It's Doo-Wop On Broadway

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

September 9, 1999 / 12:51 PM EDT / CBS

In the 1950s, American doo-wop music was one of the signature sounds. Across the country, groups of teen-agers, mostly boys, could be found hanging out on street corners and harmonizing to the stars about what else? Girls.

But it wasn't just happening here. Broadway musical Kat and the Kings shows how teen-agers as far as South Africa enjoyed singing doo-wop, too.

And what did they sing about? Girls, reports CBS News This Morning Co-Anchor Mark McEwen.

The musical, which opened in New York on Aug. 19., is about a teen-age singers in South Africa in the late 1950s who formed an American styled doo-wop group and achieved moderate success.

Their story is told by their onetime group leader, Kat Diamond, who named the group after his favorite pack of cigarettes, The Cavalla Kings.

The drama is told as a flashback, as an older Diamond reminisces on his shoeshine box, about the best time of his life when he was 17, singing American doo-wop songs with his friends and dreaming of making it big.

Kat and the Kings opened in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1995. Last year the show was performed in London and received two Olivier Awards, one for best new musical and another for best actor, which was given to the cast as a group.

"We started in a little theater," says Jody Abrahams, who plays the young Kat. "It was, hey, we had a good time with the show. To see it now, yeah. It's like being in the washing machine. Like a cat in the washing machine."

The ensemble cast primarily consists of six people, five men (the four young Cavalla Kings and the old shoeshine man) and one woman who plays the sister of one of the guys in the group.

The story is partly based on the real life experience of the late Salie Daniels, a singer and actor who sang in the 1950s with a group called the Rockets and who actually went by the nickname Kat.