A group of 32 South African actors have shaken up the staid Brits with the vigour of their show
Paul Tilsley
One minute to seven and the entire cast of the musical Umoja stand squeezed between costume rails and props in the cramped backstage area of London’s Shaftesbury Theatre.
It is the first night of this entirely African endeavour. The buzz of the packed three-tier audience flows through the wings over the 33 musicians and singers. Without a word at first, somehow they gather into a circle. Hands are clasped and a passionate prayer is whispered.
The tension is visible. Every conceivable hurdle has been overcome to get the cast this far. In the terminal atmosphere of South African theatre, Umoja almost became a casualty on many occasions.
Many of those now standing on stage right of the fabled West End boards went for months without pay while the musical at first crawled hesitatingly and fitfully from Johannesburg’s Market to Victory theatres, then gathered steam at the Sandton Convention Centre, before hurtling joyously through the Civic Theatre Complex en route to London.
Umoja’s arrival in the West End has confounded critics. All around it London shows are closing five in the past month alone.
The events of September 11 are blamed and certainly many flights from the United States to London are half empty. But one reader wrote in the London Evening Standard recently that the reason four shows closed last month was because they were “no good”.
It’s a high-stakes gamble. The Lion King and Mamma Mia are still posting “House Full” boards outside in Covent Garden and Soho. But at a major ticket agency in Leicester Square, the historically dominant Lion King now has to share equal advertising space with Umoja.
A frighteningly efficient and charming Shaftesbury Theatre box office staffer struggles with a caller: ” Yes, it’s a musical but not formulaic, not like any other in theatreland today.”
That earthy difference could be Umoja’s recipe for success. “It’s naive and honest,” sums up a BBC senior executive at a preview.
Like most shows since Hair in the 1960s, the comedy that preceded Umoja at the Shaftesbury failed. But the small cast of British jobbing actors are today maybe in another show. Their lives go on.
For the 32 South Africans stageside this is not just another opening night. More than half the cast have never even flown before. For every single one of them it’s the first time performing in the West End. For show creators Todd Twala and Thembi Nyandeni it’s their first work, for director Ian von Memerty his first show in the United Kingdom.
Such are the harsh economics that if these currently uplifted performers screw up on opening night they’ll be given just one day to pack and be on the next plane home, their dreams shattered.
Like all actors, many have dreamt of the night for years. Khumbuzile Mazibuko was only given minutes to consider it. Just a month ago this newsreader at Johannesburg’s Kaya FM was engaged in some Friday afternoon office singing. DJ Lawrence Dube overheard her and, Mazibuko picks up, “phoned Sis Todd Twala and said, ‘You’ve got to hear this girl sing.’ The show had just lost a lead singer. I went over immediately and … Sis Todd said, ‘This is the voice we need for London.'”
A quarter to nine on the opening night and Twala is proved right. Several in the audience weep openly at the power and beauty as Mazibuko belts out the spiritual Paradise is Almost Closing Down, few aware this is the first time she has ever been onstage.
It is a defining moment, true, but the corner to high ground has been turned earlier, in the opening moments, as performers one minute intricately entwine in the Venda snake dance, the next they made the first rows of the stalls shake with the power of Zulu rituals.
The British are so reserved that the joke goes: “Hey, that girl you’re making love with, is she dead? No, just English.” Well, when the curtain comes down the audience holler for more in a standing ovation for three minutes.
Britain’s Daily Mail leads the critics’ to acclaim, praising “the gorgeous effervescence of these performers, their shimmies and shakes, their athletic self-expression, their pride in their persistent heritage”.
While mere mortals pour out of the theatre claiming Umoja is the smash hit of the year, which “makes Lion King look what it is, a Disney plastic bore”, musician Eddy Grant described it as “excellent, refreshing, really what theatreland needs right now, what the world needs right now”.
Former Rolling Stone Bill Wyman said: “When they sang with no instrumentation they were perfectly in pitch and all the harmonies were fantastic. The dancing had so much energy that they blew me away.”
Credit to music and porn publisher Joe Theron, who had never produced theatre before, who lost more than R200 000 on the show in South Africa and who virtually single-handedly paid more than R3-million to take it to London. Theron was first given an audio recording of the show by music publisher Terry Dempsey, with a view to a record deal.
Something clicked and Theron demanded to see the show. Problem it wasn’t running. So hastily a special performance was mounted in Hillbrow’s cramped Windybrow Theatre, just for Theron. At the wild London first night after-party he says: “It was gut feel. I fell in love with the show and I was right and I felt it from day one.”
Not a modest man, Theron has had to take knocks from jealous theatre colleagues. But, says one: “Who cares if he’s pouring porn earnings into theatre, theatre backers are called angels. Theron’s the biggest angel South Africa’s got.”
Ironically, for years Theron published Top 40 magazine, chronicling others’ hits. Now he’s got his own.
The details
Umoja is running at the Shaftesbury Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue, London W1 until February next year. For more details visit www.umojatheshow.com.