Didi Kriel is the driving force behind the music of Antjie Somers, the musical currently playing to excited throngs at the Nico Theatre
Guy Willoughby
Didi Kriel is a self-confessed theatre workaholic: “God knows how many shows I’ve created, arranged, accompanied since 1983! When did I last have an evening off?”
He kindly squeezed in a few words with me during rehearsals with funny-man Casper de Vries for an upcoming skou called Laat Daar Lag Wees. “After this, Casper’s gonna make me work an extra hour, I know it …”
Didi’s star has been in the ascendant since the ecstatic Oudtshoorn reception of Antjie Somers, his spirited first attempt – along with fellow composer Wikus du Toit – at a full-blown musical.
“I told [writer] Hannes Muller that I didn’t do indigenous instrumentation, and I’m tired of working with three or four- piece bands. I wanted a full 32-piece orchestra, operatic feel, classical values, otherwise I wasn’t interested.”
He chuckles wryly: “In the real world, budget did not allow for that, so I pre- recorded with full orchestration in my home studio. Given sound problems – we don’t do enough musical theatre in South Africa to really hone our hard-working technical staff – I am pleased with the results.
“Audiences seem prepared to go on a journey with us, even though the music is quite complex, sophisticated. These are not lekker luisterliedtjies!”
In Antjie Somers, Hannes Muller and fellow-writer Alyzzander Fourie take one of Afrikanerdom’s venerable mythic figures – the child-eating bogeywoman who’s reputedly a man – and imagine a historic basis for the character that places her/him firmly within 19th-century race politics.
Andries/Antjie Somers is an ex-slave gang leader of the 1830s, a Boland Robin Hood, and at the end of a torrid love tangle and much derring-do, we realise the production performs a telling ideological task: it claims for once- despised slaams (slave), or Cape coloured history, a mainstream role within a “new”, post-apartheid Afrikanerdom.
Kriel comments: “At Oudtshoorn this year, coloureds came to the party for the first time. We celebrated diversity. Tolerance, compassion – that’s what it’s about.”
How did Antjie Somers gestate? According to Kriel, it was a four-part collaboration on the job: “Wikus and I would get a broad scenario from Hannes, and we’d pick out where to end speech and where to start a song, where recitative – sung dialogue – would work. It took us four months, from October last year, until rehearsals began in January for a six-week period.
“After that, we were still workshopping the script and music while rehearsing. Antjie is an awkward but successful marriage between words and music – my original impulse was to have wall-to-wall music, to pull it closer to opera, my first love – and if we revisit the show, I’d like to rework the love ballads. The confrontational songs, the dramatic moments, are more successful.”
Kriel concedes that a major problem revolved around the casting: while there are many engrossing performances, the vocal work is uneven.
Some actors have operatic range and resonance, while others are barely holding the tune.
“It’s very difficult casting 22 true musical performers in this country – people who can act, sing, dance – as we don’t generate enough work for them.
“David Dennis, say, can’t afford to give up TV work to join us; the best musical actors accept year-long TV contracts, as otherwise in South Africa they’d spend three to four months not working on stage.
“So it’s difficult to achieve a standard in performance, given the blend of solo, three- or four-voice ensemble and full- blown choir singing on stage.”
Initially daunted by the task – “I asked to pull out because we need more time, but Hannes wouldn’t hear of it” – Kriel learnt something fundamental about the performing arts in South Africa. “If you want to do a full-blown stage musical, don’t fret, just do it!
“If some young composer comes and is inspired to say, ‘I can do that’, I’ll be satisfied. That’s the only way to grow the local repertoire, to prove to managements that audiences are eager for good local stories on stage.
“We don’t always need yet another revival of Oklahoma!”
Antjie Somers is on at the Nico Artscape Theatre Centre in Cape Town until April 29. Bookings through Computicket or Tel: (021) 421-6795