Interview: Jessica Vosk Talks TIGER KING Music Video & Shares Who She'd Want to Star With in a TIGER KING Musical

Jessica Vosk is a multi-talented performer who shot to Broadway stardom most notably as everyone's favorite green witch, Elphaba in Wicked. While we all remain responsibly indoors during this time, Vosk has found a way to bring her humor and voice to a "character" we've all collectively become fascinated with; one Carole Baskin. As we patiently wait for the inevitable Tiger King musical to further feed our obsession with the Netflix documentary, Jessica Vosk donned the requisite flower crown, and along with Pentatonix's Scott Hoying, brought us all the Tiger King parody music video we needed.

I spoke with Vosk about how the video came about, who she would want to star with in a Tiger King musical adaptation and more!

How did the idea for this song and video come about?

Scott [Hoying] and I have known each other for couple of years now. We met when I was doing the fifteenth anniversary show for Wicked and we had an NBC special, and we performed together on the special. Pentatonix subsequently came to see the show, and we all kind of became obsessed with each other, and he and I have stayed in touch since then. He's such a great guy and we have both been sitting in quarantine, he's in Los Angeles, and I'm here in New York, and we thought, 'Is there a way for us to use our stupidity for good?'

We had both watched Tiger King, and there have been two shows I've been obsessively Instagram story-ing my reactions to: Love is Blind and Tiger King. He was like, 'What if we did a parody of Tiger King?' And I immediately went on Amazon to buy myself a Carole Baskin lookalike wig along with a flower crown. I said, 'Scott, you better buy a mullet.' We both got our Amazon goodies about a week later, and he said, 'Let me sit here with a couple of friends of mine who are songwriters and send you a couple of drafts of things we're thinking of.' We went back and forth with filming and he sliced it together like the genius he is and that was it! It was born out of us sitting here going, 'What can we do to make ourselves laugh, and hopefully make other people laugh in a time when things are up in the air? And it's hard to maintain any sense of normalcy, so why not just be idiots together?' It seemed to have worked!

What was it like filming your part of the video?

Luckily, I call him my 'husband-in-quarantine', my friend Michael, he lives in the same building as I do and he became my cameraman. I had a bunch of ideas that I wanted to use and I asked him if they were any good or funny. We filmed in his apartment and in my apartment... And then Michael said, 'You know, I think you've got to do a shot on a bicycle. That's what Carole Baskin is known for, she rides around the tiger den and waves at all of her tigers, and you need to do a bicycle moment.' It turns out that we do have a bicycle room in our building. So, we went downstairs with our masks and gloves on. And I'm not going to lie to you, I absolutely stole somebody's bicycle from the bicycle room. I just rode that bad boy around for a couple of minutes, and replaced it back to its spot that I took it from, unscathed, and it made it into the video. I'm quite proud of that.

How fast did you binge watch Tiger King when it was released on Netflix?

Oh girl, two days, maybe three tops. I mean it's a train wreck. You just can't look away. And right now in quarantine, what are you going to do? I'm getting fantastic shows to binge and that happened to be one of them, and of course it became viral because who could believe a story that crazy? Yet, here we are.

If you were starring in a Tiger King musical who would you want to star in it with you?

I've always been obsessed with Norm Lewis, and I have a crush on Norm Lewis - he knows - so I would like for Norm Lewis to be in it. Obviously, Kristin Chenoweth, she and I share the same humor and I absolutely adore her. I would need Noah Galvin to be in it because he's such a fierce friend and brings comedy genius to the table at all times. And while we're at it, Alex Brightman.

What kind of music would be in the Tiger King musical?

It's got to be country! It's got to have a little country flair. I could see Dolly Parton as a co-writer, along with... I have a love of Jason Robert Brown, and he can write anything and he's written some country-style tunes that I've sung before. He can also write really good comedy.

What do you think it is about Tiger King that so many people feel it lends itself to a musical interpretation?

Because it's insane! It's like, how could this possibly be a real thing? How could it just get worse? If you think about it in musical terms, what do we think about musicals? They're high stakes, there's drama, you have to figure out characters that you can attach to or feel badly for or hate, and you've got every single one of them in an adaptation of the Tiger King documentary to make into a musical. It's just that trashy for us to latch onto it, and it's so easy to use it comedically for us who [feel that] musical theater is our home and our safe space. I just think everybody would go severely method with it, which is exactly what it needs, somebody who really, really believes they're Carole Baskin. I would pay, certainly if Broadway is going to be virtual for the rest of the year, I would pay a premium virtual ticket!

Watch Jessica Vosk and Scott Hoying's Tiger King music video parody below!