Scene-setting doesn’t get much better than this. As the band build up the driving reggae skank of Toots and the Maytals’ Funky Kingston, the Jamaican capital awakens. A workman’s hammer and a cleaner’s brush help tap out the tune, the stage bustles with life and in one comic vignette a banana is brandished like a gun.
Later in the show, a tamarind-switch punishment will provide a more brutal percussion and real pistols will be drawn – one in each hand, as in the iconic poster for the 1972 movie. Part of the phenomenal achievement of this musical adaptation is how the story is propelled from sun-kissed comedy to elegiac tragedy with the same front-footed energy as that opener, one of several reggae standards bolstering the film’s genre-defining soundtrack featuring Jimmy Cliff, the Melodians and Desmond Dekker.
