Guy Willoughby
Review of the week
Reviewers like to begin notices of Not the Midnight Mass by reminiscing about the first time they caught their act (except in Cape Town – Cape Town reviewers, like Cape Town police, rarely catch anything). I’ll quickly observe, then, that I first saw the famous a cappella foursome from my pram at the old Black Sun in Berea, Jo’burg, in 1988, and was deeply struck by the hip blackness of their material and the hipper blackness of their outfifts. Or was it the lighting at the old Black Sun?
Times change; the Mass swopped venues and cast members, with the brother-sister team of Graham and Christine Weir always at its creative core. Their winning formula, then as now, was the combination of sheer vocal skill and effrontery with lashings of topical wit and original songs.
In the 1990s they hummed, trilled and hollered up and down the country as well as the United Kingdom, winning encomiums and cult status, with just a whiff of that old Black Sun avant-garde thang hovering about them. (They always wore black, of course.) Now, out in force at the Baxter, part of the festive season mainstream, how are they poised to take on the millennium?
In a word: brilliantly. Scrubbed, slick and sorted, the Mass are under new management, shimmering with energy, direction and cheery outfits.
Wedded to Graham Weir’s mercurial songwriting talent and Christine Weir’s dazzlingly cool contralto are two fine musical troupers – lyrical songbird Tina Schouw and sturdy bassman Adrian Galley – who bring individual flavours to as heady a comic-musical brew as you’ll taste this season.
The Baxter Concert Hall, acoustically impressive, is a tricky venue to play: it has a cavernous interior, odd sight-lines and more exits and entrances than a Slabolepszy farce. The Mass surmount these obstacles gloriously, gaining extra fire from the sheer scale of difficulty, and on opening night the audience fell wildly in love with them all over again.
The essence of the Mass, as always, is the rich interplay of voices. The variety and texture of aural effects that the Weirs, Galley and Schouw pull off is a many-sided delight.
A marvel, too, that most of the material heard is original. Millennium Mass showcases Graham Weir’s protean talent as a songwriter in a range of moods sublime, silly and satirical. His set features previous Mass favourites and catchy new surprises: Sweet Valley, The Umbogintwini Twins and Eh Bahran are the kind of tuneful foot-stompers that will win over the most cover-struck of audiences.
Schouw’s effervescent presence and soprano aerate the show charmingly, and her songwriting contributions – Keeper of the Flame and Picasso – are musical highlights. Then there are a bevy of classical compositions, transformed into wordless, polyphonic feasts: Bach, Mozart and Handel are resuscitated, resculpted and despatched.
There are those who mutter that the Mass should have played in a cosier, more intimate venue, but their manager, Brent Meersman, says: ”We are setting a certain scale for the future, showing what we can do and the size of audience we can muster.”
Fighting talk and, on the undoubted strength of Millennium Mass, not misplaced: this inspired smorgasbord of musical delights will cheer and thrill the most eclectic of audiences. And often the jokes are pretty good, too.
The Millennium Mass is showing at the Baxter Concert Hall, Cape Town, until January 8.