A Circus Sideshow (Artscape Arena)

Photographer : Giovanni Sterrelli

Photographer : Giovanni Sterrelli


Without a doubt, Graham Weir is one of our most gifted and daring composers. What’s more, he is still blossoming. His latest creation, A Circus Side Show, bears his inimitable style, and shows him mastering increasingly complex musical forms. It’s also a treat to see Christine Weir back on stage in Cape Town and vocally stronger than ever.

Set in the dusty South African hinterland during the 1940s, Side Show trails Jack’s ramshackle, part circus, part freak show as they barnstorm the rural towns.

Owner and sword-swallower Jack, played by the towering Adrian Galley, does his best to keep it together against hostile locals, storms and internal wranglings. But the real unifier is the compassionate Franco (Graham Weir), a character physically modelled on the pinheads in MGM’s 1932 film Freaks.

Side Show is about beauty on the inside beyond appearance, poignantly captured by those physically unusual singing exquisitely. The Übermensch in this scheme is a contemptuous Russian acrobat, Marek (in Superman red and blue) a part for which Richard Lothian has had to learn some gymnastic skills, and with whom everyone is slightly in love. Most especially the dwarf Pinky, portrayed with gravitas by Rory Avenstrup (from Paljas), who drowns her unrequited love and some darker secrets in alcoholic binges.

Director Megan Choritz and designer Dicky Longhurst have captured a suitably eccentric atmosphere. Weir’s collaborator and musical director, Amanda Tiffin, has created evocative arrangements, at first carnival music that recalls the movie tunes of Nino Rota, steadily becoming wilder with gypsy violins as the passions rise.

Side Show isn’t as cleanly structured as Weir’s one-man musical Letter from Patient Essop. The book needs shoring up. Weir’s innovative musical compositions, his refreshing treatment of difficult themes, several priceless comic moments, and across the board engaging performances makes this, like all Weir’s work, something out of the ordinary.

October 26, 2007 | Tags: , , , | Comments Closed

Karoo Moose (Baxter Studio)

Photo: Pat Bromilow Downing

Photo: Pat Bromilow Downing


Director and playwright Lara Foot Newton’s latest creation, Karoo Moose, is conceptually her strongest work to date since her seminal play Tshepang. With it, she returns to the subject of child rape and a rural town – a shattered, forsaken community where “there are no fathers”.

Fifteen-year-old Thozama (Chuma Sopotela) is ‘sold’ for sex to pay off the gambling debts of her jobless and spiritually crushed father, Jonas (Mfundo Tshazibane) – “an opportunist with no opportunities”. Her rape is depicted with shocking lyrical power – Thozama standing in an enamel basin of water, a goal post net draped over her, is used for target practice by men kicking their soccer ball at her legs and cheering. Sopotela gives us one of the best theatre performances of the year, burning with controlled energy and illimitable rage.

Foot Newton however doesn’t lapse into sermonizing or righteous anger. Even Jonas redeems himself in part. There are no outright villains in the piece, except perhaps the main culprit, Khola (Thami Mbongo), but then we learn his father was a bad man too.

But the key redemptive quality in this work lies in its format. Each performer in the ensemble acts several roles. Mdu Kwenyama plays the infant Quinnie sucking her thumb, but also the rapist tsotsi David. In playing male and female, adult and infant roles, the actors through their performances deconstruct and debunk the patriarchal constructions of black masculinity.

The imaginative use of props, such as the two dried palm fronds that become the moose with its antlers, or a hide drum that transforms into a womb at the moment of birth, together with Bongile Mantsai’s evocative musical arrangements, display the creative beauty of which the human mind is equally capable.

The collective experience of theatre such as this, functions in a similar way as Thozama’s courageous act, when the escaped moose terrorising the imaginations of this small town is killed by her – a magical feat that releases her own power.

October 14, 2007 | Tags: , , , | Comments Closed

Impempe Yomlingo and iKrismas Kherol

It’s been an exceptional week to be in the theatre. Right now, there’s a deluge of quality shows in Cape Town. Don’t’ miss Lara Foot Newton’s Karoo Moose (until October 27) her strongest work since Tshepang and the best Baxter production of the year; Geoffrey Hyland’s solid production of Women Beware Women (until October 20) with a stellar cast, and Graham Weir and Megan Choritz’s A Circus Side Show (until October 28) in Weir’s inimitable musical style.

These three shows are artistically and production wise far superior to the two biggest shows in town (on at the Baxter) Impempe Yomlingo (Mozart’s Magic Flute) and iKrismas Kherol (Dickens’s A Christmas Carol). The latter is unforgivably boring and has one of the most turgid scripts I have ever sat through. Not only does it employ foreign clichés about this country – gumboot dancing and ending with a rousing rendition of the click song – but the story has no realistic context – Scrooge is a seamstress from Khayelitsha who has become sole proprietor of a gold mine. Unlike Karoo Moose playing upstairs, Kherol fails to move us in any way, and is therefore shamefully exploitative of the serious issues facing this country. This is clichéd, export, curio performance art, and it smacks of dishonesty when going as community work.

The same wonderful and enthusiastic cast perform the Magic Flute on the scaffolding of the Kherol’s set – literally. Directorially there is no concept to speak of and nothing to watch. It is a concert version. The re-orchestration using marimbas is delightful and novel for the first hour, but after interval you miss the rich arrangements of Mozart. Philisa Sibeko makes a good Pamina, but with one or two exceptions the rest of the leads and cast are not ready for the parts. I am also not convinced (but stand to be persuaded) that this leapfrogging into a production to go to the London is of benefit to these singers artistically. Most have been trained by the dedicated offices of Cape Town Opera, of which there is no mention or credit. An ugly dark cloud still surrounds the failure of director Dornford-May’s last company DDK.

October 13, 2007 | Comments Closed

Ennio (Theatre on the Bay)

ennio
You don’t come much closer to sheer joyous entertainment than a world-class production like Ennio. Also known as the “human cartoon”, comedian Ennio Marchetto morphs into 50 different lip synching parodies of entertainment figures in just 75 minutes, every second of which is painstakingly choreographed. He does this using ingenious paper costumes.

Co-director Sosthen Hennekam, who trained in Paris as fashion designer, is responsible for much of the show’s highly original innovative costume origami.

A rabbi singing Hava Nagila turns into Britney spears (Hit Me Baby One More Time) and ends as plucked naked chicken; Jesus Christ Superstar turns into Jim Morrison singing Light My Fire; a sarcophagus opens to reveal a mummy, and as the bandages unwrap out pops Cher freshly improved by cosmetic surgery.

Marchetto moves with an extraordinary alacrity, so light on his feet he really does seem to float across the stage like a paper sail, lifting into the air with a delicacy that wouldn’t crumple tissue, exactly as an image skids across the television screen on the cartoon network. The lightning speed with which he changes doesn’t allow a joke or any of the ‘one-line’ gags to go stale.

This is a uniquely conceived and exquisitely polished show.

October 8, 2007 | Tags: | Comments Closed