CHRIS THURMAN: David Kramer revives versatile, pitch perfect Orpheus McAdoo

Opening nights are curious things. Often the performance ends with a standing ovation — but then, quietly, in huddles in the foyer or over drinks at the bar, people talk about how they didn’t really like it that much. I couldn’t stay for chit-chat after the opening of David Kramer’s Orpheus McAdoo, which runs at Artscape until November 3, but I picked up one or two murmurs and misgivings.

Some audience members may feel that Kramer leans a little too heavily into the “African drum” conceit. Others might find that there is a hint of overreach in the musical mash-up of ragtime, opera, the spirituals and minstrelsy of the American south, and the nascent forms of SA musical traditions that grew of out colonial cosmopolitanism. Ironically, this is similar to the criticism that McAdoo himself occasionally faced when he toured his Jubilee Singers around SA at the turn of the 20th century.

My own response was one of enthusiasm at the music history lesson provided by Kramer. Not that this musical, first staged in 2014 and now revived in collaboration with Cape Town Opera, is a kind of edutainment. Kramer has, for decades, been exploring the interwoven strands of our country’s soundscape and its place in transnational histories, stretching west across the Atlantic and east across the Indian Ocean (including the 2009 hit Ghoema, the last show he co-wrote with Taliep Petersen, and the more recent Ver in die Wêreld, Kittie). What he offers is an invitation to listen, learn, feel — and perhaps, somewhere in your bones — to remember.

So, who was Orpheus McAdoo? The son of emancipated slaves, he graduated from the Hampton Institute, where he was a classmate of Booker T Washington; the “uplift” politics he imbibed there, valuing in equal measure education and economic success for black Americans, formed the bedrock of his career as an arts entrepreneur. He rose to prominence by exporting Jubilee singing — a style based on the “Negro spirituals” — to Britain and its colonies.

Appropriately, Kramer’s musical starts in Glasgow, tracking south via Liverpool and down the west coast of Africa as McAdoo and his troupe inadvertently retrace the first passage of the trans-Atlantic triangle on which the slave trade depended. Unlike their forebears, who were taken from Africa to America across the dreaded middle passage, the McAdoo company imagine that they may experience something of a homecoming when they arrive in Cape Town.

But SA is familiar to them for all the wrong reasons. The McAdoo singers navigate colonial SA’s race politics by being granted “honorary white” status, but they still face prejudice at every turn — and, of course, the popularity and critical success of their show among white audiences depends on certain bigoted assumptions about race.

McAdoo is, however, desperate to separate his brand from the minstrel shows that trade heavily on racist stereotypes. There is thus a po-faced religiosity to the Jubilee style, with its Christian overtones invoking the notion of “respectability”: the argument that middle-class people of colour, whether in the US or in SA, had to work hard to show white people that they were deserving not only of freedom but also of respect.

The group’s performances at Lovedale College make the connection between Hampton, Washington and Tuskegee on the one hand, and black elitism in the days of the Cape Native Franchise on the other. Orpheus McAdoo is not just a feelgood story. It depicts the limitations of trans-Atlantic solidarity as well as the shortcomings of accommodationist politics in the face of systemic racism and violence. At the end of Act 1, the company sings My Sarie Marais (representing the cross-pollination between American and SA musical traditions) while Orpheus’ misfit brother Richard is beaten by a white policeman for not carrying a “dompas”, as the coat of arms of the Boer Republic looms overhead.

It is a devastating moment, casting a shadow over McAdoo’s later triumphant incorporation of minstrelsy, the Cakewalk and other popular vaudeville styles into his repertoire — a fusion that gestures towards SA’s musical melting pot. There is undoubtedly something celebratory to be redeemed here and, to top it all off, this show achieves what McAdoo never quite could by making opera a crucial ingredient in the mix.