Two international smash hit shows head up the centenary celebrations at Bradford’s Alhambra theatre in 2014.

Stephen Crocker raised his eyebrows when he learned that Disney was planning a stage adaptation of its big screen animation The Lion King.

“I remember thinking ‘how could you put an elephant and an ant on the same stage and make it work?’ But, thanks to Julie Taymor’s vision and expertise, it does work,” says Stephen, director of marketing and creative services at EMEA-Disney Theatrical Group.

Based on the Oscar-winning 1994 film about a lion cub called Simba, destined to be King of the Jungle, the show became one of the world’s most popular stage musicals, winning Tony and Olivier Awards and a Grammy. The West End production is almost in its 15th year.

Produced by Disney Theatrical Productions, the show comes to Bradford next spring for seven weeks, the only Yorkshire stop on its 2014 UK tour.

The biggest musical theatre production ever to tour, it features more than 50 actors, singers and dancers from around the world and 700 costumes, masks and puppets.

“It didn’t seem like it would be possible to ever tour the show, it’s on such a huge scale,” says Stephen. “American theatres are built for modern productions, but in the UK a lot of theatres are old. But as technology has advanced, we have been able to take it on tour without compromising the scale.

“If you take anything away from the show you take away its integrity. An audience in Bradford deserves the best version we can offer.”

At the heart of the story is the universal theme of the circle of life.

“There’s something comforting about that,” says Stephen. “It’s an allegorical Prodigal Son story – stories around the world have this ingrained idea of redemption. The African element unites it all, but it’s timeless.

“There’s no better show for a child’s first theatrical experience, but it entertains all ages.”

Visually, the show is stunning, with performers using masks and puppets to portray principal characters and other animals, from gazelles to an elephant.

In adapting The Lion King for the stage, acclaimed musical theatre director Julie Taymor drew on her experience of staging epic theatre and operas. She and co-designer Michael Curry hand-sculpted and painted every prototype mask that appears in the show’s spectacular Circle Of Life opening scene. The show’s 232 puppets are largely inspired by Japanese Bunraku and Balinese puppetry.

While it uses state-of-the-art digital technology, Stephen says the show “could have been staged 200 years ago”.

“The puppetry and other techniques are rooted in traditional theatre. The stampede scene is a Victorian rolling device,” he adds.

There’s more groundbreaking animal puppetry in War Horse, also coming to the Alhambra in 2014. Based on former Children’s Laureate Michael Morpurgo's best-selling novel, it’s the powerful story of a Devon farm horse taken to the First World War battlefields in France.

Caught in enemy crossfire, Joey the horse ends up serving on both sides before becoming entangled in barbed wire in No Man’s Land. His owner, farmer boy Albert, embarks on a dangerous mission to find the horse.

The stage version features spellbinding puppetry, bringing galloping, breathing horses to life. Michael calls it “an extraordinary show”.

“For me, the reason it works is that it isn’t sentimental – it hurts. It tells of the experience of war from the horse’s point of view,” he says.

Michael had the idea after chatting to an 80-year-old First World War veteran he met in a Devon pub more than 30 years ago.

“I told him I’d come across an old painting of the British cavalry charging up a hill, with horses caught in barbed wire. His eyes filled with tears as he told me that he was there with horses, too.

“For two hours he talked of the horse he’d loved and left behind, eventually sold to French butchers. It felt like he was unburdening himself.”

The old man later showed Michael a collection of things he’d kept from the trenches. “I thought ‘he’s handing this to me’. Next day, I rang the Imperial War Museum and asked how many horses went to war. They said about a million had gone from Britain – and 62,000 came back.

“I was a war baby, I grew up playing on bombsites. But it wasn’t the bombed buildings that made me aware of what war did – it was my mother’s eyes remembering her brother, shot down in 1941.

“What I learned was that almost as many horses as men died in the First World War and they died the same way – on the wire, in the mud, exhausted and machine-gunned.”