PB: It’s not. And the thing that we’re so proud of is the fact that we are telling the same story but in a different way with this whole storytelling aspect of the story. It’s not like we’re not trying to be the animals within the cast. We’re not trying to necessarily turn into puppets or all of that other fun stuff either. And even in some of our other resorts where we have The Lion King or whatever the titles may be and all those shows, there are aspects of people trying to pretend to be animals. And our main goal was not to even go down that road. Instead, we wanted to be storytellers, where you can sit around the campfire and tell a story and keep everyone engaged. This story is different than any other version of The Lion King, no matter if it’s on Broadway or in Hong Kong, Florida, or Paris – I think they have one as well. But it’s all the same story. But I like the fact that in our cast, they are people, they’re human beings who have been telling this story time and time again. And every time you tell it, it changes a little bit.

You know how you tell a story that somebody told you and then you tell it to someone else? Think the game telephone. And with that, you have to change it just a little bit more to make it a little bit more interesting. And I always say to people, we could tell this story and we could tell it from Scar’s point of view or Nala’s point of view. We could still tell the story of telling The Lion King through all those different venues, but we chose to tell it from Simba’s point of view. And I think that’s the magic, just having people step in and out of the roles of those characters.

Tale of The Lion King