Clinking Bottles With God.

It's an unlikely combination: Bible plays from medieval England and amateur performers from South Africa's deprived townships. But together they make the new West End musical "The Mysteries" one of the most powerful and innovative productions to hit London in years. Daring and irreverent, the show features a black Jesus and a jolly, rotund Noah who clinks beer bottles with God after the flood subsides. Night after night, audiences rise to their feet in applause, stirred by the sly take on familiar Bible stories, as well as by the cast's energy and spectacular singing. The raves have been so relentless that the show is now preparing to go on tour in America in May.

It's been a long, hard journey. When actor Vumile Nomanyama walked onstage during the show's first performance in Cape Town two years ago, white audience members marched out in protest of a black man's playing Jesus. But "The Mysteries" was designed to bridge racial and economic divides by drawing on common cultural heritage. And slowly, it seems to be succeeding. "Our task is not only building a new company but building a new audience," says director Mark Dornford-May. "Building a totally colorblind audience is going to take at least 20 years, but a mixed audience is a beginning." Meanwhile the cast is creating a new vision of what black South Africans can achieve. "People like us, who go abroad, contribute a lot when we come back," Nomanyama says. "We plow back the experience we get into our communities, so we can help upgrade standards."

The project got underway in 1998, when South African arts patron Dick Enthoven asked Dornford-May, who directs a theater in one of London's poorest boroughs, to form a company in Cape Town. Enthoven hoped to showcase South Africa's indigenous talent and bring its fractured communities together, and Dornford-May jumped at the chance. He began recruiting through the country's strong network of local choirs, which sent singers flocking to auditions. He didn't look at resumes because "people didn't have a past," he ...