When the steamship carrying Orpheus McAdoo and his Virginia Jubilee Singers docked in Cape Town in 1890, few could have imagined the sensation about to unfold. Their harmonies, born from songs once sung in captivity, would soon echo across the territories of the southern continent that would one day be called South Africa. The music they carried, drawn from grief and grace, found resonance wherever it travelled.
That journey, musical and historical, is reimagined in David Kramer’s production Orpheus McAdoo, returning to the Artscape Theatre from October 21 to November 2. Building on earlier stagings, including Orpheus in Africa in 2015, this version again marries Kramer’s fascination with hidden histories to the musical power of Cape Town Opera, merging past and present in a single voice.
Kramer’s discovery of McAdoo’s story began, as many of his projects do, with an image. “I saw this photograph of African-Americans in Victorian clothes in Cape Town, 1890,” he recalled. “I thought, what is this? I’d never heard about it.”
The photograph drew him into archives and into the life of a man who led a choir of African-American singers on a two-year tour through the colonial world, a story he calls “Black excellence that hadn’t been told.”
The Virginia Jubilee Singers, formed by McAdoo in 1889, followed in the footsteps of the famed Fisk Jubilee Singers who had introduced the world to African-American spirituals a generation earlier.
What began as an effort to raise funds for education after the US Civil War grew into a cultural movement, carrying the sound of freedom across the Atlantic. When McAdoo and his troupe arrived in the Cape, their performances offered audiences something entirely new — songs of endurance performed by free Black artists commanding grand stages.
“Their popularity was extraordinary,” Kramer told me. “If you want to know how popular they were, they were like the Black Beatles in the Cape and surrounding territories.” In a deeply divided society, here was a group of performers, elegant, assured, blending jubilee spirituals with ragtime and early folk, whose artistry disrupted expectations.
Yet Orpheus McAdoo is no exercise in nostalgia. It explores the reversal of history: the descendants of enslaved Africans returning across the Atlantic, carrying songs once bound in sorrow. I mentioned this symmetry to Kramer, the way the voyage seemed to invert the slave route itself. He nodded. “That paradox is in the show,” he said. “Songs once sung in bondage returning as instruments of freedom.”
That current runs through the score. Spirituals are performed not as relics but as declarations of survival; music once bound to loss now carrying release. “With the choir, when I do the spiritual jubilees,” Kramer explained, “we hear them as they would have been heard.”
The sound becomes a kind of time travel, a sonic act of remembrance that imagines how those harmonies once filled halls from Cape Town to the Kimberley diamond fields.
Still, the music’s beauty never hides the violence it moved through. In one of the show’s most striking scenes, the troupe performs before President Paul Kruger, his first visit to a theatre, while, on the other side of the stage, Orpheus’s brother is beaten by a policeman who doubts his identity.
“The contrast is stark,” Kramer said. “The harsh reality of the southern colonies against the niceties of the theatre.” The split-stage device captures the collision between performance and prejudice, reverence and rejection.
This third iteration of Orpheus McAdoo, following Orpheus in Africa and last year’s production, marks an evolution in Kramer’s craft. “I take more licence now than I would have 10 years ago,” he says. “You can’t simply present facts; you have to hold an audience beat by beat.”
The new production’s soundscape draws power from its hybrid cast, singers from Cape Town Opera joined by theatre performers whose dramatic energy lends intimacy to the grandeur of the choral form.
Kramer calls it “a time capsule,” one that allows modern audiences to hear what the Jubilee Singers might once have sounded like. Through that act of listening, the show restores dignity to artists whose music bridged continents and centuries.
Across his career, from District Six to Kat and the Kings, Kramer has turned the stage into a space of reclamation, where silenced histories can sing again. With Orpheus McAdoo, he extends that conversation across oceans.
“When Orpheus arrived,” he says, “it must have been a knockout blow. People couldn’t believe black performers could sing harmony like this.” That astonishment mirrors the rediscovery unfolding in our own time.
In revisiting the 1890s through sound, Orpheus McAdoo also speaks to the present. “What you had in those early days and under apartheid was suppression,” Kramer said. “People who were not known before can now be seen.”
That revelation reaches backward, to the wonder of those colonial audiences hearing a new sound, and forward, to today’s recognition of stories long overlooked.
Ultimately, Orpheus McAdoo is less about nostalgia than return. In reversing the routes of displacement, the musical does more than recover a forgotten chapter of history; it reclaims the dignity embedded in every note. As the choir hums the first chords and the lights rise, one senses not history revived but history answered — a song once carried away, finally coming home.
Tickets are available via WebTickets and directly through Artscape on 021 421 7695.
