Julie Taymor
...U.S production came in 1979 at the Baltimore Stage with the play The Odyssey (www.disney.com). She received her first NYC acclaim as production designer for Elizabeth Swado’s "The Haggadah" in 1980 and a mutual friend, sent composer Elliot Goldenthal, to see the show, calling it "just as grotesque" as his own work (www.uk.movies.yahoo.com). Taymor and he soon become companions, as well as co-creators of "Liberty's Taken" (1985), and were eventually married (www.uk.movies.yahoo.com). I could not, however, find any mention of the couple having children or the date they were wed. I can only guess that Taymor and Goldenthal are completely devoted to theatre and have time for little else. Together Julie Taymor and Elliot Goldenthal created a mask-and-puppet adaptation of Thomas Mann's fantastical novella "Transposed Heads" (1986) and "Juan Darien, A Carnival Mass" (1988), which Lincoln Center revived in 1996, giving Taymor her first Broadway credit (www.uk.movies.yahoo.com). In 1992 she staged one of Stravinsky's opera’s "Oedipus Rex” (Smithsonian Magazine). Taymor, whose only prior work for the screen was a hallucinatory short film for PBS ("Fool's Fire" 1992), made her feature directing debut with an adaptation of Shakespeare's "Titus Andronicus"(www.uk.movies.yahoo.com). In 1998 she attempted to launch a film version of "The Magic Flute" but the project languished in development (www.uk.movies.yahoo.com). Her next directorial effort, the biographical film, "Frida", was in my opinion her greatest work, but what she is best known for is her work on the Broadway show The Lion King (www.disney.com). If any of us recognize the name Julie Taymor it is most likely for her work designing the amazing costumes for The Lion King’s Broadway adaptation. I have not personally seen the production but I have seen clips, read reviews, and heard all about it from my mother, who did get to see it. In the playbill for the Lion King musical Taymor is quoted as saying, “The Challenge was to take this epic film, to find its essence, and to make it theatre”. When I began looking for information on Taymor I kept coming up with these rave Lion King reviews and the word shaman over and over again. In anthropology class I was taught that a shaman is a traditional medicine man who communicates with the spirit world to help heal and see future events. “The animals of Africa come parading down the aisles as if they too had undergone such a transformation, their skin and feathers turned into poles and fabric, their bodies turned into hybrid surfaces mixing the flesh of the puppeteers and the mechanisms of puppets.” –Smithsonian Magazine In his time, Jim Morrison was also often referred to as a shaman. If you look at the costumes for this particular show you will understand what is meant by shaman. Julie Taymor created these incredibly imaginative and visually stunning. One could see the actors inside of the animal costumes but would also know that they were supposed to represent a lion or a hyena or even a huge elephant. She could have made costumes that covered the whole actor in a fur or feather suit to make it look like he or she was actually an animal but she really pushed the costumes to a different level. There were two hundred and thirty two puppets in the show, including twenty five different species of mammals, birds, fish, and insects (www.disney.com). When conducting my research of Julie Taymor I was truly disappointed to see that my favourite work by Taymor, Frida, was so poorly liked by critics. The critics called this work “tamer” compared to her earlier boldness and daring (www.uk.movies.yahoo.com). I have to completely disagree with these comments. I have studied the life of Frida Kahlo rather extensively for Spanish class, art class, and in my own personal time as well, and I can say that the movie reflected her life in an accurate and intriguing way. Taymor really drew the viewer in with her own creative touches such as the surreal puppet scene when Frida is in a terrible bus accident and must endure many painful surger...