Jeremy Taylor
Co-author, with Andrew Tracey and Paul Tracey, of Wait a Minim
(19*-) Teacher, guitarist, singer and actor. ** Was one of the performers in Leon Gluckman’s revue, Wait a Minim! at the Intimate Theatre in 1962. TAYLOR, Jeremy. Teacher, guitarist, singer and actor. ** He starred in Leon Gluckman’s revue, Wait a Minim! at the Intimate Theatre in 1962 with musicians Andrew and Paul Tracey, and Kendrew Lascelles. Anthony Farmer was the set designer. They toured the country for eleven months, visiting Durban’s Alhambra, Rhodesia, Cape Town, Pretoria and Port Elizabeth before returning to Johannesburg to play at the Alexander Theatre and the Colony in Hyde Park Hotel. Pieter Toerien and Basil Rubin brought him, together with Russ Conway and the American crooner Dick Haymes back to the Civic in 1967. Des and Dawn Lindberg presented his Back in Town at the Arena in 1979. He staged his one-man show Stuff at the Arena in March 1983. Roger Leclercq presented his Stuff at the Siegfried Mynhardt Theatre in 1984 until a fire destroyed the venue and the show was moved to a restaurant next door and then the Intimate. He starred in Robert Hewett’s Gulls which Keith Grenville directed in 1987/1988. He starred in Harold Brooke and Kay Bannerman’s The Earl and the Pussycat at the Leonard Rayne in 1992.
Quoted from the programme notes of Go For the Gap (a solo show of Taylor in 19**): 'Humorist, satirist, social and political commentator, composer/singer of songs and writer of monologues and poems, Jeremy Taylor is all of these. He has achieved world-wide recognition in a variety of guises ranging from becoming one of South Africa's most popular solo performers to successful concert partnerships with Spike Milligan. Born in Newbury over 40 years ago, Taylor was educated at Newbury Grammar School from which he attained an open scholarship to Trinity College, Oxford, reading French and Italian. When he left England in 1959 to take up a teaching post in Johannesburg, his evenings were spent singing in coffee bars and writing short stories and plays. At the suggestion of painter Harold Rubin, Jeremy began to write songs and went on to compose Wait A Minim. The show's success escalated following his debut record release 'Ag Pleez Daddy', which became a South African No. 1. When the review went on tour, he left his teaching job and for two years toured South Africa and Rhodesia and, when time permitted, undertook numerous late-night cabaret appearances. In 1961, he released a solo album 'Jeremy Taylor', which proved an outright success in spite of being banned by the South African Broadcasting Corporation. 1962 saw Jeremy appearing in a second show Minim Bili (Zulu for Minim the second), and in 1963, the best items from the two shows were combined and brought to London under the original title of Wait a Minim. The cast album was released by Decca, during which time Jeremy, together with co-stars Paul and Andrew Tracy, made an album Always Something New Out of South Africa, a variety of musical styles intermingled with unusual African musical instruments.
Sources
Tucker, 1997
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