Wearing his 30 pounds of gear for Disney’s The Lion King, Dionne Randolph is not so much a man in a costume as a giant human puppet. As Mufasa, the literal king of the jungle and father to Simba, he sports a big mechanical headpiece that moves via motors that run up his back.

“You and the puppet are the same entity—you have to feel the same emotion,” says the affable Randolph, whose deep, regal voice is only about a semitone higher than that of James Earl Jones, the voice of Mufasa in the 1994 Disney cartoon that inspired the mega-musical. Randolph is speaking to the Straight from Portland, Oregon, as he walks to the gym for one of the rigorous daily workouts that help him keep up with the demands of the production. “The puppets live only from a physicality rather than from a switch that I hit. The motor makes the mask move, but it doesn’t make it live.”

The elaborate masks and puppets—more than 230 in all—are part of what sets Disney’s The Lion King apart and makes it a spectacular savannah come to life. While Mufasa and Scar’s mechanical “heads” can be raised and lowered to make them appear to lunge, catlike, at each other, there are also menacing hyenas and slinking cheetahs that require actors to operate wearable puppets, gazelles that leap gracefully from the ends of dancers’ arms, and towering giraffes with performers strutting on stilts. Rather than a cartoonish, theme-park-on-stage look, it’s as refined and culturally rich as the show’s South African–influenced music. The designs draw on traditional carved-wood African masks, shadow puppetry, and rod-operated Bunraku marionettes.

The tour’s puppet supervisor, Willie Wilson, speaking to the Straight in a separate interview from Portland, says it’s that mix of devices that makes the show unique. “The whole thing is that it’s something that’s never been seen in theatre before—an actor being able to perform with a puppet without being covered up in a puppeteer’s costume or anything like that.”

Little could have fully prepared Randolph for the demands of the role he’s now performed for seven years with the Broadway touring production that hits Vancouver’s Queen Elizabeth Theatre from next Tuesday (July 13) to August 8, but it helps that the Georgia native once worked in puppeteering at Orlando’s Disney World. Back in the mid 1990s, he operated giant puppets for a show called Legend of the Lion King, inspired by the same movie. “You kind of learn the magic of bringing something inanimate to life—that connection between the person and the puppet. I mean, you could bring a chair to life if you did it right.”

Back then, acting was pretty much a hobby for Randolph. In fact, his audition for this show was his first for a Broadway production. Still, nailing the part was only half the battle; next came intense training before he headed out on tour.

“That was the surreal moment: putting the costume and the mask on for the first time. When I first put it on, I felt like Gumby—like, ”˜You want me to do what in this?’ Yeah, it’s pretty cumbersome. But I’ve gotten used to it over the years,” he says with a laugh. It’s hard to tell if he’s joking when he adds that the entire ensemble is a full 15 pounds heavier by the end of each performance.

Randolph says director Julie Taymor, who still holds regular workshops with the cast, has always stressed that the actors find the human quality within the animals. “She took it from the aspect of ”˜We are really telling the story of a young person coming of age who’s had a trauma,’ ” explains Randolph. “Only when Scar pushes Mufasa’s buttons does his more animal side come out.”

As physically demanding as performing in that costume is, not to mention carrying around the boy-lion Simba during the show, Randolph says his role as Mufasa is actually more mentally taxing. “I’m playing the king, the father, the friend, and there are so many emotions I have to play on-stage,” he explains of the story, in which the doomed Mufasa struggles to protect his son Simba from the evil clutches of Scar, who wants to rule the kingdom. Such large-scale emotional outpouring does not lend itself to a lot of partying on the road. “After every show my day is done, regardless of what the cast has planned. I need my couple hours to regroup.”¦Sleep is my number one thing on tour.”

If the performers take a pummelling, so do the puppets and masks. Wilson has a team of three people who work every day, painstakingly repairing and repainting the pieces. “We never know what’s going to face us in the morning when we come in after a show,” says Wilson, who played a lot with puppets as a kid but pursued the world of wardrobe and props before finding his way back to them via The Lion King. “It could be something that will take five minutes to fix or it will take us the whole day to do. For me, the most difficult things are the mechanical ones—the masks can short out.”

With so many different devices to keep track of—the puppets and masks will fill an entire, meticulously packed truck when they roll their way to Vancouver—Wilson has become the ultimate multitasker. “It’s a little bit of everything: we have to have building skills, we have to have electronic skills, we have to have artistic skills—it has a lot of challenges. But it’s a job you never get bored with because you never know what to expect.”

In fact, bored just doesn’t seem to be a word in the lexicon of people inhabiting the wild kingdom of Disney’s The Lion King. “I was just talking to a production manager about my seventh anniversary coming up and I said I don’t even feel like I’m ready to go, or like I’m tired,” says Randolph, before hanging up to start his workout. “It’s one of those shows where there’s not one moment you’re not proud to be a part of it. It makes you want to do your best in it.”