As someone involved in the entertainment business generally, not just music, I am always intrigued by the circumstances in our country’s history that provide so much fertile opportunity for songs, literature, sculpture, plays, painting, dance, etc, to come before us as part of the entertainment landscape.
At the back of my mind, for example, is an idea to write a musical about the Caribbean migration experience to North America. The ingredients are there in waiting: the often comical engagements with a new culture, including the hilarious confusions stemming from language mix-ups; the struggle to adapt; the feeling of exile; the epiphanies many of us experience; the backtrack ordeal; the longing for the homeland. A musical, drawing on those opportunities for drama and comedy, and featuring the various vibrant Caribbean music forms, would be a powerful draw both for Caribbean people, wherever they live, and be appealing as well to the people who have come to know us from the culture we brought to their countries. While I haven’t begun the work, the idea remains alive; it is a natural.
Looking backwards, while it’s not widely known, because it was a theatre project, I wrote a full-length musical called Raise Up in the 1980s on the occasion of the anniversary of Emancipation. The play was commissioned by our Commemoration Commission and staged here at the Cultural Centre, directed by Ron Robinson, and the
