‘Goddess’ Brings Kenyan Folklore to New York

In “Goddess,” an original musical about a mysterious singer in Mombasa, Kenya, Moto Moto is not just an Afro-jazz nightclub, it’s a great equalizer, where Kenyans of all faiths, tribes and social classes shake and spin their bodies in rapture.

“I’ve literally met the loves of my life on dance floors,” the director Saheem Ali said. “So I understand the power of a life-changing event that happens in a space of communal dancing and joy.”

It’s that electric sense of belonging that Ali sought to recreate in “Goddess,” now in previews at the Public Theater after an 18-year development process.

“My first child is Liban,” Ali said to his cast on the first day of rehearsal for “Goddess.” “He was born in 2006.”

“My second child is ‘Goddess,’” he said, referring to the musical. “And she was born in 2007. Eighteen years, never again for one show.” (It arrives on the heels of his Broadway production of “Buena Vista Social Club,” the lively stage adaptation of the beloved 1997 album that is set in Havana nightclubs and was nominated for 10 Tony Awards, including for Ali’s direction.)

Creating an original musical from scratch is its own tall order. And at the heart of this passion project is the African folklore myth of Marimba, the goddess of music who created songs from heartbreak. It took Ali years to find the right collaborators and hone the plot.

While the long-running, Tony-winning Broadway show “Hadestown” is based on the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, it shines as a kind of exception to the stories that tend to get turned into musicals. “Goddess” doesn’t have an underworld, but it might hold a similar appeal, with characters that include a soothsayer, deity infighting and a trio of sultry, singing narrators who act as conduits between the human and spirit worlds. The themes at its core are universal: resisting familial pressures, nurturing the talents that bring joy, listening to the quiet voice within. The key, Ali said, was making it personal.

“I needed to slowly kind of piece together the power that was at the center of the story that meant something to me,” Ali, who is from Nairobi, said.

The story centers on Nadira (Amber Iman), a gifted singer who begins performing at Moto Moto, transfixing the club’s patrons with her heavenly voice. Drawn to her is Omari (Austin Scott), fresh off studying in the United States, and playing the saxophone in secret against the wishes of his more tradition-minded father, the governor of Mombasa. Nadira, who isn’t quite what she seems, also has a controlling parent — a mother who is the goddess of evil. Such is the premise for “Goddess,” a love story.

“It’s personal, it’s cultural, it’s his home, it’s his people, it’s his story,” Iman said of Ali. “Everyone is invested in a different way because that level of investment and love comes from the top down.”

The long journey for the show (which had a run at the Berkeley Rep Theater in 2022) extends back even further — to 1994, when a teenage Ali, sitting in an English literature class in Kenya, first learned of the myth of Marimba, the goddess who turned a weapon into a musical instrument and whose jealous mother cursed her never to find love.

“Those ingredients,” Ali said, “the kind of human nature, extremity of it, how someone can be so gifted and have a curse — those ingredients kind of stuck with me.”

Years later, in 2007, as he was finishing an M.F.A. in directing at Columbia University, he said he asked himself, “If I wanted to make something original from my place of birth, what would it be?”

He thought of Marimba. “And she just had not left me from age 16.”

But he was still finding his voice as an artist. “I need to go back to my roots,” Ali, who is now the associate artistic director of the Public Theater, realized. “I need to go back to storytelling from when I was a kid, and doing skits, and how we would use drums to create atmosphere.”

He enlisted the playwright Jocelyn Bioh (“Jaja’s African Hair Braiding”) to write the book, Michael Thurber for music and lyrics, and Darrell Grand Moultrie for choreography; they all worked on “Merry Wives” — a Shakespeare adaptation set in an African diasporic community in Harlem — for Shakespeare in the Park in 2021. (In March, the Public announced that Bioh was stepping away from the creative team; James Ijames, who wrote the Pulitzer-winning play “Fat Ham,” which Ali also directed, was named a new collaborator, and has contributed additional book material.)

What emerged was a story line that draws from Ali’s own familial expectations, which he defied to pursue theater. Ali grew up in an observant Muslim household, one where, he said, music and art were prohibited.

“My own theater making was very surreptitious,” he said.

Ali later moved to the United States to study computer science, but quickly switched his major to theater. He didn’t tell his parents until six months before graduation. Only his father attended.

“So I understood the pressure of trying to be an artist in a family where, you know, culturally, religiously, even, there was that pressure there,” he said.

In order to pull off something authentic, the attention to detail would need to be microscopic. Ali knew that Swahili, an official language of Kenya, would be interwoven throughout the musical, and that his cast would speak English, also an official language, with Kenyan accents. So he tapped Karishma Bhagani, who is from Mombasa, as a dramaturg and cultural consultant.

“I think we feel the responsibility so deeply to bring these stories to life,” Bhagani said, “because we were told these stories through a different mode of archiving, through our grandmothers, or through oral storytelling traditions that we see vibrant in the world of the musical that we’ve created.”

Each time Bhagani taught the cast the Kenyan English pronunciation of a word — like “MOHM-bah-sah” instead of “MUM-bah-sah” — they taught her American dialects in return. (She has perfected the Valley girl inflection.)

“You have to relearn how to sing with this dialect and where you’re placing it, what vowels you’re using,” Scott said of playing Omari. “And that’s a whole other breaking open of this instrument you’ve been using for years, and reconfiguring it.”

Swahili, as language, music and food, is a mix of African, South Asian and Middle Eastern influences. And the music in “Goddess” — buoyant, lush and kaleidoscopic — mirrors that diversity in a great blend of jazz, pop, taarab, Afrobeat and soul, with Arab and Indigenous African influences. It’s a change, Thurber said, from the West African music Western audiences tend to know.

“East Africa has its own musical lineage, its own tradition,” Thurber said. “And it turns out that it’s phenomenally unique and phenomenally rich because of the Swahili influence.”

The choreography also draws from a deep well of East African cultural lineage, as well as Pan-African contemporary dance to exhibit Mombasa’s sweeping diversity.

With a Mombasa nightclub, Moultrie said, “I get to play in different fields and genres.”

Ali plans to continue presenting those traditions this summer in a starry production of “Twelfth Night” at the reopened Delacorte Theater, in which the play’s twins immigrate from Kenya to the mythical land of Illyria, featuring Lupita Nyong’o (who met Ali in 1998 in a production of “Romeo and Juliet” in Nairobi) as Viola, and her brother Junior Nyong’o as Sebastian.

There’s one through-line, Ali said, to all of his work.

“I’m all about joy,” he said. “When you feel the joy, when you feel the transformation, it reorganizes the cells in your body.”