Jennifer Anderson’s Many Hats

Returning home for just a week after months away, Jennifer Anderson has too much to do. Running late, she apologetically answers the door in bare feet, no makeup and wet hair.

“Give me five minutes,” she tells a visitor to her Irvine abode.

No small irony for a woman who makes a living making dead sure that famous actors never, ever perform with a single loose shoelace, let alone a loose harness.

Indeed, Anderson takes Samuel E. Wright’s life in her hands each time she hooks him into a hoisting apparatus that will help Wright literally climb the walls as Mufasa, the almighty, be-clawed patriarch of “The Lion King,” now running on Broadway in New York.

“The connections have to be completely right, or I die,” Wright said.

As a principal dresser with the runaway Broadway hit, Anderson isn’t always playing god. But she pays meticulous attention to every task she has, such as laying out each piece of Wright’s costume in the order he’ll put them on--eight times a week, two matinees included.

“I’m quite anal,” Anderson said during a recent break from the show, which is running indefinitely at Manhattan’s New Amsterdam Theatre.

It’s also obvious talking with Anderson that she has a childlike passion for live theater and the collaborative effort required to suspend disbelief. It’s part of what makes her a mother, friend, nursemaid, mind reader and moral supporter as well as perfectionist pro.

Actors who move around a lot onstage want their costumes to fit like skin. Wright sword-fights ferocious wildebeests and runs up and down stairs hidden within an huge elephant graveyard full of gigantic bones.

Jason Raize, whom Anderson also dresses, animates Simba, the Tony-Award winning musical’s lead feline, through dance in addition to song.

Before curtain, these actors need to warm up and mentally prepare. They can’t be worrying about whether their elaborate rags are at the ready. The same goes for quick costume changes. During all these tense moments, zipping zippers all the while, Anderson supplies everything from throat spray to a shoulder to cry on.

She provides “a kind of psychological stroking,” Wright said by phone from New York. “Can you imagine, when you probably have problems of your own, trying to adjust to the ravings of a performer who happens to be in a bad mood?”

Anderson doesn’t complain. Describing her unusual job as her reddish curls dried, her eyes twinkled when she spoke about Wright and Raize, whom she maternally refers to “my actors.” “Whatever, whatever they need, I am there to provide it,” she said. “If they don’t have to think about anything related to their costume, if they have this or that, they can just go out and do their show.”

A Minnesota native, Anderson, 46, learned to sew from her mother, a seamstress and tailor. She dabbled in acting as a teenager, but specialized in costume design, earning a master’s degree at UC Irvine in 1988 after moving west with her then husband.

The mother of four has designed or constructed costumes at Laguna Playhouse and South Coast Repertory in Orange County, the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, and the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis. Other credits include “Les Miserables” and “Beauty and the Beast,” and Anderson did a stint as buyer-costume consultant at Disneyland before joining “The Lion King,” her first Broadway show, which opened in November.

Her workday begins 90 minutes before curtain. After collecting clean laundry (underclothes, towels, “my guys use lots of towels”), she ascends to the third-floor dressing room that Wright and Raize share to lay out their costumes, scanning for rips or missing pieces.

Wright wears an armor-like collar, billowy pants, a brilliant orange cape, a long black wig and a dazzling lion-face headdress trimmed in ostrich feathers. Raize, bare-chested, dons only the billowy pants, a half-bodice bedecked with shells and beads, and a smaller headdress.

One costume per actor is nothing, Anderson said, especially compared with “Les Miz,” for which she dressed four women who each had about five outfits, all of them multilayered.

“Pantaloons, petticoats, corsets,” she recalled. “A skirt, a blouse, an apron, a hat, innumerable pieces of jewelry, a bag.”

The quick changes for “Lion King” are anything but easy. Backstage can be a death trap in itself. As many as 100 cast and crew members (including 17 other dressers) may be rushing about--in the dark. Massive scenery backdrops, which can injure anybody they fall on, are constantly being “flown” in and out from on high.

In the time it takes to sing one song, Anderson has to strip most of Wright’s costume, hook and latch him into a flying harness sprouting cables, then slap his costume back on.

“I’m fastidious about that change, because it’s a life-and-death situation,” she said. “If the connections aren’t right, if the hardware’s not checked, if it’s not secure. . . .”

No actor of Anderson’s has ever met disaster in any form, but it’s been close. Recently, she realized with only moments to spare that Raize’s headdress wasn’t waiting in the wings as it should have. She flew down a flight of stairs to cross from stage left to stage right only to discover the elevator in use.

“So I ran up three flights of stairs, ran to the dressing room, ran all the way back down, and handed it off to him just as he was going out onstage. Believe me, I don’t like running, especially on cement, but the bottom line is it would be there. I didn’t care what I had to do.”

Quieter times find Anderson dispensing lozenges, tissues, bandages or safety pins from the deep pockets of the black jacket she wears like a uniform. She relies on intuition to determine whether respectful silence or casual chat might be just what helps.

“I really work on being sensitive to my actors’ needs,” she said in her soothing voice.

It’s a challenge, but nothing’s been as tough as being away from her children, Dhyana, 23, Al, 18, Caspian, 16 and Travis, 10. In the past year or so, however, she’s flown west or they’ve have flown to see her every other month. Travis spent the summer with her in New York.

Anderson said she expects more of the same, and hopes to work on the “Lion King” in Los Angeles, where the production may come for a theatrical run. In the meantime, she said, having a job she loves doesn’t fix the separation problems, but it helps.

“There are moments where I’m sitting waiting, and I think, ‘Where else could I be where every day I hear a live orchestra playing beautiful music, see beautiful dancing, and work with people who, for the most part, love their profession?”

And, unlike the title character in the 1983 film “The Dresser” starring Albert Finney, Anderson isn’t living vicariously through her actors. She loves the holistic process that unites dressers, scenery painters, lighting designers, milliners and myriad stagehands with singers, dancers, bit players and stars.

One of her favorite moments comes when all the hard work gels during a production’s first full run-through--complete with sets, props, lighting and costumes.

“It’s like magic every time. Every time.”