Hi everyone
With the media centre closing early on Saturday and me needing to drive back early Sunday, I didn’t get the chance to put up the last three reviews.
Now that the Fest is over, it doesn’t seem worth running reviews of the three individually, so here’s a quick run down of what happened.
The Cape Philharmonic Orchestra’s Gala Concert on Saturday afternoon was the most fun I’ve ever had at an orchestral concert.
Rather than just sticking to classical music, conductor Richard Cock included everything from Olympic themes to James Bond music, Phil Collins, blues standards, jazz and English folk tunes.
The aspect which made it so much fun was the audience participation. In Coates’s By a Sleepy Lagoon, he conducted the audience, asking them to make “shooshing” noises to sound like the water breaking on the beach and even had one guy do seagull effects – which proved quite amusing.
But the best was to come in the finale – Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture.
The concert had been promoted as having a real cannon for the overture, but this proved logistically impossible.
So the audience was provided with paper bags, which we had to blow up and then bang at the point when conducted to do so.
It worked amazingly well, with only one or two people getting their timing wrong, and the sound of hundreds of people banging paper bags sounded amazingly like a cannon going off.
Then, much as a couple of years ago at an outdoor concert when he got the ECPO audience to do the Macarena, Cock had the Guy Butler Theatre audience up and doing a variation of the YMCA, changed to the NAFG to stand for National Arts Festival Grahamstown – written, he tells us, by “The Village Green People”.
The concert ran much longer than I expected and I had less than five minutes to get to the basement of the monument (luckily I was already in the building) for the student theatre production Tech-no/Logic.
Presented by the UCT drama department, it was one of the funniest shows I saw the entire Fest.
For the most part it was stand-up comedy and skits by the show’s co-writer Anne Hirsch, who mused on the infiltration of technology and the mass media into our lives.
Everything from cellphones to CCTV, Facebook, MySpace and Nintendo Wii provided the basis for jokes, while a large portion of the show focused on television, particularly reality shows.
The production featured three large screens and in between Hirsch’s performances, pre-recorded segments featuring the rest of the cast were shown.
These ranged from rap music videos to reality show parodies – including one called “You’ve been Terrified”.
I laughed from start to finish. A great show and Hirsch is definitely someone to watch for the future.
I ended off the Fest at the Scout Hall, watching Live and Kicking’s final night – the Comedy Awards.
Stuart Taylor proved why he was awarded the best overall comedian award with a brilliant and original set, which included very funny insights into his marriage and birth of his child. (I saw he was blue and wondered if my wife had been having an affair with a Smurf!)
Rob van Vuuren won the “hot hatchling” award for best stand-up debut by a comedian more used to working within a scripted show, and his set also proved extremely funny.
The three shows were a great way to end a brilliant Festival, which had numerous sold-out performances and great quality throughout the Main and Fringe.
- Leon Muston
Tags: 1812 Overture, Cape Philharmonic Orchestra, classical music, Festival, grahamstown, parodies, Phil Collins, Richard Cock, rob van vuuren, stand-up comedy, stuart taylor, student theatre, Tchaikovsky, University of Cape Town, Village People, YMCA
