How ‘The Lion King’s Resident Dance Supervisor Keeps the Musical in Motion

If there were a want ad for resident dance supervisor to “The Lion King,” it might read something like this: Must be able to work 10-hour days, seven days a week; to manipulate 200 puppets and walk on stilts; to wrangle 52 performers and remember every move in the two-and-a-half-hour show. Candidate must also have the heart of a social worker, the discipline of a Marine and the boundless enthusiasm of a camp counselor to keep the musical as fresh as when it opened 28 years ago.

While plenty of Broadway shows have dance captains — they’re in charge of keeping choreography in good order — only “The Lion King” has a resident dance supervisor. The show is like a giant, kinetic jigsaw puzzle: It needs someone to ensure that all the pieces fit together, so that the narrative moves forward — and no one gets hurt.

This has been Ruthlyn Salomons’s job for 25 years.

Movement is the show’s motor, Salomons said. “It’s what binds it. It’s not just the performing bodies that move. Everything in the show moves. Everything dances.” That goes for a 5-inch mouse as much as for the 13-foot-long mama elephant, Bertha, who has four puppeteers tucked into her body.

“The show’s demands are so unusual,” said Michele Steckler, a former associate producer of “The Lion King,” “that taking care of it requires a different kind of maintenance.” In the show’s early days, Steckler petitioned her colleagues to create a new position for someone to oversee all the movement. “It was just too much for one person,” she said. (The show also has two dance captains, but they double as performers and can’t see the show from outside.)

A few years into its run, the production hired Salomons, 61, who has an extensive background in dance: She was a member of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, danced with Mikhail Baryshnikov’s White Oak Project and was the Romanian princess Matthew Bourne’s “Swan Lake” on Broadway.

Each performance of “The Lion King” finds her fixed behind the light board at the rear of the Minskoff Theater, scrutinizing the show’s performers to ensure that no step is wrongly taken, no arm momentarily misplaced, no stillness cut short. Given the intricacy of the staging, the spitfire speed of its changes and the mutual dependence of the performers, disaster is always lurking. Performers have accidentally smacked into each other; puppets have been beheaded.

“The show is so complicated,” she said, “that everything is balanced on the head of a pin.”

With such an enormous cast, there is always someone out sick or injured, or needed by a sick parent or child, or getting married, having a baby or going on vacation. Or just needing a rest.

Salomons is continually teaching and training swings, ensemble members and soloists. And she is always busy tidying sections of the show that have gone a bit slack, encouraging performers who have become a bit sloppy. That’s in addition to keeping Garth Fagan’s Tony-winning choreography up to snuff.

While only 16 of the 52 performers are professional dancers, everyone in the show must pass a dance audition. Given the complexity of the manipulation of the puppets, the large number of people onstage at any given time and the density of the group dances, the ability to dance, or at least to be well coordinated, is a necessity. And that’s just onstage.

Offstage makes its own choreographic demands. Performers have to navigate swiftly and safely among the 100 backstage personnel — stagehands, wardrobe, makeup artists, puppet directors and puppet doctors, physical therapists — to change rapidly out of and into one of the show’s 300 costumes before dashing back on as a different character. (Each ensemble members plays at least nine roles.)

“No single day is the same,” Salomons said of her job. “I’m always learning something new.”

Last month we followed Salomons around for several days to observe how she gets it done.

JAN. 6, 11:45 a.m. Before heading downstairs for a brush-up stage rehearsal, Salomons is in her office, paging through what she calls her Dance Bible to check on casting. The Dance Bible is a thick loose-leaf binder, the size of an old Manhattan telephone directory, that she created to record all aspects of the show: casting, as well as all the performers’ movements; scene by scene diagrams of entrances, exits and travel patterns; and schematics of the stage, auditorium and the lobby, where, Bertha, the gigantic elephant puppet is assembled just before curtain.

If she has to be offstage to deal with a mid-show emergency, the TV above her desk lets her keep track of what’s going on onstage. Taped to the walls and mirrors is a maze of lists with scene times and lengths, songs and monthly, weekly and daily schedules.

Stage rehearsal: Giraffes and lionesses

12:10 p.m., Giraffes Salomons is training an ensemble member, James Vessell, to operate the giraffe. At 5-foot-2, Salomons strains her neck to issue a correction to Vessell, perched high up in the 14-foot-high puppet. “Danger is in the air,” she tells him. “You are picking up the scent of a cheetah that had been laying in wait for you. Every count counts. Your life is on the line. It’s crucial that the performer understands the narrative that motivates the movement.”

There are two giraffe puppets, each controlled by a single performer who must first climb a ladder to attach his arms and legs to the custom-made stilts fitted inside the puppet. Salomons had to learn to walk on the stilts to teach the giraffe puppeteer how to achieve its stately walk and expressive tilts of its head as it crosses the stage. Success requires the physical coordination of an Olympian and often a month to learn.

1:10, Lionesses Next up are the eight lionesses for a hunt scene. “I needed to remind them of the importance of stillness in their section,” Salomons said. “It’s difficult, after doing eight shows a week, to remember the intent behind the movement. And every moment inside the show, every single movement has a narrative embedded in it.”

Crouched at the edge of the stage, her eyes go back and forth from her Dance Bible to the dancers while she softly sings the lioness’s chant. “I can’t stop myself from singing,” she said with a laugh.

A moment later, she springs up, rapidly crosses the floor, and places her hand on a dancer’s torso to demonstrate the precise position above the leg that gives her movement greater ferocity. Then she turns to the group: “Remember you have to be stealthy. Stillness is crucial in preparing to attack.”

Dance rehearsal: 1 performer, 8 roles, 13 scenes

JAN. 10, noon At the Ripley-Grier studio on 38th Street, 16 floors above the cacophony of Eighth Avenue, Salomons and Christopher McKenzie, the dance captain for the male vocalists and dancers, work with Jordan Samuels, a swing. Salomons, her voice quiet but commanding, demonstrates the steps of one of the eight roles he will play in 13 scenes — requiring 12 costume changes.

McKenzie had performed in every show for the three and a half weeks leading up to this rehearsal. “I needed Chris today because while I can see the show from the outside,” she said, “Chris understands the actual feeling of being onstage and the spatial relationship between the performers.”

“Ruthlyn can’t be at every one of the 19 rehearsals a week, so we pinch hit,” McKenzie said: “I teach parts and when necessary, I remind Ruthlyn of the details in the men’s roles.” McKenzie and Alia Kache, the dance captain for the women vocalists and dancers, are also swings.

5 p.m. After the four-hour rehearsal, Salomons races uptown to the production stage manager Antonia Gianino’s office for a short break before she and Gianino go over the evening’s casting. Performers are allowed to phone in up to two hours before curtain if they can’t make it; and because ensemble members perform so many roles in each show, everyone — performers, crew, wardrobe, hair, makeup, stagehands — has to be able to turn on a dime.

The maze of backstage hallways crackle with the din of Walkie Talkies as the crew shares new information, announces updates and coordinates timing.

Show time!

JAN. 10, 6 p.m. An hour before curtain, Salomons travels from dressing room to dressing room to check on how the dancers are feeling, answer questions, dispense advice, give notes and offer an encouraging shoulder squeeze. Thirty minutes later, she rushes down to her station behind the lighting board to begin her surveillance of the show.

6:30 p.m. The audience begins to file in.

7 p.m. The curtain slowly ascends on a giant orange sun rising on the back of the stage. The giraffes begin their majestic walk across it. The animals begin to awaken. Bertha begins her waddle down the aisle. Once again, the audience holds its breath.

10:45 p.m. After curtain call and a 45-minute subway ride home to Rego Park, Queens, Salomons is not quite ready to fall into bed, she said in a phone call. “I need to unwind,” she said. “My mind is still racing with all the things I need to do tomorrow. I try to close the lights, shut my eyes and just be silent. But sometimes, like last night, even after expending so much energy working with the performers, my dancer energy couldn’t stop, and so I cleaned my apartment.”

AFTER 25 YEARS on the job, how does Salomons maintain her enthusiasm? “Of course, I have my down days sometimes,” she said. “The daily work can take its toll. But then something magical happens to reinvigorate me, especially when I have a new performer to work with.”

She tells them it’s OK to make mistakes, that it’s part of the process. Salomons discovered that when she was a student at LaGuardia High School, in Manhattan, and fell onstage while dancing in “Company.”

“At first I was mortified and terrified,” she said. “How I could ever face the world again? A split second later I was up on my feet and suddenly realized that if I could fall and get up again, I could be a dancer. I could do anything.”