I could gone on about this for hours. Er...I'm kind of a musicals freak, so bear with me.
Lion King. It isn't even a competition. Allow me to elucidate.
For one, Andrew Lloyd Webber was the composer for Cats. ALW composed several other massively popular shows, including Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita, Phantom of the Opera, and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. This is why he is famous, but not why he is infamous. ALW is infamous for four main characteristics in his music: pastiche, allusion, modeling, and borrowing. I won't go into the details, but all of these indicate some form of recycling and reusing other ideas. ALW's creative juices are not the most prolific. People often think that he has outright stolen much of his work. Listen to Pink Floyd's Echoes album, and then listen to the main theme from Phantom of the Opera. Hear a similarity? It's not rocket science. The man is a plagarist, but denies everything.
Furthermore, ALW's "original work" is not impressive at all. He composes music not for his own artistic stimulation. He composes songs in a pop style that he knows will appeal to broad audience because he wants to make money. This is his goal. He could care less about artistic integrity. This is one of the reasons that musicals like Phantom and Cats are so successful with non-musical crowds. But broad appeal does not equal quality. Not even in the least bit.
Among the musical-literate, ALW is often regarded as a joke (as are Schnonberg and Boubil of Les Miserables fame). His musicals are shallow and built ENTIRELY on spectacle. Cats was, after all, the first megamusical. And that, my friends, is not necessarily a good thing. It's composers like Stephen Sondheim--not very well known to non-musical population, but HIGHLY regarded as the GREATEST American composer-lyricist of all time. His shows are rich and complex, and rather than composing purely more monetary gain, he composes things that he is interested in doing. He isn't afraid of exploring human darkness, which is something that ALW would never consider because it isn't "popular".
A musical should also have meaning. Cats has no meaning. When asked what was the true meaning of Cats, Andrew Lloyd Webber replied, "It's about Cats." That's it. No meaning. It's merely there to entertain an audience with mediocre music and fancy costumes. Its a vehicle for money.
On the otherhand, while The Lion King is not anywhere near the rich complexity of Stephen Sondheim, it has a heart: something that is consistantly lacking from ALW's shows. TLK is a megamusical as well, but it is highly conceptualized. Disney was very precarious about making the costumes too unlike the film version because they were worried when people came to see the show they would be expecting to see Simba and Nala and Zazu exactly how they looked in the movie. However, Julie Taymor completely reinvented the costumes and accomplished a high art of costume far superior to any previous effort in musical theatre history. It is easy to say that her costumes are the best of all time. It creates a whole new experience, yet doesn't alienate the original Disney audience. On the other hand, Cats' costumes are boring and uninspired. What, spandex with puffballs glued on? Not so remarkable.
The music of Tim Rice and Elton John is not the best of Disney's repertoire, but it is FAR superior to anything ALW has managed to rip off--ahem, I mean, compose. And the additional songs are fantastic supplements to the story.
Anyway, back to that having a heart thing. Disney knows how to make a pretty penny, but the company had stuck with Walt's ideal to produce quality family entertainment. The Lion King was their greatest success with animated film. The film was not created to generate revenue. In fact, Disney thought that TLK would not be very successful and that Pocahontas would actually be the more box-office happy of the two. The Lion King was created to tell a compelling story, and teaches both the young and the old a lesson--you can't run away from the past, and remember who you are. This sentiment carries over into the stage version.
Both shows are very successful. It's useless to compare runs, since The Lion King is still running. It might not become the longest running musical ever (Phantom will have to close before that ever happens, even though Phantom was well do for its closing ten years ago), but it is certainly the better of the two. Popularity does not equate quality, especially in the musical theatre world. And the more you become aware of works like that of Stephen Sondheim, the more you realize the folly of Andrew Lloyd Webber. Lion King is somewhere in the middle of this, but even true musical theatre scholars can appreciate The Lion King. They never, however, appreciate Cats.
Besides. "Memory"? What's that? Worst song of the decade? I couldn't agree more!
...sorry, got a little carried away there!
