Stomp
Created and directed by Luke Cresswell and Steve McNicholas. Lighting by McNicholas and Neil Tiplady. With Tomas Fujiwara, Richard Giddens, Fritzlyn Hector, Kwame Densu Opare, Nick Pack Jr., Ana Sofia Pomales, Ray Rodriguez Rosa, John Sawicki, Camille Shuford, Elizabeth Vidos, Dan Weiner, and Rick R. Willet. At the Wilbur Theatre through January 6.

Although they might have been working-class blokes at the beginning, Luke Cresswell and Steve McNicholas, creators of Stomp, have reaped a bonanza from the show since its origins in Brighton, England, more than 10 years ago. The theatrical joining of shake-and-stamp with rock-and-roll rhythm and movement was a sensation then and remains so today, with five companies circling the globe and a sit-down troupe now in its eighth season in New York.

Cresswell and McNicholas know to leave well enough alone, keeping the formula pristine and consistent. Eight unisex performers, dressed in street-chic costumes that look as if they’d been picked out of a Goodwill barrel, march on and off stage with a variety of props-turned-instruments plucked from the detritus of any clean-up crew. The setting is a two-story steel grill hung with all manner of dump-truck décor including garbage pails, their lids, street signs, huge steel barrels, and a blinking stop-and-go light. The chains that attach these items to the set also secure the performers when they scamper up ladders at either side to bang on and swing off the grid.

The mood and the tone are mostly loud and aggressive, though the directors, savvy theater folk by now, alternate volume between loud and soft and moves between fast and slow, throwing in sight gags that were ancient back in vaudeville. The lighting is as well timed as the jokes to produce laughs and applause.

The demands on strength and stamina are so intense that though the company numbers 12, only eight of them are on stage at any performance. And what we don’t see is the cache of supplies in the wings that must include bandages, earplugs, and medication for the aches and bruises.

This viewer has seen the show at least four times in the past decade, beginning with its New York premiere in a tiny downtown theater. The delight of the surprise of that first visit, compounded by the discovery of a novel theatrical experience, is hard to replicate, especially when the show has been removed to behind a proscenium arch, even in a formal theater as small as the Wilbur.

It seems that the current generation of performers is more tuned to the music than to the movement, though the shape of the choreography hasn’t changed. The movement is daredevil in parts and combative, to be sure, but it appears that the virtuosity of balancing the instrumental element with audacious choreography has been tuned down. The skills of the performers, at least in this touring company, lie more in percussive musicianship than in dancing.

The show opens with a riff on the panoply of sounds that a push broom can make, particularly when it is pounded on the floor like a weapon as opposed to being swished. One man stands on stage at the beginning, plying his broom, but the action builds swiftly in volume and size as the entire company joins him. The counterpoint of the rhythms, interspersed with a kind of stepping that is kin to a double-time march, is as complicated and clever as a score for a full orchestra. The change of pace that the audience at the performance I attended most loved was the clap-along segment, which became a running gag throughout.

The 90-minute evening, sans intermission, proceeds in similar fashion as the catalogue of instrument props shifts from brooms to large wooden sticks, which give the ritual sense of an African war dance, to rustling newspapers. In one segment that’s performed in the dark, the rhythm is supplied by cigarette-lighter lids snapping up and down.

There’s no way to identify the performers by name, or even to tell which set of eight is on stage at a given performance. The ensemble breaks into smaller groups but generally comes together for the big numbers, including an industrial-strength finale that has every steel part clanging, every stick banging, and the performers taking to the air to propel themselves from one side of the stage to the other. Stomp has spawned imitators, among them the Tap Dogs troupe from Australia and similar non-plotted theatrical evenings including Burn the Floor. But the combination of hunky bodies, adroit moves, and pounding drums that are Stomp trademarks seems not to have rusted with wear.

Issue Date: November 22 - 29, 2001

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