Last week saw the 50th anniversary of the internationally successful South African stage production Wait a Minim! that toured the world for seven years. Grocott's Mail reporter Prudence Mini found out all about the show from one of its co-writers and performers, Andrew Tracey, who lives in Grahamstown.
Last week saw the 50th anniversary of the internationally successful South African stage production Wait a Minim! that toured the world for seven years. Grocott's Mail reporter Prudence Mini found out all about the show from one of its co-writers and performers, Andrew Tracey, who lives in Grahamstown.
At Wait a Minim!'s début performance in Johannesburg on 17 January 1962, black and white people had to enjoy the show from opposite ends of the auditorium. Even though apartheid laws meant different races weren't allowed to even sit together at the theatre, the content of the show made some political comment, as well as taking a humorous look the differences between black and white people, and even some of the apartheid laws.
In the song ‘Black-White Calypso', written by another of the show's performers Jeremy Taylor, Tracey explained: "Whites would want to darken their skin and blacks would want to lighten their skin. And there were whites that wanted to curl their hair, and blacks that wanted to straighten their hair and so on – we were just joking about that."
Most of the show's music was written by Tracey and his brother, Paul, with contributions from Taylor. "We played up to 50 different instruments and we all sang," Tracey said. "Because I have been raised with African music since I was small, we had a lot of African songs and music from around the world in the show.” They played guitars, drums, mandolins, tubas, clarinets, Indian instruments and African instruments, he said.
It was Taylor's song, 'Ag Pleez Deddy' that the show became most famous for at first, and the ensuing success of Wait a Minim! changed the lives of the cast members, according to Tracey.
Recalling performances at the Rand Easter Show in Johannesburg eight weeks after the show began, Tracey said, "the Gallo Record company had a stand there and would play 'Ag Pleez Deddy' from their loudspeakers every day, and people heard this song and loved it so much. That got interest in the show, and we never looked back."
Taylor was a friend of Tracey's that he described as an English chap who studied in South Africa and sang in coffee bars. "He sang a lot of different songs from around the world, especially African music, and he followed my fathers work." Tracey's father, Hugh, pioneered the study of traditional African music and created the International Library of African Music (Ilam) in 1954, and also manufactured the first commercial kalimbas in the 1950s.
After Wait a Minim! toured South Africa and Zimbabwe (then called Rhodesia) for two years the cast went to England. This is where Tracey met his future wife, a South African, before the show toured to the United States, "of which one year was on Broadway – right in the middle of show business," and then to Australia and New Zealand before Wait a Minim! finally closed.
Tracey said that after their first performance in America they woke up early to read their first review from the Daily Mail. The headline was 'New jokers with guitars', but later that day they received another review that was much better. A New York Times article in the 1960s headlined: ‘Fun from South Africa’ and spoke of the show as a Broadway hit that dwelled on the political views of the cast and producer Leon Gluckman. They couldn't have done it without Gluckman, according to Tracey, saying that the former Rhodes University student "made a concert into a stage show”.
One day a performance in New York nearly turned into a disaster because people wanted to boycott the show, because of its South African connection and, "this was in the 60s when apartheid was getting very bad." Fortunately American singer, Harry Belafonte and South African music legend Miriam Makeba came to the theatre and asked protesters not to boycott the show. They explained that the cast were not not pro-apartheid and that the show actually made fun of aspects of South African politics.
In South Africa however, they always had the state police watching them, Tracey said, checking that the black and white audiences sat apart and that white and black actors were not together on stage.
When Wait a Minim! came to an end all of the cast members stayed in show business, except for Tracey. "I'm the one that came back home because I had my job to go to. My life’s work was studying African music with my father," he said. After Hugh's death in 1977, Tracey took over his father's job as director of Ilam, as well as other projects he was involved in, until he retired in 2005.
