Much ado about McAdoo — David Kramer brings forgotten theatrical hero back to life

Conroy Scott as Orpheus McAdoo in David Kramer's Orpheus McAdoo. (Photo: Gary van Wyk)

18 Oct 2024

Having championed the VW Kombi and red veldskoene, taught us songs that made us laugh at ourselves, and discovered incredible folk musicians during his forays into the Karoo and Kalahari, David Kramer this month brings to the stage his first collaboration with Cape Town Opera, illuminating a near-forgotten musical impresario named Orpheus McAdoo.

David Kramer’s latest musical is not entirely new, though it’s had a thorough makeover, the result of collaborating for the first time with Cape Town Opera and tinkering with his script for a show he first produced almost a decade ago.

Back in 2015, it was called Orpheus in Africa, but Kramer has rechristened it Orpheus McAdoo, a tribute to the story’s eponymous protagonist.

The musical unravels a quirky bit of history from the late 1800s when an African-American showman named Orpheus McAdoo brought his musical troupe, the Virginia Jubilee Singers, to Cape Town and, amid the racial hypocrisy of the time, became a sensation.

McAdoo was – like Kramer – a theatre impresario, someone who understood entertainment, and innovated within that realm, too.

Kramer calls him a “real hero”, someone who triumphed against tremendous odds. He was a self-made man who rose to success despite being born under slavery and frequently having to operate in spaces that were inherently racist.

The name Orpheus McAdoo first came to Kramer’s attention almost 20 years ago when he and his late friend and creative collaborator Taliep Petersen were working on Ghoema, their final musical together.

Like their first collaboration, District Six, which had used music to explore the inside story behind Cape Town’s forgotten neighbourhood, Ghoema told a history of Afrikaans music in the Mother City, starting with slavery and the various musical strands that evolved in response to the Cape’s melange of cultural influences.

While researching that convoluted history, Kramer came across the McAdoo story in Denis-Constant Martin’s book, Coon Carnival.

Kramer’s curiosity eventually led to the discovery of a letter that McAdoo had written while he was in America. In it he decried the appalling way black people were being treated in South Africa – particularly in the Free State and Transvaal – describing conditions worse than in Georgia under slavery.

Intriguingly, while he was in South Africa, McAdoo succeeded in luring President Paul Kruger into a theatre for the first time in his life; he is said to have been spellbound by the Jubilee Singers and was apparently moved to tears by their performance.

McAdoo’s troupe was so popular, in fact, that they ended up touring here for 18 months, performing in towns like Worcester, Wellington, Kimberley, Graaff-Reinet and Laingsburg, as well as the rest of South Africa.

Jody Abrahams (left) and Dean Balie in Orpheus McAdoo. (Photo: Gary van Wyk)

They’d been introduced to Cape Town by the Cape governor’s wife who’d heard them perform in Scotland and been enchanted by them. They were a choir of black Americans who sang the old African American spirituals (also called Negro spirituals), as well as light opera songs and Scottish glees. Their style of singing had never before been seen in these parts, and newspaper accounts describe sizzling performances during which they blew audiences away with their sophisticated harmony singing.

“History is always a political football,” say Kramer. “For so long there was an agenda to tell a one-sided story. It was always about the white history, the Great Trek and all these Afrikaner heroes, and the Boer War. So other peoples’ histories were suppressed. That has been a fascination of mine since we told the District Six story. People knew that the area had been destroyed, but nobody had actually gone there and considered telling the story – not from an outside perspective, but from an inside perspective.

“And with Ghoema we investigated the origins of Cape Town’s Malay choirs, consequently unravelling the story behind how the Afrikaans language came into being. These stories seemed to be a mystery to most people.

“In the case of Orpheus, it’s a forgotten story about a black American group that was hugely successful here, and although no one remembers that success the results of it still echo in our music today.”

The musical includes some African American spirituals – “beautiful, sacred songs” is how he describes them – that would have formed part of the troupe’s repertoire. Some of these – Roll Jordan Roll, Swing Low Sweet Chariot, The Gospel Train and Down By The Riverside – are still recognisable, while the impact of their original performance style still echoes in various genres, including the gospel choirs that remain such a huge cultural force in South Africa.

There’s evidence that, as a boy, the earliest pioneer of isicathamiya attended a performance by McAdoo’s troupe in Zululand and was strongly influenced by what he heard.

Cape Town Opera soloist Brittany Smith as Mattie in David Kramer's Orpheus McAdoo. (Photo: Gary van Wyk)

Consequently, Kramer believes, there’s a direct connection between the Jubilee Singers and the kind of a-Capella singing developed by those all-male Zulu choirs, and which has gone on to achieve global acclaim through the work of Ladysmith Black Mambazo, for example.

Meanwhile, in the Cape, aspects of their performances were taken up by the Malay choirs that are still active today.

“What you see is a lead singer doing a melodic line with a back-up choir coming in,” explains Kramer, “and that’s modelled on the Jubilee Singers’ template.”

Kramer, through the variety in his musical, aims to give a sense of the scope of music that was popular at the time.

“There’s a mix of traditional spirituals and folk music and my original compositions,” he says. “In writing the songs for this musical, I researched the popular music of the late 19th century and listened to the earliest recordings I could trace. My sources of inspiration have been the early jubilees, old sentimental ballads, songs from the American civil war and the beginnings of ragtime.”

Kramer says that while it’s not an opera, Orpheus McAdoo makes good use of the powerful operatic voices in the cast, including Conroy Scott as McAdoo and Brittany Smith as McAdoo’s fiancée and wife, Mattie. Alongside these seasoned opera voices are performers like Dean Balie, a captivating character actor whose natural musicality, sparkling singing voice and tremendous stage presence never fail to impress.

There is, of course, far more to the show than uplifting singing and the curious tale of a theatrical hero.

“In a good musical, the protagonist has a problem,” says Kramer. “He has to either survive or die. The musical must pose the problem and resolve it in some way. What my story tries to explain is how Orpheus had to reinvent himself in order to survive as an impresario.”

A significant conflict in the Kramer-crafted narrative is McAdoo’s response to the growing popularity of black minstrel acts that were to a large extent stealing the limelight from his own entertainments.

Just as modern pop stars are forever being usurped by the next big thing, McAdoo’s dilemma revolves around growing competition in the form of increasingly popular minstrel acts, the merits of which he questioned because they seemed to him to undermine his belief in black upliftment through education.

“McAdoo studied at The Hampton Institute where he was a colleague of Booker T. Washington,” says Kramer. “They were supporters of Racial Uplift politics which had developed in the USA during the postbellum era. During this period, black reformers and institutions began stressing notions of upward social mobility and improvement of the race.

“Advocates of Racial Uplift believed that discourses promoting the notion that black people were incapable of fully participating in modern liberal democratic societies could be challenged if upwardly mobile African Americans actively disseminated images of black civility and refinement. They hoped this strategy would result in the removal of social barriers to black progress. While in South Africa, McAdoo followed this philosophical line by presenting himself and the members of his troupe as refined performers.”

But McAdoo was at the same time faced with changes in the social sensibilities of the times – and new trends in musical entertainment.

“McAdoo realised that Jubilee singing was going out of fashion in favour of minstrel shows performed by black singers in black face,” says Kramer.

“He was against minstrelsy’s overt caricaturing of black people – even by black people themselves. So his dilemma was deciding how to survive in a business that was heading towards something that he didn’t approve of.”

Conroy Scott as Orpheus McAdoo. (Photo: Gary van Wyk)

In Kramer’s assessment of McAdoo, a major strength was his ability to adapt with the times, and effectively reinvent himself and his theatre company.

Clocking the shift in musical tastes he effectively created “a new form of entertainment incorporating elements of ragtime, vaudeville and minstrelsy”. Which means this musical is in part also about how music itself evolves in response to changing fashions, and how different styles of singing draw on one another.

Kramer believes McAdoo must have been a remarkable human being to have achieved what he did, when he did, and within such a short window of time.

“Considering the circumstances into which he was born, on a slave plantation, it’s amazing that he won such wide-scale respect and admiration,” says Kramer. “There were just 10 years between his tour in South Africa and his death in Sydney, and during that time he became a sensation, a major star.

“And this he achieved with great success without resorting to the blackface stereotypes or denying his belief and commitment to Uplift politics. Had he not died at age 42 and only worked in the colonies, he’d probably have featured more prominently in black American entertainment history.” DM

Written and directed by David Kramer, Orpheus McAdoo stars Conroy Scott as Orpheus McAdoo and Brittany Smith as Mattie Allen. It plays at Artscape, Cape Town, until 4 November. Tickets available from Webtickets.

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