When movies and plays set out to shock and awe, minor details like, oh, plot and acting can be left in the dust
Steven Winn, Chronicle Arts and Culture Critic
Tuesday, March 16, 2004
©2004 San Francisco Chronicle

We are what we see.

In an entertainment culture suffused with spectacle, the desire to be dazed, dazzled, carried away and left speechless has never seemed more compelling. In movie houses and theaters, rock concert arenas and horse-filled tents, visual amazement abounds and overwhelms. Language, lyrics, character and narrative make way for sensory superabundance.

Buffeted by world events too menacing to fathom, we've become eager, wide- eyed witnesses, our faces longingly pressed to ever larger windows. We want to be enveloped and transported by intensity now, not merely diverted. Consider some of our current fixations.

The two most-discussed movies of the season, Mel Gibson's flesh-flaying "The Passion of the Christ" and Oscar behemoth "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King," depend dominantly on their overpowering imagery. Their stories aren't so much dramatized onscreen as dynamically, hyperbolically illustrated.

Cirque du Soleil, which may well be the defining theatrical aesthetic of the age, continues to blanket the globe in lavish, lyrical and immersive entertainments. With its fluidly choreographed feats and amplified scores sung in dreamy, pounding chants, Cirque (and Cirque-descendant shows such as "Cavalia") has become a universal language of astonishment and trance. Watching and listening to these productions, the audience gets swallowed up inside the shows' deep, plush pockets.

"The Lion King," Disney's mega-hit musical now installed at the Orpheum Theatre for a long run, offers audiences the delicious double pleasure of reveling in spectacle and rejoicing in the way it's made. The "Circle of Life" opener, the stuff of instant Broadway legend, announces the terms and conditions of the show's experience in unmistakable terms. By filling the theater's stage and aisles with a universe of masked and costumed animals and human-puppet hybrids, director Julie Taymor makes artifice, the wonder of making believe, the production's defining force.