By BRUCE DENNILL
Redhill Arts Festival / Redhill School, Morningside
The Village On Oval SundayFest: Jesse Clegg
The music festival aspect of RedFest, which included a festival-style market (that is to say, one with stalls where you could buy bath bombs, artisanal fudge, brightly coloured woven clothing, costume jewellery and other aesthetically pleasing non-essentials, gathered consistent crowds during the weekend. An eclectic mix of artists cycling through over the weekend ensured that most attendees would have found something to their specific tastes. On the final day of the festival, Jesse Clegg gave lunchtime visitors something to enjoy with his radio-friendly pop-rock, with long-time sideman Ray Green adding classy guitar parts to live drums and layered backing tracks and some appreciative fans lining the front of the stage to sing along with his hits.
Every Brilliant Thing / Starring Miguel de Sampaio
First staged in 2013, Duncan Macmillan and Jonny Donahoe’s clever, quirky sort-of one-man show is immersive, moving, pathos-drenched and still somehow hilarious theatre. Star and chaos orchestrator Miguel de Sampaio hands out a number of bits of paper as his audience drifts in. On each of these is written a number and a few words describing a feeling or object or action – some of the ‘brilliant things’ mentioned in the play’s title. As De Sampaio unpacks the story, told from the perspective of a young boy whose depressed mother is considering suicide, he regularly calls out a number, which is the cue for whichever audience member has the corresponding piece of paper to read out their particular brilliant thing. It’s a brilliant mechanism not only to drive investment in the narrative but to include the audience in such a way that they relate even more to the character than mere writing alone would have encouraged. This is further enhanced by the drafting of a number of audience members to play various small roles – the boy’s father, a much-loved teacher and counsellor, the woman he falls in love with – guided by De Sampaio as they do so. This aspect also ensures that no two performances will ever be the same, making the one you’re watching even more special.
De Sampaio’s performance is remarkable, combining expert recall of the script with the improvisational skills required to adapt to each new audience’s reactions and the empathy needed to tread a line between tragedy and hope and humour and anguish as the story unfolds. Every Brilliant Thing ultimately leaves you uplifted and grateful for what you have, and possibly even inspired to help bring others to a similar space. It follows no traditional guidelines, and it has all the more impact for that.
Unity: Unbroken Completeness – Johannesburg Queer Chorus
The Johannesburg Queer Chorus is a choir comprising members of the city’s LGBTQIA+ community and their friends, with a the ‘community’ part being as important to the vision as the singing. With mostly amateur singers as members, the Chorus doesn’t necessarily feature the strongest, best-trained voices but under the leadership of musical director Jacques Le Roux and with the strong accompaniment of pianist Eugene Joubert, their collective efforts and fresh arrangements of well-known English, Afrikaans, Xhosa and other vernacular songs provide great entertainment across a range of moods.
The fact that these are not full-time performers is betrayed to some degree by their relative physical stillness as performers (with a couple of exceptions, in which songs that are clearly personal favourites inspire more widespread vitality). Music director and conductor Le Roux is their – and the audience’s – inspiration in that latter regard, fizzing with dynamism and commitment to the music, tempos and arrangements. He’s also singing throughout, effectively acting as a human teleprompter for any of the choir members should they find themselves confused about exactly where they are in a song.
A good-natured, outgoing outfit with a range of material that offers audiences as diverse as the choir something to fit every taste.