CRY, THE BELOVED COUNTRY
Published in 1948, just before the Afrikaner-dominated Nationalist government launched its policy of apartheid, Cry, the Beloved Country was inspired by Paton’s observations of the youths he presided over as principal of the black Diepkloof reformatory. Paton sought to alert his white countrymen to their culpability in the issue of black crime–to its roots in poverty, oppression, and their disruption of the black family. He tells the story of a black Anglican preacher, Stephen Kumalo, who travels from his rural parish to Johannesburg in search of his sister and his son. Finding the sister has become a prostitute, he takes charge of her little boy. Worse, he finds that his own son, Absalom is a thief who recently murdered a man during a robbery; ironically, though the victim was a white advocate for racial equality, his death fuels an antiblack backlash. After Absalom is executed, the grief-stricken Stephen forges a delicate friendship with James Jarvis, the father of Absalom’s victim, a plantation owner. Thus the tragedy leads to renewal, though Paton’s idealism is guarded: “But when that dawn will come,” the book concludes, “of our emancipation, from the fear of bondage and the bondage of fear, why, that is a secret.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
But in revamping the music for his version, Galati makes the very mistake Weill and Anderson avoided: here Stephen, played surprisingly weakly by Ernest Perry Jr., is sung at by a Greek-style chorus but never sings himself. While not fatal, this choice is crippling: it robs the show of a tragic hero whose quest demands our attention and leaves Stephen a passive, not very compelling character. (It also disregards the work’s intentions; the Goodman Theatre is lucky that the Kurt Weill Foundation, founded to preserve and promote the composer’s legacy, didn’t shut the show down before it opened.) Reassigning these songs to the chorus distances us from them–especially because of the way Galati schlepps his rich-voiced but anonymous ensemble around the stage into one politely arranged tableau after another. Chorus leader Kingsley Leggs and Darius de Haas as Absalom, to whom Galati reassigned Stephen’s main songs, sing very well by today’s pop-Broadway standards but are thin and shallow compared to the folk-opera quality Weill had in mind. Meanwhile, La Chanze’s jarringly strident belting of “Trouble Man” and “Stay Well,” the two ballads sung by Absalom’s bride, ruins their lyrical beauty, especially in the insistently up-tempo pace forced on them by conductor Zelnis. (For a sense of how this music should sound, listen to the superb new recording of Lost in the Stars conducted by Julius Rudel for MusicMasters Classics.)
