In “Goddess”, an original musical about a mysterious singer in Mombasa, Kenya, Moto Moto is not only an Afro-Jazz nightclub, it is a great equalizer, where Kenyans of all religions, tribes and social classes shake and turn their bodies in Rapture.
“I literally met the love of my life on dance floors,” said director Saheem Ali. “So I understand the power of a life -changing event that happens in a space of common dancing and joy.”
It is that electrical feeling that Ali tried to recreate in “Goddess‘Now in previews in the public theater after a development process of 18 years.
“My first child is Leban,” Ali said to his cast On the first rehearsal day for ‘goddess’. “He was born in 2006.”
“My second child is” goddess, “he said, referring to the musical. “And she was born in 2007. Eighteen years, never for one show.” (It is on the heels of his Broadway production of “Buena Vista Social Club“The lively stage adjustment of the beloved 1997 album that takes place in Havana -Night Clubs and was nominated For 10 Tony Awards, including for the direction of Ali.)
Making an original musical from zero is his own long order. And the core of this passion project is the African folklore myth of Marimba, the goddess of music that made songs from Heartbreak. It took Ali years to find the right employees and to sharpen the plot.
While the long-term, Tony-winning Broadway Show “Hadestown” is based on the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, it seems like a kind of exception to the stories that tend to be changed to musicals. “Godin” has no underworld, but it can have a similar attraction, with characters with a fortune -teller, deity fights and a trio of sultry, singing storytellers who act as frameworks between the human and spirit worlds. The themes in the core are universal: resistance to family pressure, feeding the talents that bring joy, listen to the calm voice inside. The key, Ali said, made it personal.
“I slowly had to put together the power that stood in the middle of the story that meant something to me,” said Ali, who comes from Nairobi.
The story focuses on Nadira (Amber Iman), a gifted singer who starts to perform in Moto Moto and transfixing the club’s protectors with her heavenly voice. On her attracted, Omari (Austin Scott), fresh from studying in the United States, is secretly playing the saxophone against the wishes of his more traditional father, the governor of Mombasa. Nadira, who is not entirely what she seems, also has a controlling parent – a mother who is the goddess of evil. That is the starting point for ‘Goddess’, a love story.
“It’s personal, it’s cultural, it’s his home, it’s his people, it’s his story,” Iman said about Ali. “Everyone is invested in a different way because that level of investments and love comes from top to bottom.”
The long journey for the show (it had A Run in the Berkeley Rep Theater In 2022) there is expand even further – until 1994, when a teenager Ali, who was in an English literature lesson in Kenya, first heard of the myth of Marimba, the goddess who changed a weapon in a musical instrument and whose jealous mother cursed her to never find love.
“Those ingredients,” said Ali, “the kind of human nature, extremity, how someone can be so gifted and a curse – those ingredients stay with me.”
Years later, in 2007, while he completed an MFA in directing Columbia University, he said he wondered: “If I wanted to make something original about my birthplace, what would it be?”
He thought of Marimba. “And she just didn’t leave me from the age of 16.”
But he still found his voice as an artist. “I have to go back to my roots,” Ali realized, who is now the associated artistic director of the Public Theater. “I have to go back to telling stories from when I was a child, and do skits, and how we would use drums to create atmosphere.”
He called in the playwright Jocelyn Bioh (“Jaja’s African hair braids“) To write the book, Michael Thurber for music and lyrics, and Darrell Grand Moultrie for choreography; they all worked on”Merry Wives“-A adaptation of Shakespeare that takes place in an African diasporic community in Harlem-for Shakespeare in the park in 2021 (in March the audience announced that Bioh stepped away from the creative team; James Eenings, who wrote the Pulitzer-Winning game”Fiddling‘That Ali also directed was named a new employee and has contributed extra book material.)
What emerged was a storyline that Putte from Ali’s own family expectations, which he defended to pursue theater. Ali grew up in a remarkable Muslim household, a true, he said, music and art were forbidden.
‘My own theater Was very secret, “he said.
Ali later moved to the United States to study computer science, but quickly changed his major to theater. He did not tell his parents up to six months before graduation. Only his father was present.
“So I understood the pressure to try to be an artist in a family where, you know, cultural, religious, even, there was that pressure there,” he said.
To make something authentic, the attention to detail should be microscopic. Ali knew that Swahili, an official language of Kenya, would be interwoven throughout the musical and that his cast would speak English, also an official language, with Kenyan accents. So he tapped Karishma Bhagani, who comes from Mombasa, as a dramaturge and cultural consultant.
“I think we feel the responsibility so deeply to bring these stories to life,” said Bhagani, “because we were told these stories by a different way of archiving, through our grandmothers, or by oral storytaditions that we see vividly in the world of the musical we have created.”
Every time Bhagani de Cast learned the Kenyan English pronunciation of a word-such as “Mohm-Bah-Sah” instead of “Mum-Bah-Sah”-they learned her American dialects in exchange. (She has perfected the bow of the valley girl.)
“You have to learn again how you can sing with this dialect and where you put it, which vowels you use,” said Scott about playing Omari. “And that is a very different revelation of this instrument that you have been using and re -configure it for years.”
Swahili, as language, music and food, is a mix of African, South Asian and Midden -Eastern influences. And the music in “Goddess” – fascinating, lush and kaleidoscopic – reflects that diversity in a large mix of jazz, pop, tarabAfrobeat and soul, with Arabic and indigenous African influences. It is a change, Thurber said, from West -African music Western audience know the tendency to know.
“East Africa has its own musical origin, his own tradition,” said Thurber. “And it turns out that it is phenomenally unique and phenomenal rich because of the influence of Swahili.”
The choreography is also based on a deep source of East African cultural descent, as well as Pan-African contemporary dance to show the radical diversity of Mombasa.
With a Mombasa nightclub, Moultrie said: “I play on different fields and genres.”
Ali is planning to continue to present this summer this summer in one starry sky Production of “Twelfth Night” on the reopened Delacorte Theater, in which the twins of the piece emigrate from Kenya to the mythical land of Illyria, with Lupita Nyong’o (That Ali met in a production of “Romeo and Juliet” in Nairobi in 1998 as a viola, and her brother Junior Nyong’o as Sebastian.
There is one through the line, Ali said to all his work.
“I’m all over joy,” he said. “If you feel the joy, when you feel the transformation, it reorganizes the cells in your body.”
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