THE FIRST commercial minstrels show staged in the Cape was by the Christy’s Minstrels at the Theatre Royale in Harrington Street in August 1862. By 1887 the first carnival troupe was organised and on Saturday we will have our annual Cape Minstrel Carnival.
But, back in the late 1800s, there were two very distinct styles of performance associated with African-American entertainers.
Minstrelsy was being formalised into a three-act format in the mid-1800s – and was born out of a history of whites performing in blackface and black performers adopting the practice.
The spirituals, or jubilee singing, entered the repertoire circa 1870s, and this specifically black-influenced music is the wellspring for David Kramer’s latest musical, Orpheus in Africa. Rehearsals started just before Christmas at the Fugard’s Annexe, in Harrington Street.
Back when Kramer and his late friend and musical partner, Taliep Petersen, were researching what would become the musical Ghoema, they learnt about African-American entertainer and impresario, Orpheus McAdoo, who travelled to South Africa between 1890 and 1900.
McAdoo brought his Virginia Jubilee Singers to Cape Town, “and they had this huge success. They toured all over South Africa, had this big adventure, made a huge box office success for two years before they went to Australia”, said Kramer
Finding out why McAdoo moved from presenting the more religiously-oriented jubilee songs into a variety Vaudeville entertainment show, is what Kramer explores in Orpheus in Africa.
Drawing on academic research and books written about McAdoo – which he discovered via UWC academics Robert and Sandy Shell – Kramer tries to show in the musical what motivated McAdoo to change direction: “The interesting thing was that he didn’t just go the easy route of minstrelsy, he actually invented a new kind of show, which heralded in some ways the new jazz era which was starting in America,” said Kramer.
Ragtime is the key, though that only comes come at the end of the musical: “Ragtime was shocking to the audience of that era because it was about syncopated rhythms that that audience had not heard before. That’s the basis of jazz music and this was the direction he moved into, from a very formal style of singing.”
It was that story which Kramer wanted to explore – the story of an entertainer impresario who has to reinvent himself in order to survive “because jubilee singing goes out of fashion, badly out of fashion”.
Kramer wrote about 10 new characters and comedy songs for the musical, though they also draw on old traditional spirituals of that time.
The musical also references blackface, which is a contentious issue at best, but Kramer goes there because that was a reality faced by African-American performers in Victorian times: “The story is so big, his relationship with local black people is a whole ’nother story, how this music influenced Isicathamiya singing, and all of that.
“It’s historic and you need to contextualise it so that the audience will see these two things going on at the same time and how they affected one another.”
Back in America, black entertainers were negotiating their way through the template of minstrelsy, donning blackface and presenting what they thought was a more authentic version of performance, but at the same time caricaturing themselves. McAdoo realised that the popularity of jubilee singing was waning and he needed to stay commercially viable, but how to do that?
“I had to decide what story I had to tell, so I just followed him, this personal journey of him having to come to terms with himself and it’s a story of the entertainment world at time,” said Kramer.
“This was all about negotiating his way to a new form of entertaining, because his access to stages was extremely limited by the conditions in America. This was another reason people like Ernest Hogan and Orpheus McAdoo and many African-American companies toured the colonies, because it gave them access to stages and they were treated with more respect, they were accepted as professional performers. I’m not saying there wasn’t racism, but they had access which they didn’t have in America where the Jim Crow thing was coming back stronger, with a vengeance.
“McAdoo was a religious man singing spiritual songs and his competition was from black Americans singing minstrel songs, and this was the minefield he had to negotiate while trying to keep his dignity intact.
“What he achieved in 10 years was quite amazing and had he not died at 42 in Australia, he would probably have gone back to America and become one of those pioneering names because what they did was quite a few years before Scott Joplin. This early ragtime was introduced by people like Ernest Hogan and McAdoo. It was a bar-room music, brothel music, so you can imagine that it was very hard for Orpheus to move in that direction.”
• Orpheus in Africa, Fugard Theatre, Jan 28 to Feb 22, Tuesday to Friday at 8pm, Saturday at 4pm and 8pm.