The Lion King Breaks QPAC Record

It’s official – Queensland loves The Lion King.

Queensland Performing Arts Centre (QPAC) today announced that the Brisbane season of The Lion King has broken QPAC’s box office records, making it the highest grossing show since QPAC’s opening in 1985.

Not only does The Lion King hold the highest box office earnings, it also had the second highest total audience for any show during its four month Queensland premiere season.

With over 271,000 in attendance at The Lion King in QPAC’s Lyric Theatre, QPAC’s Chief Executive John Kotzas said, “The anticipation for The Lion King was so high the Brisbane season was almost sold out prior to opening.”

With music by Elton John and Tim Rice, including ‘Circle of Life’, ‘Hakuna Matata’ and the academy award winning ‘Can You Feel the Love Tonight?’. The show mixes pop tunes with additional African influenced numbers by LeboM and Mark Mancina; creating a fusion of contemporary sounds with traditional African rhythms and chants.

But it’s the combination of masks, large-scale puppeteering, and traditional shadow puppetry, that makes this show such a unique theatrical experience, and it is due to the creative mastermind of Julie Taymor, the show’s director, costume designer, and mask/puppet co-designer.

Taymor won a Tony Award for Best Direction of a Musical and for Best Costumes for The Lion King in 1998. Other awards include three Molière Awards including Best Musical and Best Costumes, a Drama Desk award, Outer Critics Circle and Drama League awards for Taymor’s direction, and myriad awards for her original costume, mask and puppet designs.

From its beginnings as a Disney animated feature in 1994, the stage adaptation has been seen by over 75 million people in 16 different countries. Disney’s landmark musical is currently playing on Broadway, London’s West End, Hamburg, Tokyo, Madrid, Sao Paulo, and on tour across North America, the U.K., and Japan. The Australian tour will open the next leg of its tour in Melbourne’s Regent Theatre on February 19.

For more details, visit the official Australian website for The Lion King.