Wallets stretch, but musicals still king of the jungle
The most successful musical in history returns to Australia to prove that light rules everything it touches.
Riding a surprising wave of revenue from stage show-hungry audiences, The Lion King musical returns to Sydney on Thursday, with nine of its first 10 performances selling out.
Tickets for nosebleed seats start at $60.
“None of the big hit musicals that have come out since The Lion King, they’re like Hamiltons… none of them do what The Lion King did,” series co-director Anthony Lyn told AAP.
Life-size herds of elephants, gazelles, antelopes and zebras – hand-crafted, sculpted, woven and beaded – will fill the aisles to welcome lion cub Simba into the world, accompanied by a chilling African chorus in the show’s massive opening number, Circle of Life.
Mufasa and his pride are definitely feeling the love; It has collected almost $13 billion at the box office so far; This is equal to the theatrical revenues of all Star Wars films combined.
More than 127 million people in 24 countries packed theaters during the musical’s 29-year run; This period has been surpassed only by Broadway greats Phantom of the Opera and Chicago.
Musicals appear unscathed by cost-of-living pressures; The genre sold 4.4 million tickets in Australia in 2024, generating more than half a billion dollars in revenue.
The best three years ever for musical theater in Australia were 2022 to 2024 in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We need entertainment, we need to be able to switch off, we need to move, we need stories,” Daniel Frederiksen, who plays The Lion King’s main villain Scar, told AAP.
Emily Nkomo, who plays the heroic lioness Nala, said live theater offers an irreplaceable human connection.
“There’s that feeling you get when you see people doing something that beautiful on stage,” he said.
“We can communicate with the audience, then they respond and we respond to them.
“There’s nothing like it.”
The Lion King is scheduled to run at Sydney’s Capitol Theater until August 30.
Australia’s Associated Press is the beating heart of Australian news. AAP is Australia’s only independent national news channel and has been providing accurate, reliable and fast-paced news content to the media industry, government and corporate sector for 85 years. We inform Australia.
