Can you feel the difference? The 'Lion King' revolution

Even if you've never seen the musical

The Lion King

, you might have heard rumbles about why for so long it's been, um, a rather Big Deal:

It's a tireless Broadway phenomenon, so beloved (and still selling all its tickets) that it opened the Tony Awards telecast this year a full decade after its premiere.

It's such a precious treat, reducing young and old to blubber, with the widely lauded masks, puppets and mythic sensitivity of director-designer Julie Taymor.

It's the crown jewel of the increasingly prominent Disney Theatrical Productions, which has three cash cows on Broadway, with

Mary Poppins

and

The Little Mermaid

.

But did this lord of the Broadway jungle also spark a wave of creative and economic changes? Depends on whom you talk to. Curiously, Disney Theatrical Productions president Thomas Schumacher says no.

"We're successful at it, and for the most part it's going well," Schumacher says. "But we didn't invent anything. If you say we invented [technical] vocabulary, I say,

Cats

. If you say we invented going after this audience, I'll say,

Annie

."

Broadway 10 years before

The Lion King

, in fact, looked remarkably as it does today. June 1988 featured a Stephen Sondheim musical, a David Mamet play, and a

Macbeth

, along with an exuberant, culturally specific musical hit (

Sarafina!

), theme-park extravaganzas (

Starlight Express

), and whiz-bang megamusicals (

Cats

and

Phantom

).

Plus ça change ...

But

Lion King

technical director David Benken thinks the show "really opened up a lot of people's eyes as a different way to treat material." That's been the consensus: Animated-movie hits for kids could be made into surprisingly sophisticated theatrical fare for everyone, if a visionary such as Taymor took the reins.

Although Disney has since hired world-class directors (Richard Eyre for

Mary Poppins

) and designers (Bob Crowley, who also made his directing debut with

Tarzan

) and still often netted only mixed or poor reviews from critics, it's hard to argue that the company's impact over the last decade has been anything short of enormous. Just walk down tourist-friendly 42d Street, or gape at the company's outsize share of the weekly Broadway grosses; Disney claimed more than $3 million of the nearly $22 million total for one recent week.

Now its success has attracted a few more big kids to the playground. The newly minted DreamWorks Theatricals will produce

Shrek the Musical

on Broadway this fall, and even Marvel Comics is getting into the game.

Spider-Man

is targeted for sometime in 2009, and it's already much-anticipated: The composers are Bono and the Edge of U2, and the director is none other than Taymor.

The audience gets what it comes for: a familiar story made new onstage, with technical wonders to impress even the grown-ups and, in many cases, advance the industry standards. The engineering of

Poppins

and

Mermaid

looks cutting-edge, and Benken contends that's no illusion.

"Purely from a technical side, yeah," says Benken, who served as technical director on both

Lion King

and

Little Mermaid

. "Everybody always wants to push the envelope a little bit farther."

Schumacher says: "Of course we're going to try to push that, and try to do some things you might not have seen before."

With

Mary Poppins

, it's the extravagant flying that's drawing applause each time Ashley Brown (in the title role) lifts off in the New Amsterdam Theatre. For good measure, the show also offers a jaw-dropping dance that takes chimney sweep Bert up the sides and across the underside of the proscenium arch.

For

Little Mermaid

, Disney had to find new technical talent to master the automation necessary in George Tsypin's set design, which perpetually shifts between deep sea and dry land. Tsypin's set is largely composed of plastic, which is intensely colorful, shiny, and unusually hard to clean. (Apparently it's prone to a static charge that attracts dirt.) Before the show goes out on tour, technicians will make sure it won't crack in cold weather as the set is toted from city to city.

Benken notes that industry-wide, computer-driven systems now far outstrip those that motored the previous generation's megamusicals. Anyone who has ever been underwhelmed by the slow-falling chandelier in

The Phantom of the Opera

, he says, might want to check out the show in Las Vegas, where Benken just installed a system that drops the fixture at 17 feet per second.

"You couldn't have done that 10 years ago," Benken says, "or at least not for a reasonable amount of money." He also cites rising safety regulations, which is surely on Disney's consciousness in the wake of an actor's fall last month off the tall, slender ship in

Little Mermaid

. He was seriously injured and is suing for damages.

Clearly, these complicated shows take longer to put together than, say,

Damn Yankees

.