Puttin’ on the Ritz – despite the rolling on of the years
IT’S BACKSTAGE and Thelma Gibbon is helping to hang costumes. “I need a knee operation, but at 86 I don’t know if it’s wise,” she says. The rack is filling up with sequinned outfits, hired from Hollywood Costumes in Krugersdorp. Some of the oldtimers are tightening up with safety pins, others are dressed, eye-lashed, lipsticked and ready to paint Parys red.
We’re at Mimosa Hall, Parys’s chief resort, and the entertainment for tonight is Melodrama, presented by the elderly denizens of Sally Martin Park Methodist home. The programme is titled Celebrating Life and the cast, ranging from 60-odd to 90, will lip-synch and sway to golden oldies like Irving Berlin’s Puttin’ on the Ritz and Petula Clark’s This is My Song.
By 7pm the art deco hall is filled, the lights dim and the show begins. Back stage there’s a smattering of drama queen bitching, but under the spotlight, a handrail to aid them, they’re polished performers, though their instruments – a piano, harp, sax and drums – are fake. Suspend disbelief, and they’re belting it out in superb tune, tinkling the ivories with passion, plucking those strings like pros, sexing up the sax.
The regal woman with white hair framing her angular face is Vi Malan, mother of Rian ( My Traitor’s Heart), at 90 the most senior cast member. She sings and plays her faux instruments with animated abandon, turning us into guilty fodder for our mean, mortal complaints. We’re sitting upfront, courtesy of Wally, who died before he could assume his booking, and the inevitable bittersweet irony settles among us. Some won’t be here next year, but they have cocked a snook at age.
The Melodrama is the brainchild of Hilda Little, a former Springbok aerobics instructor who directed entertainments for the mining community of Welkom. Little and her husband John moved to Parys 10 years ago and her first Melodrama in 2006 was themed on World War I. “The stage was the scene of bombings and lightning strikes. I still get emotional thinking about it.”
She is kind and patient. “It’s about being patient, and making everyone feel special. There are a few drama queens, make no mistake, and jealousies can erupt into spats. So part of the job is smoothing things over.”
The cast have met three times a week for four months. Watching four women with a collective age of 341 do the Spice Girls’ Wannabe including Vi Malan and her walking stick, and you fear for their tickers.
Buddy Scott, 79, a founder of the Guild of Aviation Artists in South Africa, takes six pills a day “to stay alive”. He does an endearing version of Elvis Presley’s She’s not You, and tells me “Elvis and I were almost the same age”. “Hy’s so oulik (he’s so cute),” I hear someone in the audience effuse as he takes his bow. By 10pm the show is over and the cast help each other off the stage. Then they’re in their coach and driven back to Sally Martin Park.
“They’re deflated now, not sure what to do next,” Little tells me later, adding, “We’ll do another Melodrama next year.”
I hope they’ll all make it. They’re a reminder to us all to make an effort to enjoy life, until the very end.