Theater: What's Up in Africa, Doc?

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Kwamina (book by Robert Alan Aurthur; music and lyrics by Richard Adler) is the name of the London-educated, medically trained son (Terry Carter) of a dying black African chief, who returns from England to break the hold of an evil witch doctor (Brock Peters) on his superstitious people. Defying racial taboos, he falls in love with a white doctor (Sally Ann Howes). At this point there are enough doctors on stage to perform much-needed surgery on the script, but they never operate.

Kwamina tries to dance and drum its way out of its plotty doldrums and deadweight writing. Thanks to Choreographer Agnes de Mille, it sometimes does. Sinuously quivering shoulders and hypnotically swiveling hips make the stage thrum with barbaric force and sensual splendor, most notably in Mammy Traders. But the dances are less show builders than clock stoppers. Between them, the wordy worthy talk ticks on. The interracial love affair is played with such fastidious good taste by Terry Carter and Sally Ann Howes as to be flavorless.

An educated modern African of Kwamina's sort sometimes calls himself a Bintu, meaning "been to" Oxford or Cambridge. Broadway-born and bred, Kwamina has been to the latest headlines, but it never gets to the heart, in or out of Africa.