Here you leave today and enter the world of yesterday, tomorrow, and fantasy.”
A legend at the entrance to Hong Kong Disneyland Park bears Walt Disney’s famous quote. Walk through the archway and you will be taken on a “trip abandon”, with the characters who peopled your childhood, and in adulthood, seem like familiar friends. Within the gates of the park is constructed a beautiful experience, pitch perfect, and its pinnacle is the cultural extravaganza on offer.
From The Festival Of The Lion King (a retelling of the animated classic in song and dance) to The Golden Mickeys (a musical revue-style awards show for much loved Disney characters) and the Flights Of Fantasy Parade (that goes down Main Street every afternoon), the live shows at Hong Kong Disneyland are a smorgasbord of visual delights, with great music, gorgeous costumes and spectacular dance performances. And each is stage managed to perfection, no mean feat considering that the number of performers in each of these presentations can go up to 100 or more.
“For the Flights of Fantasy Parade, we have about 104 performers,” says Annie Wharmby, director of show operations at Hong Kong Disneyland. “For Lion King, it’s just under 90 and for The Golden Mickeys, it’s just over 90.”
Picking great performers, especially when so many are required to work together in perfect synchrony to put on one of Hong Kong Disneyland’s world-class shows, becomes very important. Annie reveals that her casting directors travel all over the world, looking for talent. “Most of our performers come from a jazz dance background, but we do have some who come from a Latin or hip-hop background as well. Our shows incorporate a lot of different skills (whether it’s performing on the trapeze, fire acts, stilt walking) and sometimes, specific roles call for specific abilities, so we audition accordingly. But they do have to have great dance ability, a great technical background. What we’re looking for are performers with the ability to pick up choreography quickly,” explains Annie.
Fourteen nationalities are represented among the cast members of the various live acts, including “atmosphere performances” like the Grizzly Gulch Welcome Wagon show and the Toy Soldiers Boot Camp skit that takes place at Toy Story Land. While a bulk of the performers are from Mainland China and Hong Kong, cast members also hail from the Phillipines, Australia, the U.S, U.K, Samoa and other parts of the globe. And for the Festival Of The Lion King, Annie says auditions are specially held in South Africa.
Apart from the great performances, what makes a live act at Hong Kong Disneyland something you’ll remember forever is the immersive nature of the experience itself. The staging area for each performance is used so cleverly that audience members are “pulled into” the act. The Lion King musical sees the circular stage split into three different levels at crucial moments during the performance, a trapeze dancer descends from the ceiling, giant floats with Simba and his friends proceed from the aisles of the seating area into the arclights. During the Golden Mickeys show, when Quasimodo sings his lovelorn song while moving along the balustrades of the Notre Dame cathedral, or when Tarzan performs his daredevil aerial stunts, or even when Beauty dances with her Beast, the illusion of reality is accentuated by the performers who fill the auditorium, making their way to the stage through the seated audience. “It’s a great way to bring the audience in, to make them part of the spectacle,” admits Annie. “These are tried and tested theatrical techniques that we incorporate into each show. With Festival Of The Lion King, we also have an advantage in that we launched it here more than 10 years after it was first showcased at Orlando (Walt Disney World Resort), and there have been great leaps in stage technology since then.”
The Storybook Theatre in Fantasyland, where The Golden Mickeys is performed, can seat up to 1,006 people, Adventureland’s Theatre In The Wild, which is home to Festival Of The Lion King, seats about 2,250. The shows are so popular that they run to nearly full houses during the day. Feedback is instantaneous and gratifyingly warm. “Audiences are so aware of the Disney product, and our performances are based on that — whether it’s a TV show or a film. And all Disney products tend to have a great story — so we have a lot of really good material to work with,” says Annie.
And then there’s the unbeatable, magical ingredient: The cast members themselves. Annie says, “It’s really the passion of the cast that makes the shows magical. They bring a lot of energy to the show. Even if they’re performing in hot weather conditions, they have these huge smiles on their faces, and that’s beautiful to see.”
We agree.