Riding a surprising wave of revenue from audiences ravenous for stage spectacles, The Lion King musical returns in Sydney on Thursday, with nine of its first 10 performances sold out.
Tickets for nosebleed seats start at $60.
"None of the big hits musicals that have come along since The Lion King, the likes of the Hamiltons and what have you ... none of them do the things that The Lion King does", the show's associate director Anthony Lyn told AAP.
Herds of life-size elephants, gazelles, wildebeest, zebras - crafted, sculpted, woven and beaded by hand - will stampede through the aisles to welcome lion cub Simba to the world over a spine-tingling African chorus in the show's colossal opening number Circle of Life.
Mufasa and his pride have certainly been feeling the love, totting up almost $13 billion at the box office so far - on par with the cinema earnings of all the Star Wars films combined.
More than 127 million people have crowded theatres in 24 countries during the musical's 29-year run, a tenure exceeded only by Broadway elders Phantom of the Opera and Chicago.
Musicals appear unbruised by cost-of-living pressures, with the genre selling a record 4.4 million tickets and clocking up more than half a billion dollars in revenue in Australia in 2024.
The three best years ever for musical theatre in Australia were from 2022 to 2024, following the COVID-19 pandemic.
"We need entertainment, we need to be able to switch off, we need to be transported, we need stories", Daniel Frederiksen, who plays The Lion King's arch-villain Scar told AAP.
Emily Nkomo, who plays heroine lioness Nala, said live theatre offered irreplaceable human connection.
"(There's) that feeling that you get when you see people do something this beautiful on stage," she said.
"We can communicate with the audience and then they respond back and we respond with them as well.
"There's nothing like it."
The Lion King is scheduled to play Sydney's Capitol Theatre until August 30.
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