Word: jacobe
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...first couple of outbursts sweep the audience and send fits of chills running up and down the spine; but since emotional climaxes are reached in scene after scene, the final tragic highlight of the musical, Jacob Zulu's verdict, loses much of its passionate appeal. The crescendo of the play has been reached by the middle of the first act, and no additional pumping up the volume will have any more effect upon already aching ears...
...solitary figure silhouetted against a reddish-orange dawn marks the beginning of Tug Yourgrau's musical, "The Song of Jacob Zulu." The play, which opened on Broadway in 1993, is an honest attempt to recount the tragedies of a South Africa under the baleful spell of apartheid. Inspired by the murder trial of Jacob Zulu in 1985, the play recounts the violence and pressures of a society fractured by racism...
...Yourgrau, South African born playwright and director, began to write the play after President Nelson Mandela established the Truth Commission to ensure that crimes committed during the apartheid era were to be forgiven but not forgotten. Jacob Zulu was written in this same belief. "The search for truth is balanced with the needs of the present to go forward," says Yourgrau. "Healing begins with true talk...
...more than three minutes is immediately assigned a scene in which he can showcase his abundant lung capacity in a fit of uncontrollable anger, or a shuddering, tearful breakdown. And each emotional tidal wave produces a sage, if somewhat cliched, statement of advice that could be applied to Jacob Zulu, South Africa and the world...
...Orson Welles and Laurence Olivier both donned blackface in famous film versions doesn't mean no one else should try. Parker had the radical idea to cast a black man as Othello, and Laurence Fishburne brings an outsider's dignity to the role of Shakespeare's noblest chump. Irene Jacob is a lovely, sallow Desdemona, and Kenneth Branagh--looking bloated and rheumy, slithering snakelike on rooftops, whispering his venomous gossip as if it's his last confession--makes a fine Iago, a demi-devil working his cool wit to destroy those he might have loved...