In New York: Children of Apartheid Meet Broadway

(2 of 3)

The intensity is reflected in the audience, which, unusual for Broadway, is more than 80% black. Black churches, civic groups and schools have bought blocks of tickets, swelling the theater with revival-level enthusiasm. "There's a family bond," explains Charnele Dozier Brown, the only American in the cast. During a recent matinee the spectators laughed, stomped, clapped and cried along with the musical's emotional tide. They lifted their voices to the anthem Freedom Is Coming Tomorrow. "You can relate to it," said Gloria Brown, a Newark cafeteria worker. Too much time has passed since the children of Sarafina! have seen their parents, their friends, or the green hills of Zululand. In the Hotel Esplanade (where they settled after guests at the Mayflower didn't take to rock music at 3 a.m.), they visit back and forth like in a college dorm. Their rooms are filled with VCRs, miniskirts, Japanese cameras and fluffy pink stuffed animals, but they are far from feeling at ease. "I miss the chickens that used to play on the ground at home," said Ntomb'khona Dlamini, 17, the tiniest cast member at less than 5 ft. Her television is turned to MTV, where the rockers gyrate in Day-Glo. Daughter of an evangelical preacher in Umlazi, outside Durban, she sang in a choir with her sister and four brothers. "In South Africa I didn't know Broadway was so famous," she sighs. "I didn't know it was the end of the world."

Dlamini calls her parents three times a week. Her roommate, Nandi Ndlovu, a 17-year-old with a round face like a happy Buddha, phones home nearly every night. "I can't do otherwise," she shrugs. Enfolded in a pink terry-cloth bathrobe, she curls up in an armchair and lets the computerized pages of the phone bill cascade to the floor: $3,967.78 worth of calls in two months. In the kitchenette, the remains of some ipapa, South African-style cornmeal bread cooked here in the wee, homesick hours after the show, lie among empty cans of grape soda.

For all the torture, the tear gas, the murders of schoolchildren that Sarafina! depicts, and for all the agony of apartheid that its players have experienced, America, in its midtown-Manhattan incarnation, seems far from utopian. "Before I came, I thought the U.S. would be like a small heaven," said Thandani Mavimbela of Hlabisa, a rural village in Natal province. "I thought it would be like on TV -- The Boat of Love. Love Boat? Or Dallas. But then you see places like Harlem. I was shocked. The empty, burned buildings. On Broadway, very poor people sleeping on the street. In South Africa, when I was hungry and far away from home, someone would always take me in. I would not have to eat from a dustbin."

Mavimbela, 26, is the broad-shouldered son of a house painter. He dropped out of school at 17: the family lacked the money to pay school fees for six children. Drifting from township to township, he found no steady work. Two friends invited him to act in a play about a youth who fled after the Soweto uprising of 1976 to join a guerrilla army. Furtively, the three would perform in community halls in black townships, ready to escape through a back door should police arrive.