I’ve watched your site develop and grow, constantly impressed by the way in which you handle the process and the information. You guys have really won my respect, and my gratitude. In November 1999, we opened our inbox to find an email from Jason:
#Heather headley this is who i am rar tv
(By this time, Jason’s official website had launched.) Meanwhile, The Lion King had sparked our interest in other Broadway shows, and we began reading theater websites, recording TV appearances, and seeing shows when we could. Over the next year or so, we received emails from staff at the New Amsterdam Theatre, fans of Jason, and others who had started websites about Jason and The Lion King. Photos above taken by Richard Lee at the New Amsterdam Theatre stage door on June 27, 1998 Jason took the time to sign autographs for everyone who had waited, and he took a picture with us in addition to signing our programs. He asked if we had gotten his message (which we had not, but we were too excited to ask for clarification), and, after we gave him the address of our website, he told us excitedly that he had a computer at home. We explained that we were the girls who ran the website, and he greeted us as though we were old friends.
Even from the last row of the New Amsterdam Theatre, in $25 seats with the words “seat behind pipe” printed on each ticket (the pipe turned out not to be that obtrusive), we sat in awe of Julie Taymor’s designs, the incredible sets by Richard Hudson, and the gifted original cast, including (of course) Jason.Īfter the show, we headed to the stage door to meet Jason. To this day, my first trip to The Lion King remains one of my most treasured experiences in a theater. Growing increasingly more excited about our upcoming trip to The Lion King in June 1998, we read or watched nearly everything available about the show. We also started recording various television appearances featuring Jason and the other cast members. “The Raizens’ Jason Raize Page” premiered in early 1998 on Geocities as a fairly typical fan page, and we updated it as we came across information. She encouraged us to move forward and offered to try to put us in touch with Jason to make sure that we had the right data for the site. Not long after we sent our letter, Jason’s aunt called me and said that Jason was “flattered” by our idea. “Baleheads” for Christian Bale fans) were popular at the time, and ours amused us so much that we had to use it. We also introduced our nickname for ourselves: “The Raizens.” This sounded silly even at age 14, but similar nicknames (i.e. We explained our desire to start the first website about Jason and asked for her support. Through my mother and her co-worker, we sent a letter to Jason’s aunt Sue. Then we had an idea: why not start our own site? My cousin Kathleen and I became smitten with Jason when a friend gave us a video of his performance of “Endless Night” on The Rosie O’Donnell Show. We scoured the Internet to see what we could find about Jason, but we uncovered not very much in these early days of the World Wide Web. My mother took me to a lot of local theater as a kid, and I knew many classic musicals, but I was unfamiliar with the contemporary theater scene and probably would not have been interested in The Lion King had the cast not included Max Casella from my favorite movie, Newsies. When I “discovered” Jason in 1997, I was 14 years old and incredibly shy. Jason, a person I never knew very well, made a tremendous impact on my life, and that’s the story that I want to tell. This is not a straightforward site history.
Jason Raize appeared on the screen and talked about the stage show’s emotional moments, such as his solo “Endless Night.” My mother, watching with me, excitedly informed me that Jason was the nephew of her co-worker’s sister-in-law, and that the whole family was thrilled for his big break in The Lion King. When The Lion King was Broadway-bound in fall 1997, I caught a television special called From Pride Rock to Times Square: The Lion King Comes to Broadway.
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