Big Cat Tales

12 November 2014 | 11:37 am | Simon Eales

"The headspace required for writing music like this always depends on the project."

Composing all the decent songs (sorry Elton, that’s only partially true) in one of the world’s most enduring musicals, Lebo Morake aka Lebo M produced the opening and closing ceremonies for the soccer World Cup in South Africa a few years ago and, between many other gigs, travels the world tuning the casts of the production that, funnily enough, made him a king. A remarkable feat in anyone’s book but one a child growing up in apartheid South Africa couldn’t have imagined. “Growing up in Soweto in the ‘70s,” Morake explains, “I became a Youth Club kid, then became one of the youngest night club singers in South Africa. I started working professionally at age 14, then went into exile, after that ended up at Duke Ellington Center for the Arts in Washington DC… then moved to Los Angeles in 1985 with everyone else, scraping by, playing gigs, then my career started to build up in the movie space.”

After working with Hans Zimmer on the soundtrack of the movie The Power Of One, he joined Zimmer, Elton John and Tim Rice to work on The Lion King. “I’ve done a lot of collaborations, but in the case of The Lion King I came in initially as an arranger and lead vocalist. Then subsequently I became more involved and wrote much more for the project when it went to Broadway.”

Morake says there’s no formula to the way he writes, blending the vastly different structures of African and Western music: “The headspace required for writing music like this always depends on the project, but here it was a combination of observing what else was being created for the show and what was going on in my personal life at that point, specifically the changes that were happening in South Africa that happened to be so relevant.”

While commonly regarded as a retelling of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Morake speaks about The Lion King, particularly Simba’s journey, as also being an allegory for the rise of Nelson Mandela in South Africa. It’s an interesting perspective considering the role music played in his upbringing. “It really came as an alternative to all the other things one could have been exposed to, including political activism. But it also comes from my parents. My father was a singer from a young age.”

Don't miss a beat with our FREE daily newsletter

Early next year, The Lion King returns to Melbourne for the first time in a decade. 

“There’s a whole new different Lion King cast here than I experienced years ago, in that it has a lot more of a global, multicultural edge. Having such a diverse group of people, literally more diverse than any other production of The Lion King, brings a whole new emotional experience, it’s so fresh. It feels as fresh as new.”

The Lion King dates:

Brisbane: 21 Sep - 25 Jan, Lyric Theatre
Melbourne: 13 Feb - 31 May ,Regent Theatre