Lions, Hyenas and AIDS, Oh My!

My wife and I will celebrate 18 years of wedded bliss tomorrow, and for our anniversary I treated her to a performance of The Lion King at the Orange County Performing Arts Center on Friday night. She is a huge fan of musical theater. Me...not so much.

Thanks to a friend who works at the Center, we had the opportunity to buy our tickets months ago before they went on general sale, and had great seats dead center and just a few rows back from the stage. During the opening number of the show we were literally surrounded by the performers in all kinds of animal get-ups as they paraded up to the stage.

Although I'm not a huge fan of live theater, I can appreciate great stagecraft and great singing when I see and hear it, and the Lion King is certainly all that. The use of puppetry combined with live actors was very interesting to see, and at times you weren't sure whether to watch the puppets or the actors manipulating them. The two guys who played Zsa Zsu and Timon, both comedic parts, were excellent and very funny. The actor who played the villain, Scar, sounded so much like Alan Rickman that if you closed your eyes, you would have thought Professor Snape from Harry Potter was the bad guy.

All in all it was an excellent show and we had a great time...until the very end. After the curtain calls for all the actors, the guy who played Mustapha (Simba's dad) asked the audience to sit back down for a moment and then made a pitch for contributions to some Broadway AIDS charity. As we left the theater there were members of the company standing at each exit door exchanging red ribbons for donations.

I personally think that this was neither the time nor the place to solicit contributions for a disease which is already wildly overfunded by the government compared to other diseases which we know much more about. Given that AIDS is primarily spread by bad behavior, it took a little of the enjoyment out of the evening for me to be panhandled at the door by people who want me to contribute in the hopes of making their bad behavior less dangerous.