FELA: At the broadway musical

By Our REPORTER -
FELA! the Broadway production about the life and  times of afrobeat legend Fela Anikulapo Kuti opened and triumphed at Expo Convention Center of the Eko Hotels and Suites  for a five-day sold-out run.

The landmark Broadway musical, which won three Tony Awards (Broadway’s highest honor) including Best Choreography (Bill T. Jones) starred its original cast Sahr Ngaujah reprising his role of Fela Kuti spiced with creative arrangement of Fela’s music etched on a narrative of his life in….depiction.

It’s not often that a Broadway Musical  audience gets to shake its collective booty with the cast or finds itself invited to imitate their extraordinary pelvic thrusts in a raunchy “clock” dance.


The Broadway hit about the Nigerian political firebrand, pioneer of Afrobeat, and polygamist, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti is a  frenetic mix of concert, dance party and crash course in the career of the eponymous maverick.

It arrived in Lagos boasting a terrific 12-piece band, who intensify the music’s seductively repetitive rhythms with a lovely creative rearrangement, and a bunch of knock-out dancers who are the last word in hip-swivelling, butt-brandishing rapture.

Fela! explores the musician’s controversial life as an artist and political activist through more than two-and-a-half hours of extravagant song and dance routines. There’s also a fascinating beginner’s guide to Afrobeat, “B.I.D. (Breaking It Down”), where he reduces the musical fusion to its constituent elements.

Much of the performers information about Fela and his queens came from Micheal Veal’s Fela: From West Africa to West Broadway and Fela; ‘’This Bitch of a Life’‘, a 1982 biography by Carlos Moore, a Cuban ethnologist and political scientist who knew Fela.

Hence, too, the autobiographical format in which, with the aid of projected newspaper headlines and documentary film footage on Marina, he recaps the major turning points in his career. These include his radicalisation by a Black Power girlfriend (Sandra Iszadore)  in Los Angeles in 1968 as they share their respective experiences – she as a child of the American civil rights movement, he as an activist against his country’s military dictatorship – their flirtatious, politically-charged banter heats up.

Soon they look admiringly at one another with the same realisation: “We have a lot to learn from each other.” Indeed, the scene was sublime. After the laughs subsided, one could almost hear the smiles. The play  is full of such moments.

The play also  narrates, Fela’s mother Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti (playing ghost mother)  who, even after her death at the hands of the country’s military government, played a critical role in her son’s life encouraging her son to continue the struggle.

His wives, or “queens”, as he refers to them, are depicted as regal, dignified companions. Others, however, have criticised the play for this. Fela, in fact, married 27 women in 1978 before he adopted a rotating system of 12 wives.


Kevin Mambo who played Fela with a female dancer on stage

In the play, he is able to explain his life choices, but the women are silent. Although, critics have taken the show to task for presenting Fela’s wives as “largely festive window-dressing”.

But for Morenike Taire, a female Vanguard Columnist, Fela’s gender consciousness was well-represented. “Fela was a feminist,” she says.”His mother was a freedom fighter, and his intention was to keep his wives safe.”

Other points of controversy in the musician’s hard-partying life are glossed over. Copious drug use is rendered as an unequivocal moral right. There is no mention of him describing condoms as “un-African” and calling Aids a “white man’s disease”, even though it tragically took his life.

Fela’s contentious views were opportunities to offer the viewer a more well-rounded view of his character, yet the show unfortunately misses them amidst the feel-good atmosphere. To be sure, the play appeared to have long odds at success.

Even with the endorsement of celebrity producers Sean “Jay-Z” Carter, Will Smith and Jada Pinkett-Smith, Broadway is a notoriously brutal place for new musicals – especially one with no big stars in the cast and no widely known pop hits. Yet since it began its run on Broadway last November, the show has thrived.

And it is due to cross the Atlantic for a run at National Theatre in London in the autumn.  Kevin Mambo, one of the actors who plays Fela (owing to the demands of the role, he alternates performances with Sierra Leonean-American actor Sahr Ngaujah), says: “The response has been more overwhelmingly positive than I could have expected.”

He tells the story of the time he saw an octogenarian couple walking out of the show crying. Mambo went over to ask after the couple. The man responded: “Everything is fine, but we have been going to the theatre for 40 or 50 years, and that was one of the most important things we’ve seen.”

The show, and Fela’s life, has also resonated with Mambo himself. As a Zimbabwean-Canadian, who is both globally aware but also proudly African, Mambo thinks of Fela and himself as “Afropolitans”. “To have this artist here whose success is built on the hybridisation of funk and jazz sounds from Africa and the diaspora made a lot of sense to me in terms of my own experience.”

The stage, set up as an approximation of the Shrine, is where Fela – who is played by Sahr Ngaujah – narrates his journeys to far-away lands both geographical and spiritual. The original Shrine was closed soon after Fela Kuti’s  death in 1997, but the play’s director and choreographer, the renowned Bill T Jones, does an extraordinary job of crafting an immersive experience.

As the performers by turns sit, interact and walk about the stage before the performance and during its intermission, one imagines that is exactly what the Shrine was like in its heyday: a place to hang out and share ideas.

Rarely offstage, Sahr Ngaujah (the sole import from the original Broadway cast) delivers a bravura performance of almost insolently natural magnetism and witty sexual swagger.

During the course of a free-flowing two hours and 20 minutes, the audience is treated to an innovative mix of biography, music and dance. The show itself, though, is of variable quality.

The best bits, for me, were those that make you feel on your pulses with Fela’s music, with its sarcastic pidgin lyrics and obstinately insistent rhythms, posed such a threat to the government.

That’s the case with the staging here of “Zombie” where the satire on the mindless robotic conformity of the generals and their lackeys is reinforced by the loony parodic goose-steps in the choreography.

The worst parts are those that expose how close the show comes to unchallenged hagiography. All the unsavoury aspects of this homophobic, anti-feminist sybarite have been airbrushed from the record.

And while it might be anachronistic to drag up his 1997 death from an Aids-related illness (he thought condoms were “un-African”) during the main body of the piece, I felt uneasy about the continuing silence on the topic when the casket of an Aids fatality featured in an up-to-date parade of the coffins of victims of injustice (including Stephen Lawrence and Ken Saro-Wiwa) that pile up as an indictment of corrupt authority at the end.