While he will conduct the musicians during performances, he’s also responsible for rehearsals and more. And while there was a trip to Crocker Park in Westlake and some vague enjoyment of hearing the aircraft in Cleveland National Air Show over Labor Day weekend, it’s pretty much been all business for the pair. Vanessa arrived in Cleveland a few days before James. Mukelisiwe Goba, the understudy for the role of Rafiki, rehearses for the restart of the national tour of Disney’s “The Lion King” that’s about to happen at Cleveland’s Playhouse Square. “It felt like we’d kind of set up a proper life - because touring is very transient and you work with a lot of different people and they come and go,” he says. Thus, the return to work came with its downside. As you may imagine, Christmas with faraway relatives isn’t the norm for them.

The British couple even took trips back to the United Kingdom, which, James admits, was risky but worth it because they never have had that kind of time off. “And the dog was a pretty full-time job, wasn’t it?” James says. Meanwhile, Vanessa - who’d long wanted a pet but recognized that a life on the road made that highly impractical - devoted energy to fostering four cats and a dog at various times. When they were back home in Jersey City, New Jersey, outside the Big Apple, James put time into his “side hustle” as a composer and took a couple of courses through New York University.

James recalls a meeting in which it was announced the production would be paused and that “everyone should pack up and go home for a couple of weeks,” he says with a laugh.Īnd Vanessa recalls telling people “See you in two and a half weeks!” and “See you in the next city!”īefore too long, she stopped proofing the playbills for locations where the show theoretically may have been able to resume and a crew was sent back to South Bend to pack up the set and other materials and put them in storage. The couple was with the show in South Bend, Indiana, at the time.

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