Meet the puppet master behind ‘The Lion King’ and ‘Frozen’ Broadway musicals

Michael Curry understood the dilemma he and director Julie Taymor faced as they designed characters for the adaptation of Disney’s “The Lion King” for the Broadway stage.

If the actors portraying lions and meerkats and warthogs were too obscured inside their animalistic façades, the show risked losing the audience.

“If we had done pure puppets of people in suits where the humanity was taken away, we would have failed,” says Curry, whose puppet and mask designs with Taymor were groundbreaking when “The Lion King” debuted a quarter century ago – and remain so today.

“It was discovering the human balance,” Curry says. “And we did upstage the human many times in our early experiments. My first Mufasa mask had a moving mouth and blinking eyes and we knew in 30 seconds it was way too much and distracted from the purity of the acting and singing.

“So we went away from them. Then we were allowed to be really simple, and to this day, you know, they’re extremely simple.

“When I see it, compared to what we could have, I’m very, very proud of that decision,” Curry says. “It still holds up to this day.”

The national touring company of “The Lion King” returns to Pantages Theatre in Hollywood on Feb. 2 and runs through March 26.

But that’s not the only Broadway version of a Disney animated film currently on stage in Southern California with puppets Curry designed. “Frozen,” the adaptation of the 2013 movie of the same name, opened at Segerstrom Hall in Costa Mesa on Wednesday, Feb. 1 to run through Feb. 19.

Given the confluence of Curry-created characters in town – Simba, Timon, Pumbaa in Hollywood, Sven and Olaf in the OC – it made sense to talk to the man whose vision and company have created not just for these shows but for productions from the Olympics to Super Bowl halftime shows.

We caught up with him in Las Vegas where “Awakening,” his most recent project, opened recently at the Wynn Las Vegas, a city a long way from the Oregonian artist’s roots.

From Oregon to Broadway

Michael Curry Design is based in Scappoose, Oregon, about 20 miles outside of Portland, but Curry grew up in a Baptist religious community in Southern Oregon that eschewed most secular arts and culture.

“They didn’t actually condone a lot of books and media,” he says. “I grew up without a TV. But for me, I knew I was an artist before I even knew there was such a thing as an artist. I knew that I wanted to draw and sculpt, and that’s what I did.”

At Grants Pass High School, Curry’s wrestling coach mentored him in the sport while the coach’s art teacher wife encouraged his creativity. Curry was shocked when he learned she’d not only sent his work to colleges without telling him, but that a Portland art college had granted him a scholarship, too.

Art college, after a few bumps adapting to that world, led to bigger dreams, and in the early ’80s he moved to New York City.

“Things were happening there,” Curry says. “There was a lot of experimental art, and I fell in love with kind of street performance. So my first pieces were sculptures that I performed with. They were not thought of as puppetry.”

Gallery shows for his paintings and sculptures started to gain attention, such as the angel he made that moved its wings, or the sculptures of famous philosophers’ heads that he floated down the Hudson River to the sea.

“The great critic and writer Frank Rich for the New York Times saw one of my pieces and called them puppetry,” Curry says. “It’s the first time I’d ever been called puppetry and I hated it. But then theater practitioners started calling me.”

“I was in the right place at the right time,” Curry says of the shift that would eventually change his life. “Nobody knew how to do tricky stuff. All the craftsmen on Broadway then were plaster casts and old-fashioned this and that.

“I just had a feel for it, and rather than saying, ‘I don’t know how to do it,’ I said yes, took the money, and made it happen,” he says.

The big break came when an acclaimed British set designer spotted Curry in an elaborate pterodactyl costume in the annual Greenwich Village Halloween parade.

“He came up to me, a very dignified guy, British accent, and said, ‘I’m John Napier and I really want those wings,’” Curry says. “I believe I said, ‘You can’t have them,’ but he gave me his business card and I called him.”

At the time Napier was designing a new Las Vegas show for the magicians Siegfried & Roy, and he showed Curry sketches for ideas including an evil queen for which he wanted wings.

“He said, ‘How would you do this?’” Curry says. “I said, ‘Oh, aluminum and this and that.’ And then he pulled me to the next drawing table where they were doing another kind of giant creature and asked me again.

“After three of four of those sketches I remember – this is the greatest quote I have – he said, ‘Who the (bleep) are you?’”

Curry left Napier’s study with a $350,000 contract for a show that became one of the most successful in Vegas history.

“Within two weeks, I’m working in Las Vegas on the biggest show that was produced that decade,” he says.

‘The Lion King’ roars

Word spread of what Curry could do and before long his art career shifted almost entirely to the theater. By the time “The Lion King” came his way, he’d already collaborated with Taymor on operas and other productions, but this was the biggest thing yet, he says.

“Disney was wonderful about letting us explore,” Curry says. “We got to explore for about two years. I mean, you should see the rejects. We tried everything and we went too far and all this.

“What we realized was that if a raw human with no costume could convey it, that would be the best choice,” he says. “In the way we do masks, the human faces are more important than the mask. The mask is there as a reminder. A silhouette of a lion or whatever.”

Taymor, in addition to directing, has a background as a painter and sculptor. Curry, in addition to visual arts, has a self-taught background in engineering thanks to the self-sufficient community in which he was raised, where it was common to build your own house or fix your own car.

“We brought in technology that theater hadn’t even seen,” he says. “You don’t think of it now, but carbon fiber and lightweight titanium and aluminum and things like that were not used in the theater at that time.

“With these characters, we found the best expression of them, and there’s a wild variety.”

The comic and the wild

After “The Lion King,” for which he and Taymor won a Tony Award for the puppet designs, Curry eventually returned to Oregon, where his company employs about 45 people today.

Some of his most-seen work since then includes designing costumes and performances for the opening ceremonies of the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta and the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, both of which earned him Emmy Awards, and creating the giant lion puppet on which Katy Perry rode onto the field for the halftime show of the 2015 Super Bowl.

For “Frozen,” which opened on Broadway in 2018, only two puppets, Sven the reindeer, and Olaf the snowman, were needed from Curry and his team. Each required a different approach, he says.

“With Olaf, here’s what I found,” Curry says. “You really can’t mess around with comic characters. They need to look and feel like the animated feature. I tried to emulate that. And this is the case with Timon and Pumbaa and Zazu in ‘The Lion King.’ You’ll notice they look more like the animation than the other things.”

With Sven, Curry went the opposite direction, making him a much more natural-looking reindeer in a costume made largely of strips of silk fabric that encloses the puppeteer entirely.

“He’s a counterpart of Kristof, who’s crude compared to the sophistication of Anna’s world,” Curry says. “We needed a device that made him acceptable as a rough-hewn woodsman, and so I, we, made Sven be quite graceful and not a cartoon.”

Sven requires the actor inside the costume to move around the stage on hands and feet locked into short stilt-like reindeer legs and hooves. It’s a physically grueling role, and while the auditions started with actors who’ve performed inside other Disney character suits, Curry says he eventually found his Svens from the world of professional dance.

“Most people thought it couldn’t be done,” Curry says of the search before Andrew Pirozzi was cast in the role. “It’s funny, because I always demonstrate my puppets, because people often say, ‘This is heavy, this hurts’.

“When I did ‘The Lion King,’ I was in my 30s,” he says. “Now I can say, ‘Look, I’m a 65-year-old man. You’re a trained Joffrey Ballet dancer. You can do it.’”