Cape Town Opera’s recent production of Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida was set in the year 3025. The show’s fantastical Afrofuturist vision drew on the sacred symbolism of ancient Egypt, but was also inflected by that society’s cultish spirituality and brutal displays of power. While it looked into the far future, it told the same old stories.
In Aida, Egypt is at war with Ethiopia. Aida, Amneris and Radamès, caught in that eternal geometric torment — the love triangle — are also bound by the constraints of narrow, patrimonial nationalism. As Cape Town Opera artistic director Magdalene Minnaar writes, the lovers face “impossible choices” when “devotion and ambition collide”. Typically celebrated for its grand scale, this opera actually hones in on “the cost of war and the fragility of love in the face of political and religious forces”.
I don’t know if humans will still walk the earth in a thousand years. If we do, I can only wish that we are as sexy as the enormous cast of this Aida, which made a landmark contribution to the tradition of wowing opera audiences with spectacle. The height and depth of a modular set, making full use of Artscape’s stage, was elegantly complemented by lighting and animated projections lending each of the opera’s four acts a distinct aesthetic. The delightful eclecticism of Roman Handt’s costume design populated this austere architecture with characters who seemed to exist simultaneously in the distant past and in a dimension of hyperfuturistic fashion.
The costumes took their cue, Minnaar notes, from Dune and the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy; other observers have made connections to the postmodern pastiche of The Hunger Games and Black Panther. A troupe of dancers, choreographed by Gregory Maqoma, expanded the opera’s visual universe.
The performance history of Aida intersects somewhat eerily with the warmongering that drives its plot. Verdi was commissioned to write the opera in 1871 by Isma’il Pasha, the Egyptian ruler who had embarked on a campaign of modernisation as he sought to imitate the “great powers” of 19th-century Europe. The Pasha had successfully inaugurated the Suez Canal in 1869 and he spent huge sums on urban infrastructure, including the Cairo Opera House, where Aida had its premiere.
His downfall was that he shared the bellicose appetites of the European leaders he so admired. His expansionism included a failed war of aggression against Ethiopia in 1874. This bankrupted his country, allowing Britain to take control of Suez and Italy to seize Eritrea.
Fast forward a few more decades, to the rise of fascism under Mussolini, and Aida became a means to flatter Il Duce with comparisons to mighty Pharaoh. It didn’t hurt that the Egyptians’ enemies in Verdi’s opera, the Ethiopians, were a target of fascist Italy’s military aspirations. As a result, conductor of the Cape Town Opera production Kamal Khan points out, Aida was stigmatised as “militaristic”, an “extravaganza” of “elephants and camels and a cast of thousands” that was “filled with people painted as images of theatrical exoticism”.
For Khan, however, Aida is vehemently “anti-war”: depicting “a world that is unsafe for love”, a world in which “poor and starving and displaced people” are subjected to xenophobic violence, it becomes a plea for peace. Khan’s formative experiences of Verdi’s opera overlapped with the final years of the Vietnam War. The multiple historical moments that made up the palimpsest of the Cape Town Opera production thus also incorporated layers from the 20th century, when military-industrial states were met by the voices of pacifist counterculture.
Something else was brewing as the 1960s gave way to the 1970s. A century after Pasha paid Verdi and his librettist Antonio Ghislanzoni the giant sum of 150,000 francs for Aida, a largely unknown duo collaborated on a pop-rock musical that also happened to be set in Egypt. The composer was Andrew Lloyd Webber. The lyricist was Tim Rice. The piece borrowed a cherished narrative from the Old Testament, and was rather unpromisingly titled Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.
In 1968, Joseph was a 15-minute cantata performed by schoolkids. By 1972, it had expanded into a fully fledged stage musical that opened at the Edinburgh Festival, exactly 100 years after Aida transferred from Cairo to Milan.
Killer creative team
SA theatre designer Niall Griffin has already done a few productions of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. It’s a show that offers designers an invitation, perhaps even a dare; after all, how many musicals draw audience members’ attention so explicitly to costuming?
There’s Joseph’s “coat of many colours”, of course. But pretty much every song requires a costume change. Lloyd Webber’s genius lies in exploiting the pleasure of recognisable genres, and Joseph is self-parodic in its imitation and execution of various musical styles, requiring a different look and feel for each number. Joseph’s brothers are all country-and-western in One More Angel in Heaven, morph into French balladeers for Those Canaan Days and then take a bizarre Caribbean turn in Benjamin Calypso. Potiphar’s household is a hub of 1920s Charleston vibes. Pharoah is a rocking Elvis.
The design possibilities are plentiful, so Griffin has enjoyed taking multiple bites at this particularly juicy cherry. But for a new version of Joseph that has been setting the stage of Cape Town’s Theatre on the Bay ablaze — the show is now travelling to Johannesburg and will open at Pieter Toerien’s Montecasino Theatre next week, before returning to Cape Town in October — he has, quite simply, outdone himself.
I was fortunate enough to visit Griffin in studio while he and his colleagues prepared for Joseph. After glimpsing some of the designs and getting hints from a mood board on the wall, I was sworn to secrecy. It would be a few weeks before I got to see the finished creations onstage. They did not disappoint: adorning the lithe and supremely ripped bodies of a brilliant cast, the costumes were astonishing in their range and impact.
Joseph himself spends much of the show scantily clad. By convention, the role is there to exhibit the six-pack and the boyish charm of a handsome lead: over the years, Jason Donovan, Donny Osmond and other generation-specific heart-throbs have had a go. In this production, Dylan Janse van Rensburg more than meets the criteria in terms of looks. Happily, as a graduate from the Luitingh Alexander Musical Theatre Academy (Lamta), he is also a dynamic acting-singing-dancing “triple threat”.
Anton Luitingh and Duane Alexander are co-directors and, with Toerien, co-producers of Joseph. This partnership has already influenced the SA performing arts landscape, with Lamta students regularly appearing in professional shows countrywide. Toerien’s stages in Cape Town and Johannesburg are modest in size, necessitating a “bonsai musical” model. As with the 2024 hit Spring Awakening, however, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat turns necessity into a virtue.
Between Griffin’s set and costumes, Oliver Hauser’s lighting design, the endless verve of the ensemble and a killer creative team (kudos are also owed to choreographer Jared Schaedler and the combined music and sound design talents of Amy Campbell, Charl-Johan Lingenfelder and David Classen) there is nothing about this Joseph that feels small. It’s as “big”, in its own way, as Aida was at Artscape.
I note that Hauser lit both productions — no mean feat considering the very different requirements in terms of scale. Griffin, too, has often had to shift the focus of his designer’s eye to accommodate varying levels of audience “intimacy”, depending on the combined size of the stage and auditorium. Earlier this year he designed an impressively tall, hi-tech set and rig for Dear Evan Hansen, which captivated audiences in 1,500-seater venues. By contrast, a full house at Theatre on the Bay is 260 patrons.
“Regardless of the dimensions of the space,” Griffin says, “design always comes from the same place for me: it’s emotional. What are we trying to make people feel? Visual creation in a small theatre is often more difficult. Design is a very vulnerable process. You’re making a world and asking audiences to see and interact with that every night. The vulnerability is greater when the audience is closer. Even from the back row, they are inside the musical. But this immersion can also make it a more intense experience.”
Deep sincerity and high camp
What does it mean, then, to build the world of Joseph — the vast deserts of Egypt and Canaan, palaces, oases, prisons? “This is a beloved musical,” affirms Griffin, “and there is a specific ‘feel’ attached to it. So I’ve tried to find the balance between meeting expectations and offering something new. Obviously everyone wonders about the coat. I took a big swing this time. There are minute details to admire, there is plenty of colourful, shiny beading, and there is also a bit of magic.” Without wanting to spoil the surprise, let me add: it’s lit. Or rather, it lights up.
The hero aside, Griffin explains, designing this show all starts with the narrator. Veteran Lelo Ramasimong plays the part with aplomb — a vivacious figure who has to do some deft exposition. Like the audience, she experiences pity for plucky and long-suffering Joseph, but she also has to keep up the comic energy to reassure us that all will ultimately be well.
“When I have designed Joseph in the past,” Griffin admits, “the narrator has bugged me. Who is she? What is her purpose? Where does she come from? I decided to imagine her as a kind of hippie art teacher. The visual of the rest of the production is born from her.”
And what a feast for the eyes it is. Canaan is redolent of AfrikaBurn — “a festival atmosphere to start” — until the Ishmaelite slave traders appear in the guise of Star Wars Tusken Raiders or a faction from Mad Max. It’s all a bit apocalyptic and Joseph’s prospects are bleak. But before long, we are chez Potiphar and in the lap of luxury. Griffin wanted to pay homage to Lloyd Webber’s Really Useful Group company, with its art nouveau and art deco overtones.
We leap through space and time again when the upbeat Go, Go, Go Joseph invites us to a party that will range over decades, from go-go funk music to disco, ’90s drum and bass, and finally a contemporary club scene. In the concluding “Joseph megamix” even some Afrohouse and amapiano are thrown in for good measure — but not before we have been to Las Vegas for Chris Jaftha’s chiselled Elvis and, in an outlandishly good but also very funny pas de trois, a Mirage Girl styled on Carmen Miranda.
Describing this latter element, Griffin has a chuckle at his own expense. If you’re going to go over the top, you have to have a sense of irony about it. “She looks like a parrot and a palm tree had a showgirl baby! It’s so stupid, you can’t help but smile.”
This combination of artistic ambition and self-mocking humility — of deep sincerity and high camp — is a winning approach to what can, despite its many charms, be a tricky musical to bring to the stage. “We’ve had to tread lightly with the subject matter, given the global political moment,” Griffin comments a little cryptically. I assume that he is referring to Joseph singing about Children of Israel being promised “a land of our own” and the broader biblical discourse.
In truth, the story of Joseph and the other sons of Jacob (the original tribes of Israel) is not one of exclusionary Zionism but rather one of cross-border co-operation. Joseph, rejected by his family, is a refugee who starts a new life in Egypt. His brothers, facing starvation, receive food from Pharoah’s stores. A family reunion gestures towards the possibility of reconciliation between nations.
If Aida is an anti-war tragedy, Joseph carries a similar message but provides the resolution required by comedy. In their directors’ note, Luitingh and Alexander emphasise that Joseph is a tale of “dreams, resilience and redemption … hope, forgiveness and optimism in the face of adversity”. Aida ends with a desperate, dying appeal for peace. Joseph grants that peace and turns it to revelry.
Collaboration
Pharoah famously dreams about seven years of plenty and seven years of famine: a clash of abundance and scarcity that aptly characterises the performing arts in SA. We have a surplus of first-rate artists who face a dearth of stable employment opportunities. There are productions such as Aida and Joseph that overwhelm with a glorious excess, and that play to sell-out audiences. There are many more bare-bones shows that still don’t manage to break even, often despite receiving critical acclaim.
Griffin is phlegmatic about the state of the industry. “If you think about it, the theatre sector in SA is still relatively young. We just have to keep doing our best to grow it by developing new audiences. Covid hit us hard. A lot was sacrificed in the name of survival; one of the things we lost, and have not fully regained, is the integral relationship between performance and design.”
Designers such as Griffin are widely admired but their role in the creative process can be undermined: “It’s difficult, for example, when a director simply tells you what their concept is — then expects you to hand over your design and take no further part in the production. But I have started to see a change in how directors and producers approach me. It’s not just about getting visual bang for buck.”
Working with Lamta allows him to collaborate from conception to execution. “Say the cast is trying something out early on in rehearsals, and then I come up with a bit of nonsense that feeds their energy. A show like Joseph needs this connection to childlike play. And then as the crazy vision of my design emerges, I am lucky to have a remarkable team of artisans working with me. It’s hard to be a designer anywhere in the world right now. But we have the benefit of audiences who are increasingly visually literate. So it’s a privilege too.”
• ‘Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat’ is at Pieter Toerien’s Montecasino Theatre from July 19 to September 28 and will open for a return season at Theatre on the Bay on October 4.
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