Julie Taymor Reveals She'll Return to Broadway Next Season: 'I'm Coming Back'

In a new interview with the New York Post, director Julie Taymor, best known for her work on Broadway's THE LION KING and SPIDER-MAN: TURN OFF THE DARK, revealed that she will be heading back to the Great White Way next season.

"Oh, I'm coming back, but it hasn't been announced yet. But you'll see me next spring or next winter," she shared, adding "People are spending so much time on their computers and phones. Theater's got something those things don't have - it's got scale and it's got dimension. Virtual reality? I'd rather be there with a bunch of people and have the virtual reality [be] reality around me!"

Taymor's film of the live production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" which she directed for the 2013 opening of Brooklyn's Polonsky Shakespeare Center, screens this weekend at BAM. "We shot four live performances with four cameras," she explained of the filming. "The cameras had the best seats in the house. The audiences got to see a movie being made, and that gave me 80 hours of material to cut from. If you're shooting theater, people accept that they're children in costumes, because it's live, as opposed to having to make it look like "Avatar."

While the 63-year-old refuses to discuss the controversial staging of Broadway's SPIDER-MAN: TURN OFF THE DARK, ("It's four years ago. It doesn't exist in my mind. It's gone"), she is happy to discuss one of her proudest achievements, designing costumes for THE LION KING. "Recently I designed a new costume for [the show] in China," she says. "It's the Year of the Monkey, and I felt, "Why not honor their great hero?" So we put Monkey [Master] into [the song] "I Can't Wait To Be King." It's not a major character, but it was fun."

Asked if she ever had to to modify a costume from the long-running Disney musical Taymor replies, "We changed the difficult ones 17 years ago. I've never had anyone tell me, "We have to change the costumes, they're difficult." They're not wearing dresses, they're manipulating puppets, and the masks are much, much lighter than [in] the original. We found a new material. You know, dancers go through difficult stuff. If you don't want to do it, you quit."

Read the interview in full HERE

Taymor is best known for directing the stage musical, The Lion King, for which she became the first woman to win the Tony Award for directing a musical, in addition to a Tony Award for Original Costume Design.

She has also received the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Costume Design, an Emmy Award, and an Academy Award nomination for Original Song. She also received the 2012 Director Award for Vision and Courage from the Athena Film Festival at Barnard College in New York City. She was the director of the Broadway musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark and an off-Broadway production of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

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