go, you assume the concept has to be stylized.”
Early this year, Taymor met with Schumacher and Disney chief Michael Eisner at Disney World in Orlando. It was a memorable meeting all around: Eisner, who’d spent the morning canoeing with Schumacher in the canals of Disney World, was wearing a a sweatshirt and baseball cap; Taymor was loaded for bear, having brought along a full presentation, drawings and mock-ups of puppets and masks. It was a potentially tricky moment – for both Taymor and Eisner. Would art, or Disney, be compromised?
For Taymor, the fundamental question was: “How can I create ach animal’s image and have its human character be as strong as it was in the movie?” The answer: “You will almost always see the human being,” she says. Some of the characters will wear masks not unlike the ones she designed for Oedipus Rex, which sit atop the actor’s uncovered face. “With Pumbaa, the giant head is built off the stomach fo the actor,” she says. “The actor’s face is where Pumbaa’s hair starts; the animal’s ears are on the actor’s shoulders.”
Taymor also wanted her stage-cinema techniques to come into play. “When Mufasa and Simba move through the grasslands, they’re small heads on top of the heads of the chorus,” she says. “The projection will be minimal; we don’t want it to be like a movie. Revealing the technique is the magic – allowing the audience to absorb it, then forget about it.”
Michael Eisner got all this immediately, Schumacher says. No doubt the most powerful man in entertainment was also impressed by the hauteur of a woman who – stranger in a strange land though she was – came off as a kind of potentate, too. “Julie just wanted to make sure the kind of ideas she was walking about were the same as ours,” Schumacher says.
Taymor does seem absolutely engaged with the project, even if on more a technical than a spiritual level. She speaks in passing of the story’s mythic essence – “It’s the prodigal son,” she says – but what appears to have hooked her on The Lion King was the practical puzzles: translating the animal characters, the big-screen effects. “When I saw this movie, the question was, how can you translate the stampede of the wildebeests onto stage? How would I do that?”
She’s arrived at an answer – though, since the premiere is still almost a year off, she has to be somewhat vague about it. She speaks elusively of treadmills and conveyor belts, and of the effects she’s used in her other shows: the painted crowd banners held aloft in Juan Darien; the bobbing-wooden-heads-on-wheels device she created for Liberty’s Taken to satirize the morality-legislating Boston Committee of Safety. The wildebeest stampede will be a little like these things, she says, only different.
Just as The Lion King itself, with its genuine, accessible humor and emotions, will be a little like her other productions, only different.
Masks and puppets, a way of heightening reality but also of distancing herself from it, have defined Taymor’s career. Despite her exotic looks, she grew up in the plush Boston suburb of Newton, Massachusetts, the daughter of accomplished parents (her father a gynecologist, her mother active in Democratic politics), but got out as soon as she could – “I really hated the idea of being part of the suburbs” – and went as far away as she could. Her first idea was to act: She commuted to the Boston Children’s Theater during her school years, and joined an avant-garde theater ensemble at 15. She also traveled to India and Sri Lanka that year, alone, as part of the Experiment in International Living. Strikingly, she claims to remember almost nothing about her childhood up to that point (“My memory doesn’t take off until Sri Lanka”), an odd gap – perhaps a telling one – for an artist whose work attempts to plumb the unconscious.
Upon graduating from high school, at 16, she went to Paris to study mime but, deciding against a potentially ominous career path, returned to attend Oberlin, where, along with fellow future MacArthur genius Bill Irwin, she joined the theater group of experimental director Herbert Blau.
“I was always considered a little offbeat,” Taymor says – meaning that, unlike most of her peers, she wasn’t interested in drugs or rock and roll. “I danced to Motown at parties, but music wasn’t as huge a part of my life as it was with other teenagers,” she says. She never even had a record collection – or many friends, for that matter. Making art – acting, sculpting, painting, drawing – was what counted for her. “I just did theater; it was just something I always did,” she says. To this day, she retains something of the air of a distracted, socially-maladroit teenager: that genius thing again.
After college, she went to Indonesia for four years, on Waterson and Ford Foundation fellowships. It was the ultimate escape for a Jewish girl from the Boston suburbs. “I was always an outsider there,” she says. “It was a very exhausting, very lonely thing to be.” But also thrilling. For the first time, she discovered that she was, as she puts it, “too much of a director to be an actor.” She formed a troupe of Indonesian actors, living with one of them in a small compound with a dirt floor and no running water, electricity, or telephone. She traveled to the country’s heartlands, witnessing ancient rituals imperiled by fast-encroaching civilization. “It was a culture in transition, from slow-moving and individualistic to fast-paced and consumerist,” she says. “We in this country have had a long time for that transition – people there couldn’t cope.”
It was those tensions that inspired her first major theater work, the trilogy Way of Snow. The piece, which began with the shamanic possession of an Eskimo in frozen fields near the North Pole, moved in its second section to the peasant world of Indonesia, where a farmer’s ox was killed by a bus, and in its third part to a modern metropolis, where an answering-service operator plugging and unplugging wires went berserk. Way of Snow incorporated masks, shadow puppets, and Javanese-style rod puppets that Taymor carved herself from a cotton tree outside her house. The feathers used to represent snow in the Eskimo section came from a chicken the company had sacrificed and eaten to bless the project.
It was going native in a big way – the ultimate cultural-anthropological trip for the disenchanted suburbanite. Still, if Lawrence of Arabia, a dreamy English schoolboy, could bring off wearing a kaffiyeh, why couldn’t Taymor of Indonesia sacrifice five chickens? Though she may have been an outsider overseas, “I never really felt like an America,” she says. “It was at the time of the Vietnam War, and I was embarrassed at being associated with it. Why did I have to defend this terrible thing?”
Even today – despite working for Disney – she doesn’t seem to have entirely repatriated. “I’m an American,” she says, “but what I do as an artist has no boundaries. I can do a Salome in Saint Petersburg, a Magic Flute in Florence. I don’t care about nationalities – I care about culture.”
Goldenthal, who seems the more grounded of the pair, comes from the other side of the tracks: The son of a house painter and a seamstress, he grew up in housing projects on Coney Island, and his childhood memories are sharp. “if you opened the windows, you heard salsa and opera and John Coltrane and tarantellas,” he recalls. It was an atmosphere of rich sot, soaked with “the smell of 110 years of cooking French fries. You had the feeling, in the winter, that if you licked the air, maybe the French-fry oil would come alive.”
They met in 1980, when Taymor designed the production of Elizabeth Swados’s The Haggadah, for a culturally-inclusive Passover pageant staged at the Public Theater. Taymor created a giant Seder tablecloth that billowed up, Peking Opera-style, to become the Red Sea, not to mention life-size puppet rabbis debating Passover scholarship, and alarmingly graphic plague effects projected through Plexiglass shadow puppets. A mutual friend send Goldenthal to see the show, calling it “just as grotesque” as his own work.
“Elliot’s dark – really dark,” Taymor says, smiling. “I like that a lot.”
He’s also more verbal than she is. When he first read the story, by magic-realist Horacio Quiroga, that Juan Darien is based on, “I wanted to do it as an oratorio,” Goldenthal says. “I couldn’t imagine it theatricalized till I saw Julie’s Haggadah.”
“A lot of what I do is very intuitive,” she says. “I don’t say, ‘Okay, it’s time for this symbol.’ I brought the carnival to Elliot’s Mass.”
They began collaborating soon after they met – “Working with Elliot is the best thing I do,” she says – though they’ve succeeded to the point where working together is practically the only chance they get to see each other. (Their next collaboration, somewhere down the road after The Lion King and Othello, will be an opera version of John Gardner’s novel about Beowulf from the monster’s point of view, Grendel.) “We used to get away more when we were unemployed,” Taymor sighs.
Now here they are, somewhere in the strange territory between young and poor – “Elliot was struggling financially when I first met him” – and rich and famous. The friends they barely get to see anymore, the ones they worry will envy them, are both successful but more-or—less struggling actors and photographers and dancers; but Taymor and Goldenthal also mention such acquaintances as Calvin Trillin, Max Roach, and Peter Jennings. Now and then, for a stray moment, they get to relax in the big loft, Taymor spacing out on junk TV, Goldenthal cooking or watching boxing.
But mostly they work. When Goldenthal talks about Othello’s May premiere, Taymor’s eyes wander off. “That’s when I go into rehearsal,” she says. “That’s when I go into rehearsal,” he says.
It never stops. “I just finished a movie script of The Transposed Heads,” she says, speaking of the fantastic Thomas Mann novella she turned into a mask-and-puppet production, last seen – for two weeks – at the Mitzi Newhouse Theater in 1986. She’s also adapted her Titus Andronicus, for First Look Pictures.
“It’s fun to try a new medium,” she says, but “I’m not about to move to L.A.” Why should she? The translation from theater to film is more fraught for most directors than it is for her. “My landscapes in the theater are already vast,” Taymor asserts. “Most theater isn’t.”
Vast, year, but cool and remote. Wouldn’t it be strange if it took the carefully-packaged warmth of Disney to give Julie Taymor her first real hit?