Jumpin' Jo'burg

Wait a Minim! is an ingratiating musical revue that is light of hand, light of heart, and light of foot, possibly because the cast is barefoot most of the time. This sparklingly talented company (five men, three girls) seems to share its songs rather than sell them, knows how to sail its jokes across the footlights rather than slug them, and times its spoofy skits to the precise half note (which is what a minim is).

The troupers are mostly South Africans, and like all inhabitants of peripheral cultures, they are both keenly aware of, and distinctly amused by, more magnetic centers of civilization. Thus, a part of the show parodies national types ranging from Italian gondoliers to U.S. cowboys, from French amorists to supranational cool-jazz combos. In a beer garden, a band of Tyrolean-hatted minstrels is cleaving the air with Bavarian bonhomie, when suddenly the guitars are spitting like machine guns, a momentary lapse into the old Wehrmacht tunes of glory. In a sight gag of suspended comic torment, a girl blowing up a balloon reduces a Buckingham Palace guard from graven aplomb to jittering hysteria.

Music fills the evening, and the instruments have such wondrous personalities that they sometimes threaten to upstage the cast. Among those played are the mbira, timbila, kalimba, guitar-lute, Lozi drums, tampura drone, bamboo pipe, Japanese koto zither, and double respiratory linguaphone. These vary in appearance from hollowed-out Halloween pumpkins to xylophones seemingly made of baby elephant tusks. The chief players, Andrew and Paul Tracey, are equally adept with bagpipes, clarinets, flutes and tubas. Of the three fetching girls, Dana Valery has a voice of expressive authority and distinctive beauty. She has the show's tenderest numbers, folk ballads that ripple as hauntingly across the stage as moonlight on still water.

The troubled waters of South African race policy receive a scattering of satiric pebbles in Minim, but the all-white cast is scarcely in a position to throw critical stones. Indeed, their imitations of black Africans seem a trifle anemic, especially in a closing drum-and-stomp session. Otherwise, this troupe is so gifted that it may never see Johannesburg again.

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