Every member of a show’s ensemble has a “track” or the sum total of choreography, singing, staging and sometimes minor parts to follow during the course of a production. For eight Wicked actors those tracks include monkey time—flying, climbing and/or darting about the stage.

Kehau Ahu is one of two female dancers chosen to do the actual flying in Wicked.  ZFX Flying Illusions coordinates the cabling system and the dance team provides the choreography to achieve the look of monkey flight. Kehau is assigned two crew members to operate the cables, one to control up and down and the other the lateral movement.

“We haven’t knocked into each other but we do get really close sometimes," admits Kehau, “especially when there are new people on the crew. You just have to trust that everyone knows what they are doing and go for it.”

The flying monkeys wear two harnesses under full monkey body suits — one is attached to the flying cables and the other to hold the wings. They must learn to operate their wings with a hidden cable. How do they get the hang of flying? “You start really slow, to feel out how your body is going before you get up to full speed,” says Wicked Associate Choreographer Corinne McFadden Herrera. “Then you add the wings and the choreography. A lot of elements have to come together to be a believable monkey while you’re in the air.”

And then there’s changing in and out of the monkey suit. “I fly twice,” explains Kehau. “The second time I fly, I drop down, I’m unclipped then I have to take off all the monkey stuff, including the harnesses, and put on the hat, gloves, coat and all for the Mob scene. “I just have one dresser, Wendy Linn, to help me. You can’t think about it, you just have to make it work and that’s the beauty of the theater.”

Kehau Ahu follows a very specific track. She’s the girl with the wig that sticks straight up in the ponytail, she’s the girl that flies stage left and she’s the girl that partners with actor Everth Lopez for all the ensemble dance scenes. Together, they let loose as Shiz students and cavort as Flatheads, then Kehau joins the primate troop and Everth emerges as the Wizard’s monkey servant Chistery. (To see Kehau and Everth backstage, click here.)

“His first appearance as Chistery is a quick change,” explains Everth’s dresser, Mario Urena. “Everth goes from the big Flathead costume with two dressers to zip him out of that, he takes his shoes off and races over to me as he puts his monkey shoes on. I help him with his coat and someone is helping him with his mask. I clip and zip him, then he goes on and hops right top of the Oz head.”

At over 12 feet high and narrow, the Oz head is still daunting for Everth even after months of playing Chistery. “It’s very dark up there and the mask is a little limiting for your vision so jumping back and forth to the side bars that I hold on to, even now, is still scary.”

It takes someone who is not only fearless, but also disciplined and creative with their movement to be on the monkey track. “It’s a little bit of hunching down, throwing of the arms, you visualize that you live on all fours, not upright," explains Kehau. "It just comes as you learn the show, the choreography is that and you become it.”

In the original Broadway production of Wicked, Corinne’s husband, Manuel Herrera, played Chistery. During his initial research, Manuel discovered the ideal primate primer. “What we found very helpful was the Tim Burton version of Planet of the Apes,” explains Corinne. ‘On the DVD, there is a fantastic special feature that shows the actors in the film going through a kind of monkey camp to teach them how to act, to move, how to behave like apes. I found that so fascinating and instructive to watch so that all the Chistery’s we hire who are having trouble, I tell them to rent Planet of the Apes and watch that special feature, it is absolutely amazing.”

Everth did watch the DVD and the Discovery Channel, yet says that in the beginning he had hard time acting like a monkey. “It was a challenge to make it real and not cartoony. I never saw Manny do Chistery but I’ve talked to original cast members about his process. I had a couple of private workshops with the dance captains just to go over acting and moving exercises to help me embody a monkey. It was a lot harder for me than I thought it would be.”

He also had to learn how to relate to the other actors emotionally as a monkey. “I really had to focus and listen, to get in tune with the Wizard, Elphaba, Glinda and Madame Morrible. I do try to make my relationship with them something else, something deeper so the audience can understand the important part that Chistery and the monkeys play in the story. If my character stays focused on the other actors, on those relationships, then somehow it really works. It does become more touching.”

It does take a bit of a daredevil to play Chistery since he climbs around so much, all without a harness. It helps if the actor has prior experience doing aerial work as Everth did. He was born in Nicaragua, moved to Miami at age 6 and tumbled into gymnastics. By 15, he was a Florida state champion and invited to relocate to the Olympic training center in Colorado Springs, where everything was about gymnastics. “I realized that wasn’t all I wanted to do,” Everth admits, “so I decided to return to Miami and focus only on the performing arts, first just acting. When I was 18, I studied dance and got into the whole musical theater world.”

He moved to New York when he was 21 to join the dance company of his childhood friend, choreographer Mia Michaels. He was cast in Notre Dame de Paris and ended up in Las Vegas where he joined Cirque de Soleil’s Delirium then went out on tour with it for three years. He joined the Los Angeles production of Wicked last October and made the move to San Francisco.

Kehau, too, migrated from LA to San Francisco with the show. A native Hawaiian, Kehau discovered her passion for dance at age 8 and by high school had set her sights on New York. Once she graduated, she made the move from Oahu to Manhattan, alone. “I grew up very quickly, from a naïve, very safe, very protected Island mentality where the world is small to New York City where I was like an ant in this major metropolis.”

She continued to study dance and started auditioning all the while battling major culture shock. Eventually, she was cast in the Wicked national tour, her first professional job in musical theater. Kehau left the tour after eight months to join the Los Angeles production.

Along their parallel show tracks, Everth and Kehau inhabit multiple Wicked personalities, zip in and out of intricate costumes, and dance, dance, dance.

Physically, it’s very demanding. The dancers know how to take care of their bodies, keep them in shape and free from injury. With eight shows a week, the production is conscious of the wear and tear and makes a physical therapist available to the actors at all times. Wicked also offers the performers a free Yoga or Pilates class pre-show one day a week.

“You have to be amazing physically, and a lot of the dancers we have hired have modern and contemporary dance backgrounds, gymnastics, even aerial work,” explains Corinne. “But you also have to be a good actor, such a good actor that you can translate through a mask and that is very difficult to pull off. We do have exceptional people.”

The others who regularly stay on the monkey track in the San Francisco production of Wicked are Angela Ara Brown, Holly Hyman, Terrance Spencer, Eric Stretch, Alexander Selma and Neka Zang.


To see more on the Monkey Masks, click here. For more Monkey Wings images and info, click here. To read more about designing and caring for the masks and wings, click here. And, for more about Wicked, click here.

Show Photos: Joan Marcus.  Backstage photos: Cece Hugo

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