The world’s a stage with ‘Lion King’
Long-running musical holds special place in the hearts and careers of South African performers
FUMANE Moeketsi bent her knees into a crouch, threw her hands up in the air and tore into the opening notes of a musical she had never seen.
It was the fourth time in five years that Moeketsi, the deepvoiced 23-year-old daughter of a platinum miner from a tiny village in South Africa’s Eastern Cape, had tried out to play Rafiki, the oracular mandrill, in The Lion King.
She had stood in line for open auditions with hundreds of other hopefuls and waited by the phone for callbacks that never came. She had mastered English (her first language is Sesotho) and memorised Circle of Life (she can’t read music). She had claimed a dormitory roof-deck here as her makeshift rehearsal room – a space where she could sing to the sky, without bothering her neighbours.
Finally, on the last day of May, Moeketsi found herself in front of a row of folding tables occupied by The Lion King global brain trust, including the show’s award-winning director, Julie Taymor, and, hovering anxiously along a wall, Duma Ndlovu, the South African casting consultant.
“Nants’ ngonyama,” she belted out, silencing the room with the Zulu lyric that has become the show’s signature sound. “Bakithi baba.”
Over the past two decades, 263 South Africans, many with little formal training in singing or acting, have been dispatched all over the planet to Lion King productions staged in Dutch, English, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Portuguese and Spanish. Moeketsi was determined to be next.
“I want to perform,” she said a few days later, sipping tea at a burger joint behind the storied Market Theatre, long a centre of anti-apartheid art and now, in a South Africa where for many the struggle is economic, renting rehearsal rooms to Disney. “I want to write. I want to save enough money so I can build a theatre that’s close to my village. That’s my dream.”
According to Disney, the musical – about Simba, a lion cub finding his way after the death of his father – has earned more money than any other title in entertainment history. Since opening on Broadway in 1997, it has been seen by 90 million people in 24 productions that have grossed $7.9 billion.
Adapted from a hit animated film set in the fictional Pride Lands, the stage adaptation is rooted in South Africa by its music, much of it by the composer Lebo M, using South African languages and choral stylings. Almost every cast – and there have been many – has included eight to 12 South Africans among usually about 50 performers.
South African cast
“I felt very strongly that we had to have South Africans in it from the beginning,” Taymor said in June.
She was there for a round of auditions, which continued through the summer, to assemble a largely South African-cast tour that will begin in Manila, Philippines, in March, and then set out across Asia.
This month the show celebrated its 20th anniversary. When Taymor and Thomas Schumacher, the president of Disney’s theatrical division, were developing it two decades ago, they helped persuade Actors’ Equity to allow for a contingent of South African performers; now every year Disney teams visit Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town to cast more. “It’s like the spiritual foundation of The Lion King,” Taymor said.
The life is hard – performers, generally young adults, leave their parents, and often their children, behind, frequently relocating to countries where they don’t speak the language. But there is adventure to be had, art to be made, money to be earned.
That’s why Moeketsi – who grew up in a home without electricity, listening to news on a battery-powered radio and hoping to one day become an announcer – started to attend auditions.
She had moved from her village to Johannesburg for college, and, as she wrapped up her studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, she saw The Lion King as her best hope, both professionally and financially.
She was seeking to join a generation of South African performers who have landed jobs in the musical. Some have found new homes, new families, new careers. Others have struggled to translate the opportunity into sustained career success.
All have been changed. Brenda Mhlongo is seated on a plush couch in a television studio, rehearsing her reproachful stare while a make-up artist touches up her face. At the same time, she and a language adviser on headset are quibbling about how best to phrase “Where is your shirt?” in Zulu.
It’s a long way from Pride Rock. Mhlongo, 38, is a Lion King success story – a grateful alumna who parlayed a stint with Disney into a significant television career back home. She now stars on Generations: The Legacy, South Africa’s second-most popular soap opera, or soapie, playing a nurse married to a mobster.
Along the way she faced years of unemployment and a spiritual crisis. But her journey illustrates the possibilities for Lion King performers who spend years on stage overseas and then try to continue working in the arts back home.
“I knew I would come back, because I wanted to make my name in South Africa,” Mhlongo said.
Filming was over; breathless after a quick wig-and-costume change, she apologised that her typically fashionable character had been dressed casually for the late-night living room scene.
Mhlongo, who grew up in Kwamashu – a township north of Durban where black people were resettled during apartheid – was a teenage mother when she first saw the animated Lion King, and discovered that watching the video soothed her baby daughter. (They would skip the sad stampede scene.)
She spent years performing with K-cap (Kwamashu Com- munity Advancement Projects), an arts programme founded and led by her husband. But, by 2007, when she learned that Disney was holding auditions in Durban, she was ready for a bigger stage.
Although many South Africans, like Moeketsi, try out year after year, Mhlongo was hired on the spot to play Rafiki in Festival of the Lion King, a 30-minute revue, at Hong Kong Disneyland. She left a threeyear-old son and six-year-old daughter to be raised by her husband.
Cast in German show
While there, she had another stroke of good fortune: She was spotted by a holidaying Disney executive who recruited her to join the Lion King production that has been running in Germany for 16 years.
However, Mhlongo lasted only three months in Hamburg, before she left the show, citing “spiritual sickness”.
Rafiki is the one prin- cipal part regularly played by a South African woman. Inspired by a sangoma, a type of South African faith healer who, according to belief, can channel ancestral spirits, the character was troublesome for Mhlongo, as it has been for other South African women, because she felt at times unable to manage dark feelings she believed the ancestors were surfacing.
(Some productions keep sage and other herbs on hand as antidotes.)
She recovered – “I had to fast and pray, and at home they had to do a lot of ceremonies” – and her career resumed.
She performed in the ensemble, while understudying Rafiki, in Johannesburg and on Broadway, and then played the role on tour in North America.
The show spoke to her, and to other performers, in inspirational ways – in particular, its story of a dispossessed leader spending years in exile before returning to reclaim his king- dom strikes many as having thematic echoes of Nelson Mandela.
The show also resonates personally and painfully. As the lionesses ululated in mourning over the death of Simba’s father, Mufasa, Mhlongo would think of her own father, who was stabbed to death in Johannesburg when she was 13.
“When I listen to the eulogy, it’s like I’m talking to my ancestors. I’m saying, ‘Why, why did you take him?’”
The peak, she said, was originating Rafiki in Spain when that production opened in 2011. The transition was jarring: there was the night her brain froze and she accidentally began a song in German. But the gig went well and she even won some awards for the year-long engagement. “After that I told them, I’ve reached the ceiling,” she said.
She returned to South Africa in 2012, and, other than a brief 2013 fill-in stint in a North American tour, has been here since. “I struggled to find work when I came back,” she said. “It was hard to crack.”
She now encourages other Lion King hopefuls, in part by helping her husband, Edmund Mhlongo, whose K-cap programme, independent from Disney, prepares high school graduates to audition for The Lion King, as well as more generally for careers in the arts.
Students there all know whether their vocal range and body type make them more likely to be a Nala or a Rafiki, a Simba or a Mufasa, and each year they learn the audition songs, which they perform a cappella, in English, although Zulu is their primary language.
Over the years, about 20 alumni have landed roles in the musical.
For Mhlongo, whose face is painted on the side of the centre’s building, alongside those of others who have trained there, the show offers a rare chance to explore the world and the arts.
“Lion King is a university,” she said.