It Cos’ Money for to Bury a Man
On the eve of South Africa’s Heritage Day, the American folk opera Porgy & Bess was the top billing at Cape Town’s Artscape Theatre, and complimentary tickets had been waved under my nose - so off we went.
The opera was a moderate success: a cast of rather unwieldy proportions (thirty players onstage during the big scenes? forty?) drove home the central point that life is fickle with gusto, and carried off a few of the numbers in gripping style. Although Sportin’ Life (Marcus Desando) didn’t quite have the pipes for “It Ain’t Necessarily So”, he certainly had the wickedness of heart, and was great fun to watch; Clara (Philisa Sibeko) was pure pathos during her reprise of “Summertime”, sung against the winds of the hurricane that had claimed her husband; and Porgy (Leonard Rowe, a last-minute replacement for Otto Maidi) was a Siberian husky of a cripple, belting out his numbers and panting so happily afterwards that you almost looked for a tail.
One of the more interesting aspects of opera in Cape Town, of course, is that it is largely performed by members of the city’s Xhosa-speaking community, which is reknowned for its vocal prowess.
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