More than three decades after it first roared onto cinema screens, Disney’s animated masterpiece The Lion King continues to spawn entertainment experiences around the globe, from the 2024 CGI prequel Mufasa to the upcoming Pride Rock flume ride announced for the Disneyland Paris resort. No Simba spin-off has been more successful than director Julie Taymor’s stage adaptation, which is celebrating its 23rd year touring across North America with an extended four-week stay at Orlando’s Dr. Phillips Center.
However, the beating heart of this beloved show comes not from Broadway or Burbank, but from Africa itself, which is not merely the setting for this feline-focused fable, but the homeland of many of the company’s cast members. Two of them are Thembelihle Cele (Nala) and Mukelisiwe Goba (Rafiki), who both hail from Durban, South Africa, and have been performing in productions of The Lion King for over a dozen years. The pair took time out before a recent performance in Tampa to tell me how, despite being so far from their families, they still find meaning in bringing a piece of their authentic culture to Disney-loving audiences.
Goba and Cele both began their journeys with The Lion King at open auditions in their hometown of Durban, but their paths have been quite different. Goba began her musical training early, with church singing and school competitions, and was trained at Mbongeni Ngema’s Academy. She says that when a friend talked her into attending her first audition, she didn’t know anything about The Lion King: “I went there for the first time being clueless.”
Cele, on the other hand, says she grew up in a very musical family: “South Africa is just generally a very musical nation; we sing and dance at funerals, at weddings, at celebrations, in moments of struggle, when we’re protesting.” But she was studying to be a scientist or mechanical engineer when a college lecture introduced her to Heather Headley, Broadway’s original Nala, “and from that moment on, everything that I did was specifically tailored towards making that moment come to life.”
After serendipitously stumbling across an open call, Cele auditioned entirely unprepared (“no headshots, no résumé, nothing”) but impressed the associate director enough with her rendition of “Shadowland” that she was initially offered a role in Australia, before he discovered she was still a freshman and sent her back to school. “I remember walking out of there so feeling so despondent, because I was just like, ‘No, this is my dream,'” Cele recalls. “Three years down the line, they kept in touch, in my senior year … I was offered the contract to go and start in the U.K.”
Likewise, Goba got a callback but didn’t land a part her first time out. “I was so heartbroken, but deep down I was like, it makes sense, because I didn’t have any clue what I was doing,” Goba says. “My second audition, it was much better because someone had taught me what is Lion King, [and] I went prepared this time, so it was kind of easy.”
Both Goba and Cele have previously played supporting roles in New York City, but on the current tour they each get to take center stage in a signature moment. Goba initiates every performance with Rafiki’s iconic “Circle of Life” opening incantation, and even after countless shows she says, “Every time, whenever I have to stand behind that scrim before the curtain goes up, I wish I could just run off stage. Oh, my God, my heart will be pounding so fast [and] I will pray, ‘God, please protect me. Please make sure that the first note I will do is going to be a proper one.'” And Cele now gets to sing nightly the very song she originally auditioned with, an emotional anthem by fellow South African Lebo M.
“I feel like it’s important for young people, especially young girls, to know that it’s OK to be strong,” says Cele. “I go into [the song] thinking that if I can just inspire just one young person out there, just one young life to follow their dreams … if one life is influenced out there, then I will have done my job.”
To maintain a tight connection to their roots while living on the road, The Lion King‘s South African cast members stay close to each other — eating meals together on traveling and load-in days — and to the African expat communities in cities they visit like Orlando. “It’s always so nice to connect with each other and to connect with the South Africans that we meet in these different cities; to speak our own home languages, and to eat food from back home,” says Cele. At the same time, Goba acknowledges that touring America also involves sacrifices, from voice-wrecking allergies to major life events, saying, “We are missing a lot back at home. People, they will die, [and] we can’t even go back home, because it depends where we are at that time.”
Since becoming entrenched in America’s cultural canon, The Lion King has been critiqued and parodied (notably by The Book of Mormon) for being appropriative or exploitative, but Cele says she and her fellow countrymen in the cast endure being away from South Africa for the opportunity to share the richness of their multicultural society’s 11 tribes and languages — including lyrics in isiZulu and Kiswahili — with engaged audience members.
“One of the most beautiful and powerful things about having to be a part of this experience is also knowing that even though we come from a small corner of the southernmost tip of the continent, that is now getting represented on such a large scale,” Cele says. “Even though there is a price to being out here — which is we’re missing out on family time and all of these monumental milestones in our in our lives, because we are here — it makes it worthwhile, because we’re also getting this rich experience, and we’re bringing it to the rest of the world.”
[location-1]Subscribe to Orlando Weekly newsletters.
Follow us: Apple News | Google News | NewsBreak | Reddit | Instagram | Facebook | Bluesky | Or sign up for our RSS Feed
Related Stories
Disney’s ‘The Lion King’ roars into Orlando’s Dr. Phillips Center
This article appears in Apr 23-29, 2025.