Searching for Sugar Man ... the book

First it was the 2012 Academy Award-winning documentary film and now it is a book!

On Monday night we went to the book launch of Sugar Man. The Life, Death and Resurrection of Sixto Rodriguez by Craig Bartholomew Strydom and Stephen "Sugar" Segerman, the two fans whose search for Sugar Man after apartheid led to Rodriguez's performing live on stage in South Africa for the very first time in 1998.

The book launch was held at one of Vince's and my favorite tapas restaurants in Cape Town, La Parada (Order the croquetas de jamon!) There, the authors were interviewed by Marianne Thamm, herself an author as well as a columnist, satirist, and the assistant editor of Daily Maverick. After a conversational interview with Marianne, Craig and Sugar entertained questions from the audience and then signed copies of their book.

The authors (seated) with Thamm in the middle at La Parada

We absolutely loved the movie and we are big fans ourselves of Rodriguez's music as a result of watching it. But while director Malik Benjelloul's Searching for Sugar Man chronicled the book authors' odyssey to find out what had happened to their musical hero from the 1970s and 80s, their book presents a much bigger picture of the Rodriguez saga.

The book is broken up into four parts - The Mystery, The Man, The Music and The Movie and it outlines three separate journeys and the obstacles and triumphs that each presented: Rodriguez's struggle to make a life from his music, the search by two fans to find him, and Benjelloul's pursuit to bring the story to life on the screen.

And apparently there is talk of bringing the movie-turned-book to the stage in the form of a Broadway musical! Produced by Hal Prince no less! What?

Rodriguez is scheduled to perform live on stage again in South Africa next year but unfortunately we won't be here to see him. So the book is going to have to suffice. Until the Broadway musical, that is.

On the fringe ...

on the fringe ...

We were in Cape Town last weekend for the beginning of the second annual Cape Town Fringe Festival, a week of alternative music, theater, dance, magic, comedy and performance art.

City Hall

The center of the action was Cape Town City Hall which housed the box office and a media center, as well as a number of performance venues. Other venues around town included Jubilee Hall, the Galloway Theatre, the Fugard Theatre, Sgt. Peppers and the Alexander Bar.





 

the Fringe Club

City Hall was also the location of the Fringe Club. The Fridge Club had food, drink and live music on tap all day every day during the Festival to entertain audiences between Fringe performances. We were actually in town to see Orpheus in Africa and although it was performed at one of the Festival's venues, the Fugard Theatre, it was not technically part of the Fringe Festival. But that didn't stop us from taking in some of the alternative spirit on display at the Fringe Club!

Orpheus in Africa

Orpheus in Africa, the Fugard Theatre production of David Kramer’s brand new musical, returned to the Fugard Theatre in Cape Town last week and we returned to Cape Town to see it!

We just could not make it to Cape Town for its world premiere sold-out and limited season at the Fugard Theatre earlier this year. And unfortunately Orpheus in Africa never made it onto Joburg as I had hoped.

In fact, I had totally given up on being able to experience a real piece of original South African musical theater while living in Africa. Everything we had seen in the theater so far in South Africa had been a drama -  like The Zulu, Hinterland and The Shadow of the Hummingbird. So I was thrilled when I read in the newspaper that Orpheus was returning to Cape Town for another limited run in September. A reprieve! I immediately bought tickets - front row center - for the first weekend of its run at the Fugard.

the curtain from our seats in the front row center!

Orpheus in Africa is based on the little known true story of Orpheus McAdoo and the Virginia Jubilee Singers’ tour of Queen Victoria’s colonies in the last decade of the 19th Century. Orpheus McAdoo was a free born son of a slave and a graduate from The Hampton Institute in Virginia. He was the first African American impresario to perform in the British colony of South Africa where he and his group achieved unprecedented success. At the same time the musical charts the evolution of African American music from spirituals (Jubilee songs) to jazz and ragtime.

David Kramer welcoming the sold-out audience

Orpheus in Africa was an opportunity to step back into the Victorian era and experience the powerful singing style of the Virginia Jubilee Concert Company as they recreated well known classics such as "Roll Jordan Roll", "Swing Low Sweet Chariot", "Hush" and 'Deliver Daniel." Alongside early spiritual and jazz standards, the musical narrative was also moved along with several original songs by David Kramer.

David Kramer is one of South Africa's most successful creators of musicals. He has won numerous awards in South Africa and abroad including the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Musical in London for Kat and the Kings in 1999.

"McAdoo Jubilee Singer to Entertain!" curtain

Virtually the entire original South African company returned to reprise their characters including Aubrey Poo as Orpheus McAdoo and Lynelle Kenned as Orpheus’s fiancé, Mattie Allen. They were excellent as was the entire cast.

And I just read this weekend that the limited run has been extended into January so don't miss your chance to see it too! Alleluia!

In South Africa, Black Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend

Anita Loos, Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, and even Madonna would have you believe that (white) Diamonds are a girl's best friend, ...










... but back in the USA, I have lots of other precious friends too. Their names are Ruby, Emerald,  ...











... and Sapphire. They are all tucked away in storage waiting for a big girlfriends' reunion someday when I return stateside.

I have black diamond friends in storage too!

Since coming to South Africa though I have adopted the black diamond as my new BFF. (Sorry, Tanzanite.)

It all started with the eternity band of black diamonds Vince bought me here for our 33rd wedding anniversary two years ago. (If there ever was a case for "even a black diamond is forever" by the way, the restaurant where we ate - Le Canard which opened in Sandton in 1987 -  closed shorty after our anniversary dinner. Still have my ring!) Last year, he added a pear-shaped black diamond ring for our 34th.

Latest addition, this black diamond Africa necklace fabricated by Eric at Tinsel for my birthday ...

pear shaped black diamond

... and I bought this ring for myself from Schwartz Jewelers a few months ago ... just because! The eyes are little black diamonds.

In South Africa, black diamonds are this girl's best friend.

Hinterland

Really, the timing could not have been any more perfect for the run of Hinterland at the Theatre on the Square. Like the nuclear disaster at Three Mile Island and The China Syndrome perfect. Remember that?

Lately, the newspapers have been full of headlines about the student protests leading up to the recent removal of the Cecil John Rhodes statue from the University of Cape Town campus, tentative plans to transfer the Paul Kruger statue from Church Square in Pretoria to the Voortrekker Monument, and the vandalism of Queen Victoria's statue in Port Elizabeth as well as other statues in The Company Gardens in Cape Town that depict historical figures active in politics before the era of the born-frees. Even Gandhi FFS!

some of the recent headlines

At the very least, the recent actions have proven that Rhodes and his legacy are still hot topics in the South Africa of 2015.

The play is about the (fictional) meeting of two giants of South Africa that could have changed the course of history. Deeply controversial at present and more than a hundred years after his death, Cecil John Rhodes still enjoys fame and notoriety, as Southern Africa’s arch-imperialist - while the multi-talented man of letters, Sol Plaatje, was one of the ANC’s founding fathers in 1912.

Sipho Mahlatshana as Plaatje and David Dukas as Rhodes

The plot of Hinterland has the two men, Plaatje and Rhodes, meeting while Kimberley is besieged during the Anglo-Boer War. In the autumn of his life, Rhodes, the king of diamonds, hires the young Plaatje as his new secretary and the two develop the unlikeliest of friendships, full of humour, warmth and pathos. But the country is changing and as Plaatje’s political career begins to dawn, the two men become set on a collision course which will change their lives.

I would have been totally in the dark if I had seen this play only three short years ago. But now, after extensive reading coupled with visits to the Anglo-Boer Battlefields, Kimberley and Cape Town which all figured prominently in the story, I probably understood 99.9% of what was said.

I had been to Groote Schuur and the Rhodes Memorial in Cape Town and am fairly knowledgeable about the life and times of Cecil John Rhodes thanks to my reading The Covenant. Unfortunately, I was completely unfamiliar with the play's other main character, Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje. Luckily there was a mini-biography of Plaatje in the Playbill which I read before the curtain rose.

Educated in a mission school near Barkly West, Plaatje was conversant in eight languages including English and Dutch and he was widely regarded as one of the most influential black journalists of his time. He was a founder member and the first secretary of the South African Native National Congress (SANNC), the forerunner of the African National Congress (ANC).

But this was not some boring history lesson. The play was funny, tragic, surprising and immensely entertaining. Not to mention educational and extremely timely.  

Hinterland runs through April 25.

Defending the South African

JCS for Easter

I have always loved going to the theater and being lucky enough to have lived for 50+ years under the lights of the Great White Way in NYC, I went a lot! As an adult, I'd say an average of once a month. Every birthday, holiday and anniversary always included a night at the theater as part of the festivities. (I saw Jesus Christ Superstar twice on Broadway. Once in high school - we studied the libretto in religion class! And once for Easter in 2012.)

As often as not, I would go to see the original cast early in their opening season. (And if there was an understudy performing that night, I would promptly turn my tickets in to exchange them for another night's performance when the star was in the house. No charge.)  I am a total unadulterated, unapologetic, full-on, remorseless theater snob. You gotta problem with that?

Going to the theater had been one of my parents' favorite forms of entertainment too and they took me to my first Off-Broadway show. "Try to remember the kind of September..." And following their example, I most likely turned our sons into theater snobs at a very early age when we took them to see their first real professional musical - Jonathon Pryce as Fagin in a West End production of Oliver in London. More please! Sean Connery and Ann-Margaret (not together) were even in the audience.

(I am a ballet snob and an Italian food snob too. That is what happens when you grow up with the best! Non est mea culpa!)

@ The Abbey Theatre in Dublin

My theater snobbery even transferred across the pond. Whenever I was in London, I would spend an inordinate amount of time in the West End and at Shakespeare's Globe indulging my London theater fix. Ditto for Irish theater in Dublin.

Since moving to South Africa though, I have followed a simple theater snob rule. No Broadway or West End revivals for me here. Only home-grown and original African theater. Like Zulu and Athol Fugard plays.

Mama Mia? Pass. Jersey Boys? You gotta be kidding. Rocky Horror Picture Show? I'm cool. Saw it in New York and London!




I recently made an exception to my unwritten rule with the one-man show Defending the Caveman. I saw the original in New York with the original caveman of course, Rob Becker. But recently I met Cathy Plewman whose husband Tim bought the book from Rob Becker and brought it to South African audiences years ago. Although penned by Rob Becker, Plewman adapted the script for Southern Africa and went on to win the Vita Award for Best Actor in a comedy. I think that makes it worthy of an exception to my rule.

Over a long, successful career, Plewman, of course, has been around the theater for forty years – reaching all the way back to works like Chorus Line, in its original London Production. After a five year hiatus on performing Caveman, Plewman stepped back onto the stage at Emperor's Palace for this past weekend only to add to his 1544 sold-out performances of the longest-running and most successful solo comedy in South African theater history. This humorous play about the hunter and gatherer in all of us has played to over one million people and many hundreds of sold-out shows.

Tim's version was very different from the Becker production Vince and I saw many years ago. Tim even began the evening by defining some of the local slang he would be using in his monologue. Thank goodness or we would have been totally lost! Every once in a while there would be a glimmer of the original Becker book, but Tim had done such a thorough job of South African-izing Defending the Caveman, it was like seeing it for the first time.

We went with another couple, Lila and Nigel. She is American-born and he is South African-born. Judging by the laughter coming from both of them, it appeared that Tim had managed to cross the cultural divide quite seamlessly. Bravo caveman!

The best laid schemes o' mice an' men

As largely independent travelers, we have always been pretty darn lucky. In spite of all the things that can and do go wrong whilst traveling, we have hardly experienced any disruption in our plans and in fact, we have been blessed with a large amount of serendipity that just cannot be planned for. I'm not talking about misplaced luggage, missed connections or cancelled flights. We have had our fair share of those inconveniences. But even without benefit of travel agents and tour operators, we have been able to, on our own behalf, regroup, reconnoiter and carry on as planned.

Denali

For the most part, things that can really jettison well-conceived plans - freakish weather, strikes, war, foot and mouth disease - have been more like hiccups rather than deal-breakers. With regards to the weather, I usually like to leave enough play in our itinerary to allow for bad rain and visibility. For instance, we allowed four days in Denali National Park to maximize our chance of seeing the mountain in its full splendor. The mountain produces its own weather system and the peak of Denali is only visible about 20% of the time! We saw it fully or partially all four days while we were in the park. But by the time we left on the train for Fairbanks, the mountain was completely socked in with weather. It was like it wasn't even there.

One time it did seem like my luck had run out. It was the year my sister and I planned a trip to England and Scotland for our birthdays around a wedding in Scotland. It was a fairly complicated itinerary. We would start in London and take in the Proms, a play at Shakespeare's Globe and scour every antique market in the city. Then we would rent a car and visit as many of the famous gardens of Kent and Sussex as we could before heading north through the Midlands to the Lake District. The highlight of our stay in Cumbria would be a pilgrimage to Beatrix Potter's Hill Top. Onward to York and Castle Howard, with some hiking in the Yorkshire Dales and along Hadrian's Wall in Northumberland before crossing into Scotland. Tea in Mackintosh's Glasgow and on to Edinburgh for The Tattoo, The Fringe and a wedding and then back to London lickity split on the Royal Scotsman.

Hotels and cottages were booked. Our car was rented. Non-refundable performance, train and airline tickets purchased. And then disaster struck with an outbreak of Foot and Mouth disease in the UK. Extremely infectious and easily transmittable, all of the National Trust pathways were summarily closed to tourists. Farm visits were stopped and many of the houses and properties were either closed altogether or put on very limited opening schedules.

For the most part, our plans were sublimely unaffected. Except for Hill Top. It would now be closed on every day of the five we had set aside in Cumbria. To badly paraphrase both Robbie Burns and John Steinbeck, "The best laid plans of dormice and men ..."

We were devastated. My sister and I have always been hopeless Potter fans and Hill Top was like our Mecca. We had always hoped to see it together. To go to the Lake District without seeing it was unthinkable. But to undo all of our reservations and planning to accommodate the single new opening day was daunting. We talked about skipping the Lake District altogether and re-visiting the Highlands in Scotland or the Norfolk Broads. But what if the disease spread and more areas were affected? Even worse, what if the disease was contained and Hill Top reopened and we weren't there?


We decided just to leave our trip as planned. Roll the dice as it were. And in the end by the time we left for London the disease had not been contained and when we periodically checked the trusty Trust website along the way, the quarantine schedule stood unchanged.

On the fateful day we had set aside to visit Hill Top, we decided to go to Near Sawry anyway and just walk the village streets in the footsteps of Beatrix Potter. We strolled over to Hill Top and planned to "lick the windows" as the French would say. As we approached the cottage, we couldn't believe our eyes. The front door was wide open. Maybe they are cleaning it and they would let us take a peek inside. But it turned out that they were open for business! When asked how this was possible, the docent simply replied, "We just decided to open today this week instead of the Trust designated day."

What? What if we had turned our itinerary upside down to accommodate the web-posted hours? What if we had skipped the Lake District altogether? But thankfully and serendipitously, we didn't. Instead of looking a gift horse in the (foot and) mouth, we quickly flashed our Royal Oak membership cards at her and stepped inside Mecca ... where we were rewarded with views of all the furniture and incidentals Beatrix painted in her tales. Including Mr. McGregor's garden! And just like that, our luck had changed.

I tell this "happily ever after" story before I tell you another very sad Christmas story. To be continued ...

Fugard at the Fugard

The first time I heard the name "Athol Fugard" was in  the early 80's when I saw Danny Glover perform on Broadway in one of Fugard's most famous plays, Master Harold and the Boys. The play, banned from production in South Africa, won the Drama Desk Award that year for Outstanding New Play. It was my first real glimpse into South African politics and the cruelty of apartheid.


I would have been satisfied to just see a Fugard play in South Africa, ... but to see 82 year old Fugard himself at the Fugard Theatre on his triumphant return to the stage after an absence of 15 years in a play he wrote and directed? Home run!



Vince and I saw him in The Shadow of the Hummingbird, his latest and sold out production in Cape Town, straight from its sold out run at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut. In the play, Fugard takes on the role of Oupa, a retired South African teacher living in self-imposed exile in Southern California, and is joined onstage by a young South African named Marviantoz Baker who plays his grandson, Boba.  Athol Fugard's writing  has moved from the political to the emotional. This is a play about love, as Fugard notes, “This is the most naked statement I have ever made about that mysterious emotion.”

Athol Fugard was born in 1932 in Middleburg, in the Karoo. He has written close to 40 plays, four books and several screenplays. Many of his works were turned into films, including Tsotsi, based on his 1980 novel, which won the 2005 Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. His writing spans the history of apartheid in South Africa through the first democratic elections and into present day post-apartheid South Africa.

In 1958, Fugard organised "a multiracial theatre for which he wrote, directed, and acted", writing and producing several plays for it in the area known as District Six in Cape Town. The 335-seater Fugard Theatre is located within the historic Sacks Futeran building in the same district, with the renovated Congregational Church Hall in Caledon Street as its entrance.

Although he stills travels extensively, as of 2013, he considers the Karoo village of Nieu-Bethesda as his permanent home.

they serve Athol Fugard's signature wine in the lobby

PS for pre-theatre dining we chose the Dias Tavern, right across the street from the Fugard Theatre ... great chicken peri peri and grilled baby calamari tubes. Bravos all around!

PPS The Shadow of the Hummingbird is coming to Joburg's Market Theatre in August.

The Owl House

Some 50 kilometers north of Graaff-Reinet in the valley of the Sneeuberg Mountains is the tiny hamlet of Nieu-Bethesda. There are no street lights. There are only a couple of streets anyway. In fact, it has only recently had electricity installed! Nieu-Bethesda sells no petrol, has no banking facilities or ATMs and no one will take your credit cards anywhere. (Warning: if you visit, bring cash and a full tank of gas.)

What it does have is a reputation for being an artists' colony and a place for creative people like Athol Fugard whose play The Road to Mecca is based on the little town. Fugard was actually born in the Karoo in nearby Middleburg and still uses Nieu-Bethesda as his retreat. There is even a Fugard Festival that happens at some point in the year. (We saw signs.)

And one of the characters in Fugard's play The Road to Mecca was based on an eccentric artist who lived in Nieu-Bethesda and whose home is now an art gallery and museum called The Owl House. Her name was Helen Martins and she was a recluse who took refuge in Nieu-Betehsda after her failed marriage left her alone and destitute. She began to create art objects and sculptures using broken glass and cement in order to "search for the light" in her closed world. She and her assistant Koos Malgas created a menagerie of camels, human beings, lambs, sphinxes and owls which are all displayed in the yard. Many of the inside walls of her house are even  "wallpapered" with finely ground colored glass giving it an enchanted igloo feel.

"The Camel Yard"

I love these skirts made from beer bottles.

This cat has eyes made from car headlights! Clever up-cycle.

inside the house

She particularly favored the owl, but there are many sculptures of mermaids and angels too.

And the other thing of note to visit in Nieu-Bethesda is the Brewery and Two Goats Deli.

We stopped in for a brew (or two) and a platter of cheese and kudu salami.

They make their own goat cheese!

And Karoo Ale ...