SIGHT SEEING SAFARI

From the day we arrive on the planet

And blinking, step into the sun

There’s more to see than can ever be seen

More to do than can ever be done. . . .

In the opening moments of “The Lion King,” director and visual poet Julie Taymor exploits these Tim Rice lyrics so gorgeously that you may feel your head will explode from too much sensory pleasure.

The show starts with a lone figure on a bare stage. Slowly, very quietly, the song begins. A splendid menagerie makes its way down the aisles, brushing against the audience and enveloping it, as percussionists in the boxes above pound and shake their instruments.

Actors are visible as they manipulate and inhabit the masks and fabrics and sculptures that create the animals they represent: the deliberate elephant; the graceful gazelles; the circling, feathery birds; the somnolent giraffes. The giraffes, most impressively, are manned by curved-over humans with hands and feet attached to fabric-shrouded stilts and with the animals’ towering, maned necks sprouting from their hunched backs. You may feel as if you’re beholding a giraffe for the very first time.

The song is Elton John’s “The Circle of Life,” and it is held aloft in the theater by simmering African vocal rhythms. All of the animals in the plain emerge to sing it and to celebrate the birth of the new Lion King, Simba, and the ongoing succession of civilization as they know it.

This is a stunning enough number in the 1994 animated film version of the Disney fable. But onstage at the newly refurbished New Amsterdam Theatre, where “The Lion King” opened Thursday night, “Circle of Life” is enchantment.

Taymor’s African animals, designed in collaboration with Michael Curry, are a complex animal-puppet-human fusion that literally embodies the show’s leitmotif: the interconnectedness of all living things.

The growing chorus onstage chants as the music undulates and a huge red silk sun rises to fill the stage. On the words “the circle of life,” the stage opens in the shape of a circle and a staircase rises up to serve as the rock perch on which ruling lions Mufasa (Samuel E. Wright) and Sarabi (Gina Breedlove) present the newborn Simba. There is an overwhelming sense of creation in the parade before us, representing both the birth of natural life and the creative birth of the human imagination.

How could that ever be topped? Well, the truth is it can’t be, and you could wait all night (or all year) for your hair to stand on end in precisely the same way again. This opening is the source and reason for the extraordinary buzz that the show has produced; it alone is worth the price of a ticket. Not only that, Taymor provides at least two other jaw-dropping visual effects in this mask-and-puppet-filled evening. And yet.

And yet it’s jolting to be reminded of a plebeian sensibility after rapture. In fact, this Disney production insists on having it both ways--the poetic integrity and the pandering too. When Zazu (Geoff Hoyle), the guardian bird, is separated from young Simba by a dropped curtain, he shouts out at the audience, “This wasn’t in the film!” A swipe at the song “Be Our Guest” from Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast” seems especially cheap in a show featuring similarly upbeat ditties (try listening to “Hakuna Matata” dozens of times).

The story is a primal one. Simba, the son of a king, mistakenly thinks he is responsible for the death of his beloved father. Simba--who begins stage life as the talented, tiny Scott Irby-Ranniar and grows into the honey-voiced Jason Raize--takes some years off, exiled, playing around with irresponsible friends, rather like Shakespeare’s Prince Hal. In this case his Falstaffs are a wisecracking meerkat (Max Casella) and a smelly wart hog (Tom Alan Robbins). The time of course comes for Simba to resume his rightful place in the kingdom.

Taymor is much more interested in visual details than in textual ones, such as the necessity and believability of songs and lines of dialogue (book by Roger Allers and Irene Mecchi). Certain songs are completely inadequate--their presence and function a mystery.

The three grinning hyenas (who are horribly great-looking) sing an uninventive song called “Chow Down” that serves no purpose. The lion villain Scar (an ineffectual John Vickery) is given a nervous breakdown number called “The Madness of King Scar,” in which this evil, vindictive, usurping lion suddenly worries why everyone hates him. This emotion is not only uncharacteristic, it is also never alluded to again.

There are some other glaring oddities: Bare-chested disco dancers who look like lost Village People show up to shimmy in “Be Prepared.” In “Can You Feel the Love Tonight,” three pairs of dancers emerge to represent the feelings of Simba and Nala (the lovely Heather Headley). Two couples dangle in the air, suspended on pulleys; it’s like a wan homage to Agnes de Mille’s dream ballet from “Oklahoma!” only with the dancers wrapped in grass.

One can’t help but imagine what a thankless show this is for actors with speaking roles. Their main job is to manipulate the puppets that represent their characters. Any acting they do is supplemental. The character of Scar wears a visible rib cage sprouting from his back; his lion mask rests atop Vickery’s face, the mask’s chin on his forehead. When he needs to bring focus to the mask, the harnessed actor uses a rod to lower it in front of his own features. The mechanics of it all are completely in view, which is endless fun. But there is no question that the technique can alienate us from the narrative: We admire Taymor rather than engage with the character.

Some actors manage to stand out from their apparatus. Painted green and standing free behind his meerkat puppet, Max Casella has a salty presence and the best lines. As the shaman baboon Rafiki, Tsidii Le Loka emerges from layers of face paint to be a true antic spirit, a magical guide for Simba as well as for the audience.

New songs for the show, such as “Shadowland” and “He Lives in You,” tend away from British pop and toward African rhythms, lending a more soulful quality to the entire score. Lebo M, Mark Mancina, Jay Rifkin, Taymor and Hans Zimmer provided additional lyrics and music, with Lebo M responsible for the stunning African vocal arrangements.

Taymor could not have created the magic she does if not for set designer Richard Hudson and lighting designer Donald Holder. They help to create the show’s two other astonishments.

The first is a wildebeest stampede achieved with scrolling fabric and levels of puppets getting bigger and bigger in the foreground as the stampede overtakes our hero. The second is a late-breaking epiphany for the grown Simba in which he finds the lost father and the true king inside of himself.

For this nighttime scene (a reprise of the haunting number “He Lives in You”), the stage is studded with pulsating stars that regroup to produce a hallucinatory image, a view of what is going on in the turmoil of Simba’s heart.

It is yet another overwhelming coup de thea^tre for Taymor. Again, it is the stage itself, not the character, that has the epiphany.

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* “The Lion King,” New Amsterdam Theatre, Broadway and 42nd Street, (800) 755-4000.