Fela!, Musical on the Afrobeat Icon, Screens Tonight at SIFF Cinema

This is video from the off-Broadway production–for some reason the trailer for National Theatre Live‘s filming of the musical Fela! isn’t available for embedding. But anyway, yes, tonight at 7:30 p.m. at SIFF Cinema (at McCaw Hall), you can watch an HD version of Fela! shot before a live audience on January 13. It’s three hours with an intermission, and tickets are $20. Here’s a little promotional copy:

Currently playing on Broadway, the Tony winning musical Fela! comes to the National with Sahr Ngaujah as Fela Anikulpao-Kuti. Using his pioneering music (a blend of jazz, funk, and African rhythm and harmonies), Fela! explores Kuti’s controversial life as artist, political activist, and revolutionary musician.

There’s a pre-show talk (7 p.m.) by Seattle U. professor Saheed Yinka Adejumobi: “Choreographer Bill T. Jones takes his cue from Fela’s lyrics and compositions, which provide the score for the Broadway musical Fela!, to demonstrate how Afrobeat bridges the gap between individual and communal desires for cultural and political freedom and social justice.” 

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If you can’t make it to that, you might want to turn to Jeremy’s “World Music 101” post, which touches on Fela Kuti. Here’s a sample to kick things off:

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Yes, Fela Kuti was an icon and a voice of the oppressed. But like most political icons who make their name opposing oppressive regimes, the story relies on the convenient fact that Fela never became the president of Nigeria, despite several attempts, and thus never met the same fate as Lech Wałęsa or Václav Havel or Léopold Sédar Senghor, who had the misfortune of actually having to try to run a country, their dissident credentials tarnished by years of politics and the attendant shortcomings, disappointments, and failures.

As for the digital experience itself, I attended the previous screening the series, Hamlet, and am happy to report it’s a worthwhile trip. The high-definition video comes at you from no less than three cameras, and the show was blocked well enough that you could get medium and close-up shots without people exiting the field-of-view suddenly. The “live” element is attested to largely by audio–you can hear the room (and even, briefly during Hamlet, the stage manager calling cues offstage). 

That said, you may find that the video production reminds you of why live theatre is its own experience–there were times during Hamlet that I would have liked to look elsewhere than the camera let me. And you may find out how spoiled we are for choice in Seattle. The National Theatre’s production of Hamlet is justly praised (though it violates, multiple times, Chekhov’s admonition about guns on stage: A secret service-type team waves guns around at every opportunity all night but somehow a roomful of people die at the end with no one getting a shot off), but so, I’m certain, was Seattle Shakespeare Company’s Hamlet. To my mind, SSC measures up nicely, even across the pond.