FELA!
Olivier Theatre,
London SE1
Opened 16 November, 2010
****
This show contains over two dozen musical numbers in just over two and
a half hours. This takes some doing, since the late Fela
Anikulapo-Kuti’s songs were so sprawling that that amount of time would
accommodate maybe eight or nine of his recorded tracks; he was even
more protracted when playing live at his Lagos club the Shrine – four
numbers would fit into that time, if you were lucky. But arrangers
Aaron Johnson and Jordan Mclean have worked wonders with medleys and
even mash-ups, so that musical matters never seem rushed or filleted.
The band are skilled at hitting the requisite Afrobeat groove, with
tenor sax player Idris Rahman (to whose playing lead actor Sahr Ngaujah
mimes) adroitly mimicking Kuti’s own phrasing on the instrument.
Jim Lewis and Bill T. Jones’s book sets the show at a performance at
the Shrine in 1978, at which Kuti is on the verge of quitting Nigeria
after years of persecution for his political activism, culminating in a
raid on his home compound at which his 77-year-old mother was fatally
thrown from a second-storey window. Fela was not the only political
activist in his family, but he was the stroppiest, as the whistle-stop
biography of the show demonstrates. His concerts were overtly
political, inveighing in song against the corruption and oppression of
successive Nigerian governments, whether nominally civilian or overtly
military.
It is an unlikely subject for either a National Theatre presentation or
a Broadway show (this production originated off-Broadway before
graduating upwards). What makes it work is Jones’ direction and
choreography. Kuti’s lyrics are about politics, but his music is all
about dancing. Jones animates the cast, including nine to a dozen
backing vocalist “Queens” (in fact, in 1978 Kuti married 27 of his
backing singers at once) in movements that combine traditional African
elements with what used to be called “stepping” when performed to
reggae and with plain and simple gettin’ on down.
In fact, it is when the show diverges most from its core that it
weakens. It makes thematic sense that in Kuti’s 1969 Los Angeles
encounter with, and radicalisation by, Black Panther activist Sandra
Izsadore, the latter should sing in more of a soul/R&B idiom, but
it feels out of place amid the Afrobeat; similarly a black-light
“Orisa” sequence in which Fela journeys through the afterlife to
question his late mother, who then sings the one original (i.e.
inauthentic) number in the show.
The biography does not dig deep. Kuti’s dubious sexual politics are
brushed aside with the ambiguous line, “I am not an easy man”; setting
the show in 1978 eliminates the need to confront the fact that, even on
his deathbed 19 years later from AIDS-related illness, he continued to
deny the existence of HIV. It is admirable that the rendition here of
the great number “International Thief Thief” expands the original
couple of names to indict a whole series of individual Nigerian
presidents and multinational corporations; less so when the requiem for
his mother, “Coffin For Head Of State”, is accompanied by the cast
bringing onstage a succession of coffins some of which bear names such
as Stephen Lawrence and Victoria Climbié (another simply reads
“No cuts”)... acknowledgement becomes appropriation. But these are
passing blemishes on an evening that is admirable and above all
enjoyable. Yeh yeh!