Over the past 75 years, many musicals have been derived from the African-American experience. But the way in which director Julie Taymor and her collaborators transformed The Lion King from high-minded children’s entertainment to ritualistic allegory is without precedent.

The Lion King’s music is central to the show’s enduring popularity, but the manner in which the score came together doesn’t reflect traditional theatrical formulas. For veteran film composer Mark Mancina and South African songwriter/arranger Lebo M (who both contributed music to the film), Taymor’s commitment to transfiguring the film into a living evocation of African culture through song and dance was what ultimately inspired them to join the creative team.

“What Lebo brought to the [film] score was so great, I wished there’d been a lot more,” Mancina confesses. “When I had my initial meeting with Julie, that’s the first thing she conveyed; she wanted to reinvent the music and reinvent the movie — she wanted to strip everything down and reanimate it with a much more African flavor.”

The music not only advances the storyline in the traditional Broadway manner, but also amplifies the grandeur, dignity, and nobility of the African experience. From the opening number, theatergoers are no longer simply observers but participants as an elaborate series of puppets and masks reveal something ethereal and universal about young Simba’s rite of passage. In a sense, the way we experience this heady theatrical blend of living sculpture and music is analogous to the way it came together between Mancina, Lebo, and Taymor.

“She would just bubble over with ideas,” Mancina explains. “For me, this was a brand new challenge and a brand new world, so winging it at the piano with Julie and Lebo was the only way to do this kind of score, and it was a really fun way to work. And for a composer, it’s just wonderful to have that kind of enthusiasm when you’re sitting at an old upright piano and somebody is telling you that the ghost of Mufasa is actually going to be a mask that comes together on sticks with dancers.”

Given the way Taymor recast the original film, Mancina and Lebo M were challenged to re-arrange and embellish the movie’s sundry songs with an ear toward creating an overall sense of cohesion while giving added prominence to the diverse, exotic pallet of rhythms and melodies which define the African experience.

This listener detected a profusion of elements sprinkled throughout the polyglot score that one would be hard-pressed to imagine in any other Broadway musical. At various times I heard echoes of reggae and country, surf music and New Orleans R&B, tango and high life, rock and hip-hop, Gustav Mahler and James Bond, Germanic chorales and Chinese opera.

“I can say that was one hundred percent intentional on our part,” Lebo concludes. “From the time before this play was born, our goal was to take the inspiration of African music, which is eighty percent of who I am, but to globalize it by bringing in the spirit that you feel in Cuban music or jazz or Euro-centric music. There’s a universality to The Lion King that appeals to everyone.”

The Lion King is currently playing at the Minskoff Theatre, 1515 Broadway at 45th St. For tickets, call 212-307-4747 or click here.