A lion of a production

On Sunday, "Disney's The Lion King" ended its run in Cleveland. As soon as the curtain flumphed across the boards, technicians began tearing the complex sets apart.

'Disney's The Lion King' » On stage: 8 p.m. Saturday through Dec. 9 (1 p.m. Sundays, 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays, and 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays) » Place: Blaisdell Concert Hall » Tickets: $30 to $150 » Call: 591-2211 or online at ticketmaster.com It isn't too late to catch the show Afraid that "Lion King" is sold out? It isn't. Tickets are available for almost all shows. It all depends on how much you're willing to spend. And as time draws down, these scattered seats will vanish as well. Tickets range from $32 for nosebleed sections to $155 for close enough to the stage to smell the greasepaint. Average seats are $73 to $90. According to "Lion King" publicists, the first half of the run is pretty well picked over, but choice seats remain for the second half. There are always "scalpers," although the Disney organization discourages such trade. People who can't use tickets they've purchased should check bulletin boards and online outlets such as Craigslist to resell.

Monday, the entire, mountainous apparatus of the enormous show was disassembled and packed aboard two empty 747 cargo aircraft. Everything fit, except for a 30-foot pallet that was loaded aboard a truck and dispatched to the West Coast.

Tuesday, the first 747 landed in Honolulu and the gear hustled over to the Blaisdell Concert Hall, where it was erected in time for the musical's Honolulu run, beginning Saturday.

Do you not know of this "Lion King"? The Walt Disney animated musical that was reimagined by genius-director Julie Taymor into a splendoriffic stage spectacular? You will hear of little else for the next three months in Honolulu, so either deal with it, or run and hide. It's here.

Getting it here in one swell swoop is the domain of technical director David Benken. "I've been doing big shows for more than 10 years, seen a lotta shows loaded into different theaters," says Benken. "So, I guess, this is my career, although I also got a degree in computer science -- which, as it turned out, was pretty handy. Modern stage shows rely a lot on computers."

The trick is fitting the package into a different box every couple of months. "Lion King," for example, has played "a hundred different houses since the road companies went on tour," said Benken, "but it's substantially the same show you get in New York."

Or, to be more exact, used to be. Depending on the venue, the show's sets are altered or whittled away to make it fit. Stage impresario "Cameron MacIntosh changed all that," said Benken. MacIntosh's concept was that if you couldn't see the complete show in a theater, including all the whiz-bang staging, well then, the show simply wouldn't play that theater. Seventy-five percent of a theatrical experience still isn't a complete theatrical experience.

Enter Disney, the multimedia company trying to make a mark on stage, add the eclectic gifts of Taymor and you have a Broadway smash in "Disney's The Lion King." Disney's insistence on quality made touring companies of "Lion King" doubly sure the Broadway elements are there, even if it means moving the mountain.

"No matter where we go, there are (modifications) to be made," said Benken. "In Honolulu, we needed to create two aisles where there were none. That meant cutting out 200 seats. Two-hundred seats! That's a big commitment for Disney and the local promoter to make, to lose those seats ... paying seats."

But those Blaisdell Concert Hall seats had to be removed. A big part of "Lion King" revolves around processions of animals walking through the audience down these aisles, and it is such an audience favorite that every-performance-shall-have-aisles.

"The only other thing we were concerned about in Honolulu is electrical power, but you have plenty of that," said Benken. "Renting the 747s was expensive -- normally the show travels in a caravan of 23 trucks -- and usually we'd ship by container ship, but you have to balance two weeks of lost performances against the cost of air-shipping."

The irony of shoehorning a show -- "showhorning?" -- into what Benken calls a city's "box" is that theaters across the land are often better than what's available on Broadway.

"The minimal ideal for the box is about 36 feet by 80 by 60," said Benken. "Your Blaisdell is wider than it is deep, and that's unusual, but it's OK. The theaters on Broadway, though -- most were built during vaudeville times when it was a completely different type of experience, and most haven't been updated, because they've always got a show going on."

What does two 747s or 23 trucks get you?

"A lot! More than 100,000 pounds of scenery and mechanics, much of which is never seen by the audience. The load factor also plays into whether a theater can handle the show. A lot of weight. It's designed to be modular, engineered to be put up and taken down efficiently. What used to take six weeks now takes five days.

"The most expensive part, though, is the labor. We have 14 technicians and supervisors on the show, plus we hire about 80 people locally to work it. There's a lot of maintenance as well, mostly paint calls, retouching everything, because, Disney being Disney, they want everything to look top-notch."

What wears out?

"Every time we move, it's a maintenance call. When you pull a show apart, it's easy to find what's going sour. Those shows that run forever on Broadway -- those are the ones that have hidden bolts and nuts working loose!"