At 'Djembe! The Show' at Apollo, you get to bang your own drum all night long

Enter the Apollo Theater and there will be a djembe drum on your seat. I speak not of some souvenir percussive takeaway nor of a cheap facsimile of the skin-covered goblet drum. Nope. Every last seat has a full-size, hand-made, rope-tuned, high-grade djembe from West Africa. You’d pay a couple of hundred bucks of Amazon, but no, it does not leave with you.

But play it you can (pro tip: pick it up).

And that, really, is the main feature of “Djembe! The Show,” a new commercial entertainment created with roots in the United Kingdom that taps into one of emerging truths about the arts these days: people don’t just want to sit in the dark anymore, they prefer to participate. And thus, at times, “Djembe!,” created by Doug Manuel, feels like a giant drumming class at the Old Town School of Folk Music, with up to 400 or so people from all walks of life, all taking instruction from the stage and banging away at once.

It’s quite a sound. And, if you always craved being part of a djembe flashmob or a spontaneous ensemble, thoroughly invigorating. Even empowering.

“Djembe!,” which is hoping for a long run at the Apollo, also has the advantage of appealing to multiple generations at once. Around me Wednesday night, kids smaller than their drums had a blast, as did some very mature drummers. You’re not forced to play and — here’s another of the show’s main assets — the class is large enough to mask any inadequacies in the drumming department from any particular student. So there’s a certain impunity from embarrassment. Cool idea. You can just pretend to be hitting the right spot, or you can go hell for leather. Or you can do as you’re told.

So you get your simplified drumming lessons from a true djembe master in the superb Guinean musician Fode Lavia Camara, along with a genial emcee in Ben Hope. There’s a live band. And while you are resting your hands, the fine Chicago performer Rashada Dawan sings a variety of songs, all designed to demonstrate how these West African rhythms informed the entire progression of popular music — from gospel to the syncopation of ragtime to pop to salsa. The show’s text, basically a kind of light, warm, TED Talk-y lecture on global connectivity and how the djembes also were the forerunners of our smartphones, emphasizes the kind of cross-cultural connectivity that is more common in entertainments outside the United States than inside, where people tend to worry more about cultural appropriation.

Here, you get a “We are the World” kind of spirit, clearly meant as a kind of “I’d like to teach the world to sing” manifesto, telling us, to quote a line, that whatever boundaries we have are those of our minds and making — and that the djembe is a reminder of the common humanity we keep forgetting. If you’re down with that optimism, and you don’t see it as erasure, you’ll have fun. And unlike, say, “Tap Dogs,” “Djembe!” is an explicit celebration of all the flowed from West Africa. As such, I suspect it will be embraced by music teachers, once word gets out.

I wish the show featured more hip-hop. Given the “Djembe!” focus on the history of rhythm, it feels like that genre gets short shrift, especially since we’re in this city. “99 Luftballoons” is one weird choice. And while Gloria Estefan’s “Rythmn is Gonna Get You” has no bigger fan that me, that was 32 years ago. The djembe beats need to catch up to the present.

Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.

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Review: “Djembe! The Show” (3 stars)

When: Open run

Where:Apollo Theater, 2540 N. Lincoln Ave.

Running time: 1 hours, 30 minutes

Tickets: $35-$53 at www.djembetheshow.com

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