DISTRICT SIX – KANALA
DIRECTOR: David Kramer
CAST: Loukmaan Adams, Bianca le Grange, Carlo Daniels, Edith Plaatjies, Sne Dladla, Andrea Frankson, Natasha Hess, Cleo Raatus
VENUE: The Fugard Theatre
UNTIL: April 2
RATING: 3 stars (out of 5)
Theresa Smith
THE Fugard Theatre’s latest production is an entertaining musical which mines nostalgia as a diversion to delight. The production is called a “tribute to the musical culture found in District Six at the time of its destruction” and it certainly does entertain in a light, frothy, happy way.
Penned by David Kramer, the musical is heavy on the song and dance, but light on intriguing narrative or lasting emotional resonance.
Drawing on a very talented cast, it bears some resemblance to another entertaining tribute which looks backwards, Remembering the Lux, in no small part due to musical director Alistair Izobel’s exuberant influence on the big sound. But here you learn very little that you didn’t know before; it only reinforces what we already knew – that talent abounded in the district.
Izobel’s touch is apparent in the way the cast move to the music around the small stage’s spiral staircase, which encloses six impressive musicians in a well of sorts. On opening night, the music sometimes drowned out the singing, but this is a technical problem easily handled by the Fugard’s excellent crew behind the scenes, so it shouldn’t be a long-term problem.
The musicians are sometimes hidden from the audience by a screen which moves around the circle created by the staircase, enclosing them in what turns out to be a giant screen. Old black-and-white pictures from District Six are projected onto this screen and the sides of the stage, tying into the storyline, reinforcing the idea that this is a place and community that now exists only on paper and in memories.
The ostensible storyline is that a girl is paging through her grandmother’s album of pictures and remembering stories she was told by said grand-mother about life in the district. These memories are brought to life by Le Grange as Evelyn, the grandmother, and everyone else playing friends and neighbours.
The performers draw on musical and dance styles which permeated life in District Six 50 years ago, painstakingly bringing the moves like the mashed potato back to life, singing songs your grandmother loved like the Andrews Sisters’ In the Mood.
Close harmony and low-tech solutions to no musical instruments are the order of the day and Dladla is a wonderful surprise when he breaks out into a Mario Lanza impression. Adams’s exquisite timing as the music teacher is a welcome comic diversion in the second half, but this isn’t anything we haven’t seen before in previous Kramer shows.
On the thematic level, District Six – Kanala concentrates on the painful coloured experience despite one of the characters pointing out the wonder of the community was how multiple cultures got along. The first half ends with the introduction of the klopse and the second half picks up with yet another welcome-to-Cape-Town riff in colourful costumes and waving umbrellas. The storyline peters out in the second half as the characters are thrown for a loop by the destruction of their homes and performers run out of steam.
Many of the songs are cribbed from previous productions like District Six – The Musical or Ghoema and repurposed to suit the narrative, but unlike when you watched those productions and walked away with a sense of anger, shame or painful memories, here there is no punch in the gut.