Julie Taymor’s production of The Lion King, for which she would become the first woman to win a Tony for Best Direction of a Musical, opened at Broadway’s New Amsterdam Theatre in 1997. To recreate this story of savannah animals on the stage, Taymor devised a method that she called “the double event,” in which each character was simultaneously expressed by an actor’s body and an animal mask or puppet. Because the actors’ faces were not hidden from the audience by the masks, their skin colors were closely associated with the characters they portrayed. Skin color is a racial characteristic that is easy to identify visually. As Stephanie Leigh Batiste has pointed out, in her book Darkening Mirrors(2011), the skin color of African-American actors becomes part of their performance, especially in the theater. Recognizing this, Taymor deliberately cast African and Black actors, using “color-conscious casting,” which consciously incorporates actors’ racial characteristics as production elements. By presenting the “color” of African actors to audiences in this way, she embodied an important theme of the musical: “the power of Africa.”

By contrast, the “color” of the white actors was rendered indistinguishable through facial makeup. This paper pays particular attention to the villain Scar, who is typically played by a white actor. Just as in the film on which the musical was based, Scar was the only lion who spoke with a British accent. He was depicted as a “white presence” with a stereotypical Shakespearean actor’s performance style and mannerisms. In his book The Great White Way(2014), Warren Hoffman has argued that the “white people” who appear in most Broadway musicals are positioned as a raceless norm that cannot engender racial problems. By using makeup to paint Scar, the “white presence,” brown, Taymor made it impossible for audiences to interpret Scar as a “white person.”

This paper refers to the three-layered structure assigned to The Lion King’s white actors—actor body, animal mask, and artificial color—as “the triple event.” In doing so, it demonstrates how skillfully obscuring the color of white actors can effectively force “color-blind casting.” By deliberately combining color-conscious casting for Black actors with forced color-blind casting for white actors, Taymor created a phenomenon that can reasonably be considered a form of “reverse racism,” as described by Anne Nicholson Weber in Upstaged: Making Theatre in the Media Age(2006) In disguising the color of white actors, the triple event became a pioneering staging method, serving to overturn the racial privilege of white actors.