This weekend, Disney’s The Lion King—the highest-grossing Broadway musical of all time—celebrates 25 years on Broadway. The smash musical, which to date has 9,000 performances and has grossed nearly $1.7 billion, actually premiered at the Orpheum Theatre in Minneapolis in the summer of 1997.
“There will never probably be a higher moment than the night The Lion King premiered on Hennepin Avenue,” said Fred Krohn of the Hennepin Theatre Trust, which owns and operates the Orpheum and several performance spaces. “We’re part of Broadway history now because The Lion King originated here.”
Krohn said his group helped bring Disney’s other early Broadway hit, Beauty and The Beast, directly from New York to the Orpheum earlier in the 1990s.
“It did great, and that gave us a leg up with Disney,” he said.
He also credits a more flexible relationship with the unions that represented stagecraft and other theatre workers in the Twin Cities as some of the reasons Disney decided to premiere the show here, just a few years after the cinematic release of the animated version of the story about Simba and his adventures. Krohn also admits geography had a lot to do with the decision.
“They wanted to be away from the East Coast so that they didn’t have critics coming in on a weekly basis,” Krohn said.
The show ran for eight sold-out weeks at the Orpheum before it moved to New York, where it has played ever since it opened on November 13, 1997.
“It’s so much better to get a show pre-Broadway than to wait two or three years after it opens on Broadway and you get the fourth or fifth cast,” said Krohn. “It put the Orpheum and Minneapolis on the Broadway map forever.”
