On Theater: Julie Taymor is a fearless flier

If moguls from Broadway, Hollywood and opera had wandered past a door in Indonesia in the late '70s, it is unlikely that any of them would have looked at the young American woman making puppets on the dirt floor and exclaimed, "Yes! There's my missing link between big-time entertainment and art!"

It is safe to imagine that Julie Taymor wasn't planning a triple-threat cultural takeover, either. Not then, at least.

But here she is, days short of her 58th birthday, masterminding last-minute preparations for the hysterically anticipated, historically expensive, denounced, delayed and dangerous $65-million Bono-Edge rock/comic-book musical, "Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark," for its Broadway opening Jan. 11.

At the same moment, her gender-transformed movie version of "The Tempest," Shakespeare's moody desert-

island masterwork, is opening this weekend and stars Helen Mirren as the exiled ruler and sorcerer, a character written as a man, alongside Russell Brand, Chris Cooper and Alfred Molina.

Meanwhile, at Lincoln Center, the Metropolitan Opera is again offering its truncated holiday-family, English-language version of her fantastical 2004 production of Mozart's "The Magic Flute" for eight performances (Dec. 21-Jan. 6). Peter Gelb, the Met's general manager, says he hired her to stage the philosophical fairy tale because "she is both brilliant and relentless in her quest for artistic success."

Take that, Green Goblin.

Amid all the hoopla about the risks - physical and financial - at the high-flying "Spider-Man," it is easy to forget the din and raw nerves that surrounded Taymor's first huge crossover assignment - a stage adaptation of a little cartoon movie called "The Lion King."

We look at "The Lion King" now as a sure thing, a blockbuster that Disney says has grossed $4.2 billion globally since it opened in 1997. (The number puts the $65-million Spidey investment into more rational perspective.) But imagine the shock when Disney - the demon expected to turn Broadway into a sanitized theme park - took a preposterous gamble and chose Taymor to open its new home, the art-nouveau New Amsterdam Theatre on 42nd Street, which had been impeccably restored for an estimated $36 million.

Instead of playing it safe with proven kid-show directors, Disney dug far into the theater's parallel universe to hire Taymor, avant-garde director-designer of admired but rarefied puppet-and-mask extravaganzas. Confronting an audience trained to expect literal helicopters and genuine falling chandeliers, Taymor was set free - with a reported $15-million to $20-million budget - to trust that audiences would understand a musical suggested and shaped by ancient Indonesian, Japanese and Indian storytelling sensibilities.

Jeffrey Horowitz, who tracked down the little-known Taymor in the early '80s to design a play with his Theatre for a New Audience, remembers the day she was asked to direct "The Lion King" on Broadway. She made him come with her to check out Disney's first Broadway venture, the very conventional "Beauty and the Beast."

"She kept saying, 'Oh no, oh no!,' " he recalls. " 'If they want me, I am not going to do that!' She was very clear from the very beginning what it had to be."

Taymor, who refers to him as "my beloved Jeffrey Horowitz," discovered her love of directing and Shakespeare with his company, including a "Tempest" in 1986 that had Ariel, the sprite, played by a Japanese Bunraku puppet. Caliban the monster had a mask from the New Guinea Mudmen. As Horowitz still marvels, the motorized set "made light look as if it were bending. Idea after idea kept coming."

Horowitz says he never imagined Taymor would be working on such massive commercial projects. "But early on, she said she really believed that popular art could also be excellent art. In Indonesia, she saw theater with entire villages, not just the cognoscenti. Everyone came to see a play. That's what she wanted."

It seems she always knew what she wanted, this girl from the Boston suburban of Newton, who, by the time she was 11, had talked her parents into letting her travel every day to the city to perform in a theater troupe. By 16, she was off to Paris to study with the legendary mime Jacques Lecoq. At Oberlin, she created her own major in folklore and mythology, then went to Indonesia for two years, stayed four and created her own company there.

"I hadn't seen the 'Lion King' cartoon" she told me in an interview in 2003. "Aesthetically, it's not my cup of tea. But Disney and I mine the same areas - myths and folklore and the outsider." She says that Tom Schumacher, now president of Disney Theatrical, told her when he hired her: " 'Look, we are going to give you the support you never had financially.' " And in the first 20 minutes, when the parade of part-people, part-jungle creatures came floating down the aisles of the theater, it was clear the support was justified.

"Fearlessness is the quality I admire most in an artist," says Reeve Carney, who, as Spidey himself, clearly knows a little something about courage. "And that's exactly what Julie is. Fearless."

Taymor received a MacArthur "genius" grant in 1992 and had already directed opera. In 2006, she and her (personal and creative) partner, composer Elliot Goldenthal, created a controversial opera, "Grendel," for the Los Angeles Opera and the Lincoln Center Festival.

But it was "The Lion King" that catapulted her into the catbird directing seat for a surprising variety of movies. In 1999, she turned Shakespeare's grisly "Titus Andronicus" into a movie starring Anthony Hopkins and Jessica Lange. Three years later, she directed Salma Hayek in "Frida," the Frida Kahlo biopic, and, in 2007, strung Beatles classics into a stylized romance, "Across the Universe."

At the L.A. preview for "The Tempest" Monday, Taymor said the Shakespeare drama and "Spider-Man" are both mythic pieces. "The story of Peter Parker is Shakespearean in the sense of his conflict," she told the website Cinematical. "Both Shakespeare and the 'Spider-Man' comic book writers, Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, they were all inspired by Greek mythology and by ancient stories. They are the pop artists of their times."

Bono, who had a cameo in "Across the Universe," is sharing in the very public, very rough birthing of "Spider-Man" - a show of mythic storytelling and ambition. As Taymor says she learned from Disney's Michael Eisner, "If you take big risks in your work, the payoff is bigger." Clearly, she is talking about more than cash.