Lion King is a roaring success

Yes, this really is a musical that invents a better class of magic than those multi-million-dollar technological tricks and thrills flashing on celluloid. In a beautiful dazzle of invention and imagination, the true star of The Lion King, director Julie Taymor, has dreamed up a way of bringing an entire African jungle and its menagerie of animals thrillingly to the stage: eastern and western styles meet and merge.

The Disney cartoon's air of sweet whimsy is quite banished. With intricate mobile masks, puppets, exotic costumes and even stilts, which are all Taymor's own creation, these jungle creatures, from prides of lions to jeering hyenas, capture a fresh dynamic theatricality.

They look like a new alliance between the human and the animal as they parade, shuffle and athletically dance in Taymor's brave new world, with its gusts of chanted African choruses. The giraffes are operated by actors on stilts concealed within the animals' skin. The front legs of each zebra belong to performers who wear the same skin as the animal they play. Designer Richard Hudson's jungle is equally startling, since it looks like a children's picture-book brought to life with sudden promontories and gorges leaping into view.

For these remarkable scenarios Elton John's very soft-rock music and songs generally serve as no more than a pleasing and heartfelt background. For this is a show where the eyes, not the ears, do the feasting. It will appeal to plenty of six- to eight-year-olds, and to all those of us who are stranded in maturity but have kept a crucial bit of ourselves forever very young.

The Lion King is, though, far from mindless. It's a classic fairy tale of good ranged against evil and perhaps an allegory too: the African jungle proves little different from the human one, whether in Balham or Bermuda. There are similar cycles of youthful rebellion, sibling jealousy, murder and spiritual rebirth. Simba, the infant lion, feels responsibility for the death of his father, King Mufasa, and exiles himself until discovering that his wicked Uncle Scar should take the lion's share of the blame. There are shades of Hamlet, perhaps, but very pale shades indeed.

Taymor's production - with its vivid set-piece parades of jungle life, birds on poles and animal silhouettes on backcloths - travels at exuberant pace, pausing for spectacular dramatics.

The very young Simba is ill-met by hyenas in a sinister elephants' graveyard, where the set wittily consists of an upturned elephantine corpse, part of whose innards forms a spiral staircase. A stampede of wildebeeste erupts from below ground, huge masks leering. The jungle fronds shimmer with stars as the ghostlike hologram of Mufasa emerges before the now-adult Simba.

Yet for all the trials of Simba's life, gross humour keeps breaking through in the shape of Gregory Gudgeon's irritating, bigbeaked bird, Martyn Ellis's warthog and an all-American meerkat. There are odd, sometimes worthwhile flashes of adult camp too. Rob Edwards's wicked uncle, whose roar is rather high-pitched, seems far too limp-pawed to pose a threat.

In the second half, when Josette Bushell-Mingo's visionary baboon draws Roger Wright's muscle-bound, guilt-struck Simba to claim his throne and rediscover love, John's atmospheric music, and that of Lebo M, with its mix of African and European influences, work and stir. Can You Feel The Love Tonight (shame about the title) is the show's one real hit. But the Lion King should be worry-free. It lights up the West End with the blaze of Taymor's fabulous imagination.

The Lion King
Lyceum Theatre
Wellington Street, WC2E 7RQ