This is a story about a return seventeen years in the making.
There is something quietly audacious about a production choosing Hamburg as its homecoming stage. This is, after all, where Disney’s Tarzan made its German debut in 2008 – where audiences first gasped as performers sailed overhead through a canopy of fabricated jungle, and where the show accumulated more than five million admissions across its German touring life. When Stage Entertainment announced that Tarzan would return to the Stage Theater Neue Flora for a limited run from November 2025, the news carried the weight of a genuine cultural event. Not a nostalgia exercise – a reckoning.
I attended a performance in May 2026, a standard evening cast (no guest star Alexander Klaws this particular night) led by Philipp Büttner as Tarzan and the luminous Abla Alaoui as Jane. The house was full, the atmosphere electric. And what greeted us was not the show that ran here before. This is a production comprehensively reimagined: new staging design, a modernised narrative flow, and – most strikingly especially from where I sat in Row 6 – a 360-degree immersive environment that dissolves the boundary between the auditorium and the stage itself. Flying apes pass overhead. Vines descend into the stalls. The jungle does not merely exist behind a proscenium; it grows around you.
The musical is itself a long-travelled work, with a complicated history – born on Broadway in 2006 under the direction of Bob Crowley, received with ambivalence by critics, and yet somehow transformed, through years of international production, into one of Germany’s most beloved theatrical franchises. What Hamburg now hosts is the apotheosis of that journey: a show that has learned from its own past and emerged leaner, bolder, and, in the finest moments, genuinely breathtaking. This is pop-musical theatre at its most committed – and at its most spectacular.
Two Worlds, One Impossible Choice
The story of Tarzan traces back further than Disney. Edgar Rice Burroughs first published Tarzan of the Apes in 1912, conjuring a Victorian orphan left in the West African jungle after his parents are killed. The infant is adopted by a gorilla, Kala, who raises him as her own. The foundational tension – a man who belongs fully to neither the animal world nor the human – is one of the great metaphors of modern literature, and it translates with surprising force to the musical stage.
David Henry Hwang’s book for the musical, adapted from the 1999 Disney animated film screenplay, cleaves faithfully to that core. The show opens with “Two Worlds” – the birth of Tarzan and the near-simultaneous death of his human parents and gorilla sibling – establishing in its first minutes the show’s central duality. We watch Young Tarzan struggle for acceptance among gorillas, taunted and excluded, before we flash forward to the adult man.
The dramatic engine ignites when a British expedition – Jane Porter and the hunter Clayton — arrives in the jungle. Jane (portrayed here with immense warmth and wit by Abla Alaoui) becomes Tarzan’s window into a world he barely knows he yearns for. Their courtship is tender, often comic, sometimes heartbreaking. Clayton, meanwhile, reveals his true agenda: the gorilla family is a trophy to be taken. The show builds to a confrontation between Tarzan’s two identities – and ultimately a reaffirmation that family, however unconventional, is chosen by love rather than blood or species.
One notable adaptation from the film: Terk, Tarzan’s best friend among the gorillas, is written as male in the stage version (voiced by Rosie O’Donnell in the film). This Hamburg revival, with Leonardo Lusardi bringing exuberant physicality to the role, leans fully into that comedic masculinity. The absence of Tantor the elephant (cut from all stage versions) is barely felt – the gorilla ensemble carries more than enough warmth to fill the gap.
“It is a show about belonging — and paradoxically, it makes the entire theatre feel like somewhere you belong.”
Phil Collins and the Grammar of the Jungle
Phil Collins was hired to score Disney’s 1999 film as early as 1995, initially as a pure songwriter. His background as a drummer with Genesis – with its West African and polyrhythmic influences already threaded through his solo work – made him an unusual but inspired choice. Directors Kevin Lima and Chris Buck made a pivotal creative decision: rather than having the animated characters break into song in the traditional Disney manner, Collins would perform as an unseen narrator-voice, giving the music a different emotional register than, say, The Lion King or Beauty and the Beast. The result – the album “Tarzan: An Original Walt Disney Records Soundtrack” – swept the awards season, with “You’ll Be in My Heart” winning both the Academy Award and the Golden Globe for Best Original Song.
In the musical, the characters do sing (adapting the convention back toward Broadway norms), which gives the score a different dramatic weight while retaining Collins’s musical DNA. The show opens with “Two Worlds,” a surging invocation of the jungle’s dualities. “You’ll Be in My Heart” (known in German as “Dir gehört mein Herz”) is recontextualised as Kala’s maternal lullaby, one of the most emotionally direct pieces in the score. “Son of Man” charts Tarzan’s coming-of-age in an exhilarating montage sequence. “Strangers Like Me” (“Fremde wie ich” in German) becomes one of the show’s great love duets as Jane opens Tarzan’s mind to human civilisation. The raucous “Trashin’ the Camp” provides comic relief in the gorilla world. And the second act builds toward “Two Worlds” reprise — the show’s emotional and musical summation.
Under the baton of musical director Hannes Schauz, the Orchester des Theater Neue Flora — listed on this evening’s casting sheet with David Lee Krohn on flutes, Jochen Bens on guitar, Derek Marshall on bass, Gleb Pavlov on keyboard, and Mark Wetjen on drums — brings a live energy to Collins’s arrangements that recordings simply cannot replicate. The percussion in particular pulses through the hall with a physicality that makes the aerial sequences feel yet more visceral.
When the Theatre Becomes the Jungle
The original Broadway production of 2006, directed and designed by Bob Crowley, was a visual sensation that nonetheless divided critical opinion. Its spectacle was undeniable – Time Magazine called it “the most visually enthralling show since The Lion King” – but beneath the aerial pyrotechnics, reviewers found the book thin and the emotional core underdeveloped. Crowley’s design philosophy then, as now, relied on fluid, shape-shifting scenic elements and a cast suspended in constant motion above the stage.
What Hamburg’s 2025–2026 production adds is something architecturally distinct: the full 360-degree immersion. Where the original Broadway production placed the spectacle before the audience, this version places the audience inside it. Pichón Baldinu, the aerial designer who created the original flying sequences (having founded the de La Guarda troupe responsible for some of off-Broadway’s most boundary-pushing work), returns here to choreograph sequences that extend into the auditorium’s airspace. Performers swing above the stalls. The jungle breathes in the lighting rigs. German reviewers have reached for comparisons to Avatar and immersive technology festivals to describe the luminous, hyper-saturated aesthetic of the scenic design.
The production was also described at its November 2025 premiere as “thoroughly revised” (“umfassend überarbeitet”), with a modernised narrative flow that tightens the pacing criticisms levelled at earlier stagings. Sergio Trujillo’s choreography is athletically astonishing – gorilla movement rendered in human bodies with tremendous conviction. The costumes and jungle textures blur the line between theatrical artifice and something approaching natural wonder. Dániel Rákász’s Kerchak commands the stage with a physical authority that transcends costume. Leonie Hammel’s Kala achieves something rare: genuine maternal tenderness within elaborate prosthetic gorilla design.
This is physical theatre of the highest order.
From Broadway Misfire to German Institution
The original Broadway run closed in July 2007 after 486 performances – considered a significant commercial disappointment and the first major flop for Disney Theatrical Productions on the Great White Way. The reviews were uneven, with praise for the cast and visual spectacle offset by criticism of an emotionally lightweight book and a production that felt, as one major outlet noted, more like “a theme park attraction than a real Broadway musical.” The show received only a single Tony nomination, for Natasha Katz’s lighting design.
In Germany, the story has been entirely different. The 2008 Hamburg world premiere was a cultural milestone, and the show’s subsequent German tour – through Oberhausen and Stuttgart – has been seen by over five million people. The 2025 comeback was greeted at its November premiere with standing ovations and frantic applause, with prominent coverage noting that the revised production is “more spectacular, more emotional, and more modern than ever.” The premiere audience, which included entertainment and media figures, reportedly embraced it unreservedly. German-language reviewers have been notably warmer than their Anglo-American counterparts were in 2006, responding strongly to the emotional directness of Collins’s music and the immersive staging that this venue – built specifically for large-scale musical spectacle – serves so well.
The Jungle Has Grown Up
Disney’s Tarzan at the Stage Theater Neue Flora is a show transformed by time and ambition. What Broadway once dismissed as emotionally thin has been deepened by a production apparatus that no longer merely dazzles but genuinely envelops. The 360-degree staging is not a gimmick — it is a philosophical statement about what theatre can be when it abandons the fourth wall entirely. The cast assembled for this run, including Büttner’s kinetic and surprisingly nuanced Tarzan and Alaoui’s irresistible Jane, honours both the athleticism and the heart that the material demands.
Phil Collins’s score, still built around one of the great Disney Oscar winners, remains the show’s emotional spine – its live orchestral delivery here reminding us that a drum pattern and a melody, when performed in the same room as an audience, carry a charge that no recording captures. Hamburg has, over nearly two decades, made this musical its own. The Neue Flora – the theatre built amid protest in Altona that premiered Das Phantom der Oper in 1990 and has since housed the grandest productions in German musical theatre – proves once again to be the perfect container for exactly this kind of adventure.
Tarzan plays the Stage Theater Neue Flora through October 2026. Go. Climb. And hold on.