FEEL THE LOVE
‘Lion King’ brings message of empowerment to Popejoy
Meet Zazu, a hornbill who’s the caretaker of King Mustafa and his family in the blockbuster musical Disney’s “The Lion King.” And meet Mark David Kaplan, who portrays Zazu, a giant bird in the show that opens Oct. 2 for a 33-performance run at Popejoy Hall.
“I’m painted blue and white and the bird is white. My makeup design kind of makes me look birdlike,” Kaplan, a veteran actor, said in a phone interview from St. Louis.
Zazu is one of the characters that transforms from human to animal and animal to human. The transformations are what director Julie Taymor calls “a double event.”
Kaplan/Zazu is a full-body puppet.
“It’s going to be a whole new experience as an audience member,” Kaplan promised.
“We are lucky that they hired actors who are taught to be puppeteers, people with a singing and dancing background, because all the characters sing and dance.”
Kaplan has been Zazu in the current national touring company production of “The Lion King” since June 2011.
In 2003 he was hired for the second national tour of the musical as a standby — actually the comic standby — for the roles of Zazu, Timon the meerkat and Pumba the wart hog. He did those roles for three years.
“I’d fill in for someone on vacation or on medical leave. For me it was great because I learned three different puppets, three different sensibilities,” Kaplan said of his experience as a standby.
“If you’re lucky you get four to six weeks to (rehearse) with the puppets. It’s an ever-evolving process. I’m always learning something about the puppets.”
Kaplan said he’s had various roles in his 25-year career. He said his success has been based on the phrase “Be ready for anything that comes at you.”
The full-body puppet is but one of four kinds of puppetry in the show. There are also hand puppets, shadow puppets and rod puppets. In all, there are 200 total puppets.
Hidden from the audience is Michael Reilly, the current tour’s puppetmaster. He and two assistants maintain the designs that Taymor and designer Michael Curry created.
Reilly said that his and his assistants’ job comes down to maintenance, but the objective is important. The purpose is to
maintain the integrity of the show’s original puppet and mask designs.
So Reilly and his crew build, rebuild and fix the puppets and masks.
Their work can also involve repainting, re-sculpting and taking puppets in for electrical repair, he said.
“A lot of our puppets are mechanical. There’s a lot of different things you need to be an expert at,” said Reilly, who has been on the national tour since 2006 and had been with the sitting show of “The Lion King” in Toronto for four years.
“A lot of the stuff (they repair) is hand-made, one of a kind. The mechanicals are made by one Japanese man. … Scar and Mufasa wear motors that enables the actors to mechanically move their mask in front of their faces so they obscure the human face and become an animal,” Reilly said.
Mufasa is the king of the jungle. Scar is his brother and covets the throne that Mufasa’s son, Simba, is in line to inherit. The musical’s coming-of-age story centers on Simba’s struggles growing up and his friendship with Nala.
The characters of Mufasa and Scar wear two masks, one that moves and another that’s a stationary headdress, Reilly explained.
He said he occasionally comes across new design challenges.
Not too long ago, the tour’s propmaster had said he wanted Reilly to look at a puppet issue Reilly probably hadn’t seen before.
“I said, ‘I really doubt it.’ I saw it: A wildebeest shield made of raffia had sheared off of the sides of it. It was a new challenge,” Reilly said.
His most recent major job was the construction from scratch of new legs for a cheetah. The actor who is the cheetah wears a full-body costume with puppet legs on the back of the actor’s own legs, Reilly said.
This is the 15th anniversary year of the musical, which opened in Minneapolis in 1997 before it reached Broadway later the same year.
The musical, which is the seventh-longest-running musical on Broadway, has won more than 70 theatrical awards globally.
Among those awards musical are six Tonys, including for Best Musical, Best Direction of a Musical and Best Costume Design.
Taymor won the latter two awards. She and Curry hand-sculpted and handpainted all of the prototype masks that appear in the “Circle of Life” number that opens the show.
The musical is based on the popular twodimensional animated film that was released in 1994. The musical has the well-known Elton John-Tim Rice songs that were in the film. Besides “Circle of Life,” there are “I Just Can’t Wait To Be King,” “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” and “Hakuna Matata.”
In the stage production, there are six African languages spoken — Swahili, Zulu, Xhosa, Sotho, Tswana and Congolese. And of the 49 members of the cast, seven are South African.