Thank You, Five: Post Show Chat with Gerald Ramsey
Production: The Lion King (2017)
Performer: Gerald Ramsey
Role: Mufasa
The Lion King is known for its beautiful and unique costumes, particularly in regards to the puppeteering and headpieces. Can you talk about yours and the way the Mufasa head moves?
Yeah! People always think it’s the movement, so when you lunge, that’s how the mask drops. But actually, it’s a little trigger on your finger that’s connected to a battery pack on your back with wires that go all up inside the costume.
That’s amazing! It looks very fluid and seamless when you move.
That’s part of the training that we get. We’re hired as actors, not as puppeteers. So when we get here, a lot of our rehearsal process is learning how to move with the puppetry to make it look natural.
What do you want people to be able to take away from the show?
I think a lot of people focus on the stories of Simba returning to the kingdom, Mufasa as a father, Nala as a warrior. But I think there’s another kind of substory or subplot in the play that people don’t think about that’s very relevant to today, and that’s with like climate and resource management. So when Scar takes over the kingdom, they become desolate for overhunting and all the water dries up, and I think it’s, in a tiny, behind-the-scenes way, talking about something that’s relevant to today as far as our responsibility to the environment.
Were there any major changes or adaptations that had to be made when transitioning the show from a single Broadway stage to a traveling tour?
Probably the biggest thing is as you move theater to theater, we cannot dig into the floors at every theater we stop into. So on Broadway, I believe their Pride Rock comes out of the ground with trapdoors. But for us on the road, we have a traveling rock that moves across, and I think there’s beauty in both.
How do these large set pieces, like Pride Rock and the Elephant Graveyard, move across the stage?
For the Elephant Graveyard, there’s tracks onstage. The Elephant Graveyard is being pushed manually by the dancers and by crew. Pride Rock actually has a battery and a motor inside of Pride Rock that’s very heavy. It has to travel very slowly, and that is controlled by a remote that puts it on the tracks and it rolls.
Feature Photo Credit: Matthew Murphy