Word: sarafina
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From the townships of Zululand to the Great White Way, the cast of Sarafina! has traveled 8,000 miles, a sudden trip into future shock. At first the idea had seemed preposterous: a musical about apartheid played by the victims. Twenty-two Africans, ages 14 and up, were recruited from the corrugated-metal and concrete shacks of KwaMashu, Umlazi and other sprawling, neglected settlements separated from the prosperity of white South Africa. Honed into a humming, exuberant whole by Playwright-Director Mbongeni Ngema, they have turned convention on its head with a triumphant spirit and rollicking rhythm that transcend politics...
Despite the teen trappings, a sense of mission infuses Sarafina!, a portrait of repression and rebellion at a Soweto high school. During "notes," a 15- minute discussion of finer points in the performance, the kids jump up to argue with the assistant director, Mali Hlatshwayo, in rapid-fire Zulu. He thumps his chest. "Emotion," explains one of the cast. At the stage door, starstruck American youngsters gather for autographs, but the kids of Sarafina! don't preen like the show horses of your average chorus line. The girls are mostly hefty. The boys tend toward skinny. Plain faces, remarkably ordinary...
...recent matinee the spectators laughed, stomped, clapped and cried along with the musical's emotional tide. They lifted their voices to the anthem Freedom Is Coming Tomorrow. "You can relate to it," said Gloria Brown, a Newark cafeteria worker. Too much time has passed since the children of Sarafina! have seen their parents, their friends, or the green hills of Zululand. In the Hotel Esplanade (where they settled after guests at the Mayflower didn't take to rock music at 3 a.m.), they visit back and forth like in a college dorm. Their rooms are filled with VCRs, miniskirts, Japanese...
...torture, the tear gas, the murders of schoolchildren that Sarafina! depicts, and for all the agony of apartheid that its players have experienced, America, in its midtown-Manhattan incarnation, seems far from utopian. "Before I came, I thought the U.S. would be like a small heaven," said Thandani Mavimbela of Hlabisa, a rural village in Natal province. "I thought it would be like on TV -- The Boat of Love. Love Boat? Or Dallas. But then you see places like Harlem. I was shocked. The empty, burned buildings. On Broadway, very poor people sleeping on the street. In South Africa, when...
...Mavimbela's ambition is to go to college. Of all the Sarafina! cast, he is the most faithful in attending thrice-weekly after-hours classes held at Martin Luther King Jr. High School. On a recent afternoon, he was at the blackboard trying to figure out fractions. "Which one is the numerator?" the teacher asked. He pointed to it and then, on cue, to the dividend, the quotient, the remainder, the divisor, the denominator. His fellow cast members gazed intently at the blackboard chalked full of figures. On the wall was a poster from another Broadway play, For Colored Girls...