The Lion King — Hollywood Pantages

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The lights go down, one voice starts, and then the animals come up the aisle right past your seat — close enough that somebody behind you gasps out loud and does not apologize for it. That opening has undone a hundred and ten million people and it has not gotten old once.

Julie Taymor's puppetry, masks, and costume work are the reason. There is genuinely nothing else in touring theater that looks like this, and no amount of the film prepares you for what a person operating a giraffe at full height does to a room. The songs everybody already knows are all here, alongside material written for the stage by Elton John, Tim Rice, and Hans Zimmer.

A long winter engagement on Hollywood Boulevard, performances most days with matinees, and the Metro stops right outside.

For a lot of families this is the holiday tradition. For a lot of kids it is the first live theater they will ever see. Be the person who takes one of them.