‘Stomp,’ look, listen!

LONDON—The cold, drizzly weather is ignored inside the Ambassadors Theatre here in the West End. Onstage, the action is riveting. Children in the audience laugh like they’re being tickled nonstop. The adults, including a number of senior citizens, slap their knees and nod their heads like they’re having the time of their lives. A prim-and-proper-looking lady loses her poise and hollers in approval.

Applause erupts every few minutes throughout the show. But there’s no dialogue being spoken onstage. It’s almost like watching a pantomime, except that the actors perform as a merry bunch of noisemakers pumping out a wonderful avalanche of sounds, packaged in a unique percussion-dance-comedy theater experience.

This ingeniously crafted ruckus, “Stomp,” was first previewed in July 1991 at Bloomsbury Theatre also in London and has since traveled around the world while winning various awards including an Olivier for best choreography in a West End Show.

It is now on its 18th year at the Orpheum Theatre in New York, and entering its 10th year at the Ambassadors Theatre.

The show debuts in the Philippines on Oct. 18 to 23 at the Tanghalang Nicanor Abelardo (Main Theater) of the Cultural Center of the Philippines.

What makes “Stomp” a standout production is the way the rhythm of sound is plucked from otherwise humdrum situations and transformed from a simple, messing-around-with-noise exercise into an intricate interplay of beats and harmony.

No plot

There is no plot. But the manner in which the cast of eight drummers-cum-dancers give life to a series of hilarious street scenes is like watching a silent sitcom that builds up into a grand concert of pure percussive beauty.

The “instruments” don’t seem to have anything to do with music—brooms, pipes, folding chairs, garbage bins and covers, kitchen sinks, plastic containers, matches and Zippo lighters, even newspapers. How they’re able to sound like a snare and bass drum, a conga, a cabasa and other percussion gear is no mean feat.

It didn’t happen overnight, but the idea was developed by the show’s creators, Luke Cresswell and Steve McNicholas— who were members of a street band, Pookiesnackenburger, and a theater group, Cliff Hanger, that performed in a series of street comedy musicals at the Edinburgh Festival in the early 1980s.

McNicholas tells the Inquirer that “Stomp” evolved from watching a street performance by Burundi dancers from Africa: “After the show, one of the performers carried the drums on his shoulders and I imagined the image of workers with dustbins.”

Other inspirations, says McNicholas, were the sight of workers in Glasgow at dawn, Fred Astaire’s tap dance routine, the look of “Mad Max” and the fight sequences in “Star Wars.”

While working on the earliest incarnation of “Stomp,” McNicholas recalls telling Cresswell: “Let’s do a show that we would like to see ourselves in.”

It wasn’t easy mounting it, McNichols realized, and he says they lost money initially. “But future producers saw the show.”

“We had no money at the start,” recalls Glynis Henderson, whose production group took a chance on “Stomp.” It wasn’t a conventional show to begin with, but she was upbeat on the possibilities.

Interest slowly built up, Henderson says, after “Stomp” appeared at the Edinburgh fest and started its London run. She describes the moment “Stomp” became a certified hit: “In 1994 it just exploded, unbelievable … It went to America.”

A Filipina ‘Stomper’

The show is physically hard, she stresses, adding that “doctors say it’s equivalent to a football match.” Injuries do happen and the cast members need to get a massage every week.

There are currently two “Stomp” companies permanently based in New York and London, plus a couple more touring companies, one of which, the Australian production, will do the CCP shows.

The eight cast members in all companies are of various nationalities. “They’re like nomads, constantly traveling and many in the production end up getting married to each other,” Henderson says. In fact, one of them, Coralissa Delaforce, is Filipina. “She married a ‘Stomper,’ too, and their baby was born in Australia,” Henderson relates.

“Why do I love ‘Stomp’? It’s clever, there’s music and it makes you laugh,” says James Cundall, the promoter who also brought “Cats” and “The Music of Andrew Lloyd Webber” to the CCP, and whose Lunchbox Theatrical Productions is presenting “Stomp” here with David Atkins Enterprises and Concertus Manila.

Cundall points out that the props, or the “rubbish” objects that the performers play with in the show, keep evolving. “They keep adding things. It’s not a static show. It looks simple, but it’s actually not simple.”

While admitting that every show that he brings to Manila and elsewhere is “a massive risk,” Cundall exudes confidence, with a smile, when he says, “‘Stomp’ is a show you can take anybody to … your mother, your kid … your lover, or your lover’s best friend, or your best friend’s lover.”

(Log on to ticketworld.com.ph or call 891-9999.)