This year, New York-based theatre director Saheem Ali became the first Kenyan to direct a Broadway show. He staged Fat Ham, a contemporary adaptation of Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, from April to July.
New York’s acclaimed Broadway theatre district is renowned for elaborate shows, exceptional performance, and high entertainment value.
Written by James Ijames, Fat Ham follows the comedic antics of an African-American family in the southern US and it won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for drama.
Ali, associate director at the Public Theatre in New York City, received the 2023 Tony nomination for Best Direction of a Play. He described the honour as a “Kenyan boy’s dream come true”.
Ali’s love for performance began in childhood and liked to gather neighbourhood children to put on skits for friends and family.
On a visit to London in 1994, he watched the musical Grease, adapted from the popular 1970s film. “I was completely blown away and went to see it a second time, bought a cassette, and just couldn’t stop thinking about it,” he recalled.
Returning home, he staged Grease with friends at Jamhuri High School. Being a boys-only school, he convinced the headmistress at State House Girls High School to let the girls participate in the show.
“I wrote the script from my memory of the scenes and we had the cassette so we sang along to the tape.” Grease was his first attempt at directing at just 16 years old.
Moving to St Mary’s School Nairobi he presented Grease once more. “I directed, designed it, and acted. Basically, I did everything,” said Ali. “And June Gachui was in it.”
The performance caught the attention of the Phoenix Players theatre company and Ali was invited to audition for the role of Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet.
There he met two key people — Lupita Nyong’o, who played Juliet, and Phoenix director, the late James Falkland.
Ali, 45, credits his initial exposure to theatre-making to Falkland.
“I assisted Falkland, watched the rehearsals and saw how he put shows together. Sometimes if an actor couldn’t do the show, I stepped in.”
His fondness for Shakespeare began at Phoenix. “I was completely enthralled by the language. It was English but not really English and James let us speak with [Kenyan] accents.”
Ali’s heart was set on a theatre career but his parents were unconvinced about a full-time life in the arts.
“Understandably so because we don’t have enough examples of people who make it work,” he explained.
“Except for the folks who ran Phoenix Players, for everyone else acting was like a hobby.”
He hopes to someday give young people in Kenya the kind of access and exposure he got, and “the possibility of being a full-time theatre artist”.
At Northeastern University in Boston, US, he enrolled for a computer science degree but he later switched to a theatre major. His parents only found out when he graduated.
Since choosing directing over acting, Ali is keen to bring the African, minority and immigrant perspectives into all his work.
But in America, he was surprised to find only White people in Shakespeare talking with British accents. “I made it my mission to make Shakespeare feel contemporary, relevant and spoken in ways that embrace people’s identities,” said Ali, who has a master of fine arts degree from Columbia University.
He has directed Romeo and Juliet, Henry V, Twelfth Night and bilingual productions in Spanish and English.
Merry Wives in 2021 in New York, was in collaboration with Ghanaian-American playwright, Jocelyn Bioh. The mostly West African cast performed in their natural accents and personalities.
“I was interrogating how people speak when doing Shakespeare. The British–White thing wasn’t my entry point.” Approaching familiar plays in different styles, says Ali, keeps him engaged and dynamic. “The beauty of theatre is that you keep reinventing the stories and ways you work.”
When Covid-19 shut down theatres in 2020, Ali turned to audio, heading three radio plays including Richard II with Lupita Nyong’o. A confluence of events brought about Fat Ham.
“It scratched my Shakespearean itch and was the beginning of a fruitful artistic collaboration,” said Ali, who handpicked Jocelyn Bioh and James Ijames to work with.
Nevertheless, he is attracted to all forms of theatre including modern drama and musicals. In 2015 he presented Hope: The Nelson Mandela Musical.
In 2016 came Kill Move Paradise, a mythical dark play by James Ijames premised on the reality of police brutality against black men in America. Nigeria’s film industry is the setting for the romantic comedy Nollywood Dreams staged in 2017.
Currently, he is working on a musical called Goddess, set in Mombasa and based on a mythological African music deity.
