Orpheus in Africa will be staged at The Fugard Theatre from January 28 to February 22. TRACEY SAUNDERS spoke to David Kramer about the musical.
THE story of Orpheus Myron McAdoo is an astonishing one. What is less surprising is that the man who brought the story of Salie Daniels to life in Kat and the Kings and introduced Oteng Piet, Ronnie Moipolai and Mary Kriel to South African audiences would be the one to tell it.
David Kramer’s abiding curiosity in people and the music they create has led to the creation of individual songs and musicals where the histories of people and places are sketched in notes and lyrics rendering them real once more. “I have always had an interest in local music history and the roots of Cape music and local folk music has motivated most of my work.”
The tale of Orpheus McAdoo seems almost preposterous in its scope of narrative. He was born in 1858 on a plantation in Greensboro, North Carolina to slave parents. His journey from there to his final resting place in Sydney on July 7, 1900 is a fantastical one and will be portrayed on a stage not far from the venue of his opening performance at the Vaudeville Theatre in Cape Town on June 30, 1890.
McAdoo made a brief anecdotal appearance in Ghoema, the final musical that Kramer created with the late Taliep Petersen. “In the research I read about him where the French musicologist Denis-Constant Martin mentions a group of black singers that tours South Africa. He included a letter which Orpheus had written back to the Hampton Institute to Gerald Armstrong, his mentor; about how awfully black people were treated in South Africa, even worse than the slaves in Georgia according to him.”
Kramer remained intrigued by Orpheus and thought he would make a fascinating subject for a musical. With the encouragement of his wife Renaye he set out to learn more about him. Explaining why there is comparatively little information about this fascinating individual Kramer explains, “He came out here when he was 32 years old in 1890 and then he went on to Australia where he also had success”.
“He was backwards and forwards between South Africa and Sydney. His success was all in the colonies. He wasn’t known in America. He doesn’t come up in the American research. When you read about the history about black staging or minstrel shows or any of those things you don’t find anything about him.”
The playwright’s interest was heightened when he discovered that McAdoo and his Fisk Jubilee Troupe had performed for President Kruger. Their rendition of Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen left tears on “the rugged features of the president” according to an account in the Transvaal Advertiser on the February 9,1891.
Initially Kramer thought about staging the concert as it was performed then. He said that he thought, “maybe what could be done was to stage a concert like that. That was really the second thrust of the story. I could visualise a concert of the Virginia Jubilee singers all dressed up in Victorian outfits singing to President Kruger and I wondered if could find the kind of songs that he sang to him, which I did.”
Thanks to the internet there was increasing information available and following his discovery of an academic work he explains how he learnt more about the singer and the man. “I found a very interesting book which chronicled his Australian episodes and so I had the South African side of the story well documented and then the Australian side of it which told me more about the man, who he was.”
Speaking about the prevalence of American performers in the British colonies the songwriter said “At one point there were as many top American black performers in Australia as in America. The Fisk Jubilee Singers and the Corbyn’s Georgia Minstrels were among the first black minstrel shows. I didn’t know that there were black American minstrels”. Explaining their relative success outside their country of birth he recounts that “In the late 1870’s they found a very warm reception in Australia and other English speaking colonies. It was much easier to perform in British colonies than in America. Under the British they found a more liberal atmosphere”
Describing the nature of the music Kramer says “The Jubilee singing was very much religious singing. The main body of their work were the Sorrow Songs, or the sacred songs or Jubilees. They introduced those sacred songs which had been sung in secret on plantations by their forefathers to the rest of the world.” In his article A feeling of prejudice Orpheus M. McAdoo and the Virginia Jubilee Singers in South Africa 1890–1898, published in the Journal of Southern African Studies in 1988, Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of Texas, Veit Erlmann describes the spirituals as “both the ritual balm on the wounds of dehumanisation and the war cry of that resistance.”
Many of these songs have become standards – Go Down Moses, S wing Low Sweet Chariot, Down by the Riverside. “That was what their repertoire was mainly. Orpheus begins to lighten up the programme with snippets of opera and glee” says Kramer as he speaks about his fascination with this transition, “What was his goal? Why did the repertoire change?” The musical score which consists of the original Jubilee repertoire and original songs composed by Kramer seeks to find this answer.
Many of the original theatres where the Jubilee Singers performed in the 19th century succumbed to fire as they were lit by gaslight and candles. 135 years later the lighting challenges will hopefully not be comparable when Aubrey Poo and Lynelle Kenned recount the heroic journey of Orpheus McAdoo from a plantation in America to the theatres of SA, Australia and England. A man, who was described in the Freeman edition of January 4, 1899 as, “prosperous and an Australian by adoption. He was a classmate of Booker T Washington. In his accent he is decidedly English. He dresses well in the style of the English upper class. He wears a few diamonds within the bounds of propriety. From all indications he is a thorough gentlemen from tip to tip.” is bound to have a few interesting tales to tell.
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