In Development: Taymor and Disney Are Working on a New ‘Pinocchio’

After the phenomenal success of “The Lion King,” Disney and director Julie Taymor are working together again, exploring the idea of a theatrical version of “Pinocchio.”

Taymor says her inspiration for the project comes from Italian author Carlo Collodi’s original story, first published in 1880, rather than Walt Disney’s 1940 classic film “Pinocchio.”

The tale has stuck with Taymor, 47, since childhood, she says, and 20 years ago she told New York producer Joseph Papp that she wanted to interpret it for the theater. That project never materialized, but her interest hasn’t waned.

“It’s a wonderful allegory, and there are moral lessons,” she says, and she hopes to update the point of view for our time. In the Disney film, she says, Pinocchio is “an innocent who is abused,” a reflection of the war era in which it was made. Taymor is interested in the Collodi character’s more positive sides; she sees him as an “incredible, wonderful free spirit of rebellion.”

On the project, Taymor would act as director, working with her frequent collaborator and longtime companion, composer Elliot Goldenthal. American novelist Robert Coover is developing the musical’s book. Goldenthal is a classical composer who has also done film, including Taymor’s “Titus” and two “Batman” sequels. Coover’s 1991 ironic, post-structuralist fiction “Pinocchio in Venice” imagines Pinocchio as an old man. Taymor and Goldenthal recently traveled to Spain to visit Coover for the project and she said she does not expect him to directly adapt his book. “I love the notion of this old man going back to relive his experiences as a puppet,” she says. “There’s something that really intrigues me about that idea of what happened to Pinocchio when he became a human being.”

Stuart Oken, executive vice president of Disney’s Buena Vista Theatrical Group, says the next step in the project’s development will be a “style workshop,” planned for early December, in which Taymor will present ideas from which the script can be formed. He says that even if everyone agrees to go ahead, however, it will likely be years before the show will be in a theater.

“We’ll have a story before [December],” Oken says, “but then we’ll have to sit down and really put it together. I think that will take a year. It will take another year to workshop and design it. And then from the time you actually green-light anything, our schedule is about 60 to 65 weeks between final design, casting, out-of-town tryouts, to get to Broadway. So the schedule is about three years.”