From the back of the theater sounds a regular beat, quiet at first, then mounting in volume. In dances a slender woman wearing a tight chef's jacket and hat. She is holding aloft a frying pan and, well, playing it. Three men follow her, also in white chef's uniforms, bearing -- and beating -- a plastic tub, a colander and an oilcan, in that order. As the volume escalates, all four snake their way through the audience; by the time they reach the stage, the noise from these improvised instruments is deafening.

Welcome to a night with Nanta: "Jackie Chan meets the Marx Brothers," as the South Korean performance group's manager, Kim Byung Ick, later remarks. For the past five years, on tour and in its home base of Seoul (where 50 percent of the audience is Japanese tourists), Nanta has been wowing audiences with its unusual musical comedy show.

What's so unusual about it? Formed in October 1997, the group takes its name from ran-da, a reading of two kanji meaning "to beat vigorously." But you won't find any drums on stage during a Nanta performance. Instead, the scene is set in a kitchen, strewn with utensils: pots and pans, chopping blocks, buckets, a couple of trash cans. These items are Nanta's props -- and their musical instruments -- plates are tossed across the stage and stacked with a juggler's dexterity, kitchen knives are used to beat out a dangerous rhythm.

The show's premise is sublimely simple: Four slightly crazy chefs (Kim Won Hae, You Seung Yong, Jang Seock Hyoun and Seo Chu Ja) are preparing a meal. To the dismay of the harassed mai^tre d' (Lee Chang Jik), they do a fine job of distracting each other from the task at hand.

Luckily, their antics do an equally good job of distracting the audience. Carefully honed over five years of performance, rehearsal and reinvention -- "it's never perfect" says Kim Won Hae, "we rehearse constantly and keep working at it" -- the show is slick, quick and very funny. There are sight gags and magic tricks and even a raunchy little turn from Chu Ja, who gets all hot under the collar while flirting with male members of the audience and ends up savaging a root vegetable with climactic shrieks. True to Nanta's family-friendly image, though, this moment segues neatly into ensemble farce as the other three creep onstage and proceed to pelt her -- and then each other -- with chopped vegetables.

Vegetables come in for some punishment in this show -- kilos of them are shredded and diced each night. The kitchen utensils are also destroyed by the punishing use they're put to. A 10-cm-thick chopping block survives for just a month, the pots and pans last little longer before they're battered and holed.

On top of the bill for replacements is the cost of purchasing tryout items to test their musical properties. "Pots and pans aren't meant to be instruments," says Seo Chu Ja, "so we're having to test all the time to get the right sound." Manager Kim Byung Ick admits that the group spends a fortune in kitchenware shops, but agrees that the expense is a necessary evil. "If you were a shopkeeper," he says resignedly, "would you let these guys anywhere near your stuff?"

The quest for the perfectly pitched pot is no mere quirk, though. It's part of a professionalism that has seen Nanta work hard to develop the magic formula that has won them fans the world over. As with the instruments, nothing is left to chance: The group has been coached by Broadway comedians to make its humor as accessible as possible, and among its performance credits are five sell-out days at Edinburgh's theater festival, where critics and audiences alike are notoriously hard to please.

What deserves most credit, though, is the fact that Nanta are doing something genuinely creative with a performance format that's all too often stuck in a rut: traditional musical entertainment. "We started out as more purely musical," says Kim, "and with stronger traditional Korean elements. Then we opened it up with comedy. I believe we're going in the right direction.

"There's a critic here in Japan who praised the group, saying that we successfully transform performance traditions into modern forms. Here in Japan, for example, you have traditions that are perhaps more ancient than ours in Korea, but they never change, they remain just traditions. The critic said that young Japanese don't try hard enough to convey this country's traditions in a modern way."

Japan's taiko groups are the obvious comparison. Groups such as Kodo and the Yamato drummers that headline music festivals or fill venues through their own pulling power are delivering taiko -- powerful, phenomenal taiko, to be sure -- with few modernizing frills attached. Even acts that challenge the group format, such as Aun -- 23-year-old twins who give a sexy, comic twist to their polished performance on Japanese drums, shamisen and shakuhachi -- haven't abandoned the instruments themselves.

Nanta's creators and performers, by contrast, have embraced modern culture and humor in a bid to make contemporary Korea engaging for a global audience. Unless Korean -- and Asian -- culture does so, Kim believes, it risks being sidelined by the Western entertainment media.

What's more, Kim Byung Ick says, Japan and Korea would benefit from promoting each other's cultures, as is now happening thanks in part to this year's jointly hosted World Cup and in part to warmer diplomatic relations. "I think artistic exchange is a good trend for both countries, and I think it'll get stronger from now on," he says. "We're happy to be one of the groups doing that."

The ban on Japanese popular culture in South Korea that was partially lifted in 1998 prevented young people in each country from drawing closer to their neighboring culture, believes Seo Chu Ja. "For a long time in Korea and Japan, interest in the other culture had to be secret, hidden," she says. "But now we have to push ahead with showing each culture to the other, because otherwise our younger generations will be looking to the West. It's time to show our Asian culture to the rest of the world."

Nanta has certainly succeeded in reaching the world -- the original group has spawned four spinoff troupes, and three of the five are generally performing abroad at any one time. But whether it's a distinctive Asian culture that they're purveying to appreciative overseas audiences is perhaps more doubtful. There's nothing Korean, for example, in the conjuring tricks performed by the mai^tre d' -- or the slapstick meringue-pie that (inevitably) ends up in someone's face.

The performers may be the most Korean thing about Nanta, but far from being a problem, the group's international outlook may be the key to its success: "The prevailing sense of humor is different in each country, so we have to be ready to improvise," says Kim Byung Ick. "But still, the energy is universal -- and doesn't everyone love food and music?"