post-mortem

of the opening night.

1) The Migritude ad that was supposed to run in The Nation, Kenya's largest-circulating daily, all this week, did not appear. The Nation mysteriously dropped it.
First time this has happened in the history of Phoenix Players running the ad with them.

2) A number of writers, journalists, cultural movers and shakers are out of Nairobi this week for the Hay-on-Wye Literary Festival, or the media conference in Arusha.

3) A number of journalists I spoke to the morning after said:

But we already saw Migritude at the Carnivore in 2005.

I had to restrain myself from howling down the phone:

NO!! That was the TRAILER!!! This is the FULLY-REALIZED, COMPLETED, SHOW!!!!

4) Getting to the Professional Centre, where we're staging Migritude, on a weekday evening, is sheer murder in terms of Nairobi's traffic chaos. It was a risk on my part to choose this venue, because of it's history as Nairobi's oldest rep theatre space, rather than somewhere outside the city centre.