There’s a moment in Disney’s The Lion King when the entire Pride Lands comes together — every animal, every voice, every heartbeat moving as one. It’s the kind of moment that stops you in your tracks.
What most audiences don’t see is that the same thing happens long before the curtain rises.
Bringing The Lion King to life at the Electric Theater required more than a talented cast and a dedicated creative team. It required a pride — a community of people who showed up, rolled up their sleeves, and gave their time, their skills, and their hearts to make something extraordinary happen.
Our volunteers this summer were nothing short of remarkable.
Needles and thread flew as our sewing team brought the world of the Pride Lands to life stitch by stitch. Costumes for a show like Lion King don’t just happen — they are built, fitted, altered, and rebuilt again by people who care deeply about the details. The results speak for themselves.
Set pieces took shape piece by piece under the hands of builders who gave their weekends and evenings to construct the world our cast would inhabit on stage. And some of the most intricate and breathtaking work of the entire production came from our mask-making team — animal masks that transformed our Young Artists into the iconic characters families know and love.
Then there were the face painters, the dressers, the parents who stayed late and arrived early, the families who trusted us with their Young Artists and then turned around and gave us their time on top of it.
This is what community looks like.
Encore has always believed that the best theater doesn’t happen in spite of the people around it — it happens because of them. Every stitch, every brushstroke, every nail driven into a set piece is an act of love for this art form and for the Young Artists at the center of it all.
To every volunteer who was part of this production — thank you. You are the Pride Lands. And we could not do any of this without you.
— Adam and the Encore Team