‘Grease’ in a Nairobi High School: Saheem Ali on His First Time Directing
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Version 0 of 1. I was 15 years old. Not yet a proud immigrant to this country. A young Muslim growing up in Nairobi with the very good fortune of having a dad who was an airline pilot. It was 1993 when he took me on a trip to London for the first time. But it wasn’t Big Ben or Buckingham Palace that caught my eye. It was a giant theater billboard with a name I knew: Craig McLachlan, a star of the Australian soap opera “Neighbours” (British spelling, thank you very much). The soap was hugely popular in Kenya, so I recognized him immediately. Also on the poster was a woman’s name I didn’t know at the time: Debbie Gibson (or was she going by Deborah in those days?) The poster was hot pink; silhouetted against the background was the face of a cool dude with sunglasses and a giant wave of jet black hair. It was advertising some show called “Grease.” I was intrigued. I persuaded my dad to give me enough pounds for a ticket. It was sold out, so all I could get was standing room, which was fine by me. In Kenya, the only live performances I had seen were acting skits in my high school assembly hall and comedy shows on the government-sponsored television network. I didn’t know what to expect. I was there so I could tell my friends that I saw Craig McLachlan in the flesh. Then the lights went down, and I was blown away. Experiencing the show was like sitting in a wind tunnel. I felt assaulted by the power coming from the biggest stage I had ever seen. It was spectacular and epic and sexy and HUGE. All the emotions were supersized, the dancing was electric, the singing was stupendous, the actors were unbelievable. I was in heaven. I didn’t want it to end. Afterwards, I finagled more money from my dad and bought the cast album cassette at the theater. I had to take a tangible piece of the show with me. In bed that night, I kept seeing the colors and images and magical moving set pieces in my head. The trip came to an end, but back home in Nairobi, I couldn’t stop thinking about “Grease.” My immediate instinct was that I had to reproduce it. Somehow, some way, I needed to make that experience happen again, and I wanted to be inside it and outside it all at once. So I sat at my Commodore 64 computer and typed out all the dialogue I could remember. I listened to the cassette on my Walkman, jogging my memory to fill in the gaps of what happened between the songs. No one told me about John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John — that there was a movie version of the show I could have easily watched on VHS. Would have saved me a lot of hours. Ah well. After my “script” was complete, I talked my high school friends into being in the show and assigned their roles. No auditions necessary; it’s set in a high school, after all. I would play Danny Zuko (only in Africa in the ’90s could a boy like me play the leader of the T-Birds without irony). Naturally my best friend would be Kenickie. There was a problem, though: I went to Jamhuri High, an all-boys school. What about the girls’ roles? Gender-bending was definitely not in my consciousness at 15, so to round out the cast, I picked an all-girls school near my home, State House Girls, and set out to convince one of their teachers to allow us to partner up and put on the show. She asked me what the point of doing this was. On the spot, I said, “Well, we’re going to raise money for the K.S.P.C.A. It’s for charity.” Good cause, check. She was sold. Next problem: money. We needed costumes, furniture, cool things to put onstage. I knew we would never recreate the incredible set pieces from London, like the end of Act I bleacher that glided magically across the stage during “We Go Together.” (OMG, how did they do that?!) I tasked my classmates to go around town, knock on business doors and ask them to donate to our production and support the young artists of tomorrow. We raised 10,000 Ksh (about $96 today). More than enough. So now we had a script. We had actors. We had the cassette we were going to lip sync to. (Did I mention none of us could sing?) We had the school’s permission (but not the publisher’s — sorry Samuel French, I know better now). And since this was my bright idea, I assumed the task of putting the show together as well. I directed, choreographed, designed and starred in that very makeshift, highly illegal, passion-fueled Nairobi premiere of “Grease.” The show went off without a hitch. No one cared that we couldn’t have been further from the first-world privileges enjoyed at Rydell High, or that our kinky hair stubbornly refused to slick back no matter how much grease we applied. We were inner-city kids expressing desire, heartbreak and the promise of a bright, heteronormative future where every boy gets the girl. That I had assembled every aspect of the production was intoxicating. It was no longer enough to perform. I had found my fix. I’ve moved on to telling stories more complex than “Grease.” I’m especially attracted to plays and musicals that ask challenging questions about identity, and lately, the responsibility of citizenship. But the theater that appeals to me doesn’t shy away from spectacle, or from embracing the power of music to tell a story. A little Greased Lightning never hurts. |