Cabaret

In the early 1990s I partnered with Marita Esterhuyse and we created and produced several cabarets in the literary European style. European style means social commentary, not the sequence and tits variety. The cabarets were perfomed in the Afrikaans language.

We brainstormed the concepts together. Marita wrote the script and composed some numbers. I did the arrangement and orchestration on MIDI.

The cabarets were performed at the Grahamstown National Arts Festival and at various functions and venues in Gauteng.

Tango vir 'n tert

The first cabaret was Tango vir 'n tert (Tango for a tart). Social commentary in music and words tried to expose the hypocricy of the Afrikaans culture.

Marita and Jacques

Kat in die donker

Our second cabaret was Kat in die donker - 'n kabaret oor knyp. The title is a variation of an Afrikaans idiom knyp die kat in die donker (literally pinching the cat in the dark) which means doing naughty things on the sly. The sub text again was about the hypocricy of Afrikaans culture. In public many Afrikaans people are very religious and prude, but in dark corners they "pinch the cat".

The Dutch word for cat, and the English pet name for a kitten sound very similar, a taboo sound for decent Afrikaans ears.

Our Dutch and English songs with such words had some of the audience storming out of our shows. Of course this compelled rows of people at the festival, waiting for another show, inquisitively to come to our show.

Laaste Vastrap in Parys

The cabaret Laaste vastrap in Parys was social commentary taking the controversial Brando movie "Last tango in Paris" as motive. The cabaret investigated how the conservative community of the sleepy South African town Parys does not really differ in its morals from cosmopolitan decadent French Paris.

Here is the original cast:





And here is the cast of the final production in Voortrekker (ie 'frontier') drag:
Jacques, Peter, Onida and Marita

And what have we here...?

Here I am in an outfit of a 150 years later, thanks to tennisballs.