The greatest challenge for Karl Shymanovitz, who serves as music director and conductor for Disney’s The Lion King, is not, as you might expect, listening to the same arrangements of the same music played day after day.
In fact, Shymanovitz, who has toured with various companies of the hit musical since 2004, insists he never gets sick of the music. The biggest challenge of his role, he says, is actually the show’s ongoingness.
The company performs “on a daily basis, forever and ever and ever—because we don’t have a start and an end,” says Shymanovitz. “This thing has been so successful that it runs like there’s no end in sight.”
The apparently never-ending Lion King tour recently touched down in Detroit for its sixth residency at the Detroit Opera House, a run that began Thursday, March 12, and will end Sunday, April 5. (Performances go Tuesdays – Fridays at 7:30 p.m., Saturdays at 2:00 p.m. and 7:30 p.m., and Sundays at 1:00 p.m. and 6:30 p.m.)
According to ATG Detroit, The Lion King is both the longest-running and the most-attended Broadway tour in North America. More than 25 million theatergoers have attended the show. The show, itself, has been performed more than 10,000 times. On top of that, it’s won plenty of critical acclaim and awards (including a 1998 Tony for Best Musical) alongside its overwhelming popularity.
Maintaining the Magic of The Lion King
As music director/conductor, Shymanovitz, who grew up in Warren and went on to study at the University of Michigan, is responsible for “maintain[ing] the artistic quality and integrity of the musical and vocal end of the show,” he says.
He conducts most performances, rehearses with the vocalists and orchestra, and works with sound engineers to ensure that everything sounds as it should.
“If the sets look tattered, if the people are tired, if the costumes are fading, [that’s] not good,” he says. “…On a show this big, that is a lot of upkeep.”
Wardrobe staff, for example, maintain a massive stock of the richly detailed costumes for which the production has been known since it first premiered. Certain beaded corsets are painstakingly made up of 25,000 or 35,000 beads. Shymanovitz says—“and sometimes they just pop on-stage and start falling off. That all has to be replaced.”
The general upkeep has as much to do with maintaining the magic of the production as it does with anything else. Performed again and again, any show might become rote for members of the company—but they can’t let the quality of the show itself be affected.
Shymanovitz says he often thinks of himself as a cheerleader for the actors and musicians. As director/conductor, “you have to inspire them to really commit to this show that they’re in.”
He approaches every performance “with all the energy and love in my heart,” he insists. “…The repetition of doing an iconic, epic, wonderful piece of theater is no problem at all.”
Shymanovitz thinks The Lion King’s staying power comes partly from the fact that “it draws from so many global and historic theatrical traditions, from African mask styles to Indonesian shadow puppet theater to…Chinese opera.”
“Even the procession of the animals,” he says—when, during the grand “Circle of Life” opener, puppets are paraded through the aisles of the audience—“is a very old, simple theatrical tradition” used in European courts centuries ago.
How Karl Shymanovitz Joined The Lion King
The Lion King, Shymanovitz says, “doesn’t get old because it’s already, on some level, 300 years old. It’s something old that’s been made new again. The combination of all of those elements is really what makes it stand out from everything else. It’s not your typical Broadway show.”
But Shymanovitz also says he wound up joining the company—originally as Keyboard Three in the orchestra—almost by accident.
As a senior in college, Shymanovitz had worked with Valerie Gebert, then-music director at U-M. Gebert left the school—to join the Lion King tour—at about the time Shymanovitz graduated. He was then hired to take over her teaching role. Then, at the end of that year, Gebert gave Shymanovitz a call: “She said, ‘We have an opening on The Lion King. Would you want to come out on tour?’”
Over the course of the next year, Shymanovitz learned not only his own part, but also enough to cover Keyboard One—and, since Gebert was seated right next to him, “I also learned her keyboard book.”
Shymanovitz says he “basically” spent the next decade and a half hopping around as a substitute for orchestra players who were out sick or on vacation, “because I could cover anybody.”
In 2019, he returned to the show full-time, becoming music director in 2022. This, his current gig, is the fourth Lion King company he’s worked with.
So, does Shymanovitz ever feel like Sisyphus, eternally rolling his rock up the hill?
“There are periods where it’s not a heavy weight to carry,” he says, “but it is a very big show with a lot of people and a lot of moving parts.”
And there are moments, he acknowledges — when a cast member has a baby, or suffers an injury, or leaves for vacation — as has happened recently, when the South African actors went home for a break, only to face visa issues when they tried to return — in those moments, Shymanovitz allows, “Yes, it can feel like pushing a boulder uphill.”
Still, “I love doing the show, especially when it’s all going like it’s supposed to,” he says. “It is a joy to do every day. I love my colleagues, and I’m very lucky to work with the people I work with—talented, beautiful, brilliant people.
“My favorite part of doing the show,” Shymanovitz adds, before I have a chance to ask—“is doing the show.”
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