The first time Tshidi Manye auditioned for the musical “The Lion King,” in Johannesburg in the 1990s, she went with a friend and neither of them was cast. In response, they fasted for seven days, she said — “no food, just water. Praying like nobody’s business,” asking for a better outcome next time.
When the show returned to hold fresh auditions, her friend got a role and went off to London. Manye (whose name is pronounced TSEE-dee MAHN-yeh) got nothing. Disappointed, mad, discouraged — not least because her prayers hadn’t worked — she decided: never again.
So the third time she heard about “Lion King” auditions, Manye resolutely stayed away. But on the day of callbacks, a colleague banged on her door at 7 a.m. and summoned her there nonetheless. “He’s like, ‘I’m telling you, I’m not asking you,’” she said.
Manye went, triumphed and transformed her life — as evidenced by her recounting that story in her Broadway dressing room at the Minskoff Theater, where she plays Rafiki. It is a starring role: the shaman baboon who sings “Circle of Life”; who holds the newborn cub Simba aloft; and who, after Simba’s long exile, welcomes him back to the fold.
Since 2000, when she started in the Toronto company, Manye has played an estimated 9,000-plus performances of “The Lion King,” most of them on Broadway. Among the 30 productions mounted in the show’s 28 years, she is the longest-running Rafiki, according to Disney Theatrical Productions.
“I never thought I was going to be able to make it, but I made it,” Manye said late one afternoon before a performance, with an air of marveling at her past that seemed genuine even after 25 years in the job, and two decades after her Broadway debut in the show.
Now Manye, who is in her early 60s and lives in Jersey City, N.J., is hanging up her shaman costume. Her last scheduled performance is Sunday evening.
After that, no more meditative half-hours as she gets Rafiki’s distinctive face, with its blue baboon cheeks, painted onto her own. No more sitting in her dressing room under the breeze of a mini fan, trying to keep that makeup from melting off.
More glamorously, no more seeing her name and photo splashed bigger than life outside the entrance to the Minskoff, or seeing tourists pose in front of that image for their own pictures. That’s how recognizable Rafiki is as an emblem of “The Lion King.”
Robert Guillaume voiced the character in the 1994 animated movie, but the director Julie Taymor turned Rafiki into a woman’s role in the musical — one that Manye said involves her speaking English, Zulu, Sotho, Xhosa, Pedi, Tswana, Ndebele and “a little bit of Shangaan.”
The stage production includes nearly 200 puppets alongside 51 performers in a profusion of elaborate costumes. Amid all that pageantry, Taymor considers the baboon — who doesn’t wear a mask and breaks the fourth wall to address the audience — “the spiritual center of the piece” and “the most human of all the characters.”
“She is in a way the storyteller,” Taymor said by phone.
Lindiwe Dlamini, an ensemble singer who has been with the Broadway production since its 1997 premiere and comes from the same township in Durban, South Africa, as Manye, noted that Rafiki is also something of an elder.
“Everybody goes to her. She advises the king, she advises young Simba,” Dlamini said. Manye, whom she has known for more than 40 years, has “always been like that, even for me personally.” She added: “She’s very, very compassionate.”
Ask Manye about her family and childhood, and she rewinds to her parents’ divorce when she was about 2, after which she lived mostly with her father in Johannesburg and didn’t know her mother.
“I loved singing,” said Manye, the youngest of nine siblings. “I grew up with gospel music, jazz music and reggae music. And of course South African music.” She thought she might make a career of it, until her father told her firmly there was no money in the arts. “My dad was like, ‘Nope, you can choose something else.’”
But when she was 16 or 17, her mother came to find her and take her to Durban. In that reunion Manye found a model for an artistic life. Her mother, Thandekile Zulu, was a playwright. Even amid the systemic economic scarcity of apartheid and its aftermath, she made a living by bringing performances to schools.
South Africa’s barely post-apartheid economy is part of what made the “Lion King” musical such a shining goal for Manye in the ’90s. On the way to achieving it, her career included touring Europe and Japan with the musical “Sarafina!” and singing in the chorus on the soundtrack of the “Lion King” movie. But it was a precarious existence, financially.
Given that, being cast as Rafiki in Canada meant one simple and enormous thing.
“Freedom,” Manye said, then clarified: “Freedom for the whole family.”
Her son, Mpho, was little at the time, and after her first year in Toronto, he joined her there. She sent money home, too, “to kind of ease the load” on her mother and siblings. When two nieces and a nephew got older, she sent them to college. She also bought herself a house in South Africa, where some of her family lives. And when she goes back to visit, she has the means to treat everyone to some fun.
These are not the usual things actors talk about when they are preparing to leave a role. But for Manye, “The Lion King” has always been a combination of fulfilling her own dreams — artistic and financial — and helping her relatives to fulfill theirs.
Now, she said, she wants a little break to take care of herself: “physically, spiritually, mentally.” She plans to go back to South Africa for a while — maybe a few months, maybe a year, to spend extended time with her family. “Kind of catch up,” she said.
But is she really exiting “The Lion King” forever? Possibly not.
“Here’s the thing,” Manye said. “You never leave ‘The Lion King.’ I’m pretty sure that if they call me two days after I’ve left and say, ‘Tshidi, we want you to come in for a second,’ I will jump and be here, no matter what.”
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