Actor Eccentricities, Part Due

In a past city, one of the current ensemble actors, Thabile - pronounced, Tabilay - was an understudy for the part of Rafiki. When an ensemble member is an understudy, they have an entire set of their own costumes for that part so they can step into the part when needed.

For those of you unfamiliar with Rafiki, she's the wise baboon most famous for the "Hakuna Matata" song in the animated movie. In the musical, she looks like this :

(and in one of our shows a little two year old in the audience started shrieking and crying in terror when Rafiki came out on stage. Fortunately she was distracted and consoled by the appearance of the elephants...)

So, back to Thabile.

Thabile is from South Africa (which will be relevant in about 3 seconds) and when she was removed as an understudy, her Rafiki costume went to the new understudy.

How did she handle this? Not well. My suspicion is that her main problem was being removed as an understudy (for reasons unknown) but she couldn't do anything about that; so, instead she decided to torture Gillian, the Wardrobe Head.

In complete seriousness, she told Gillian that she had put a voodoo curse on her Rafiki dress and anyone else who wore it would die on stage in some horrible manner. She said she had put a voodoo doll on the dress and hexed it.

She looked right in Gillian's face and said "I have the power."

And Gillian believed her, because Thabile is from South Africa and who knows... So they took the dress out of commission and spent several days looking through all the charms to make sure there was no voodoo doll.

Finally, in the words of Gillian, they realized that really, "Thabile was just a lunatic."

So they gave the dress to the next understudy, and still she lives.

Because it's not enough to have to deal with actors eating and smoking in their costumes, now we have to deal with hexes and a would be voodoo princess.