OFF-BROADWAY REVIEW
STOMP REVIEW
Reviewed by Rebecca Lewis-Whitson
Published 2008-09-15
Walking into the Orpheum Theatre to see STOMP, your head automatically starts to swivel left and right; you crane your neck to peer up at the ceiling and squint your eyes to see just what you can make out. The entire theatre seems part of STOMP’s set. The walls and ceiling are chock-a-block with scrap metal junk worthy of an abandoned garage and vintage goodies worthy of a bohemian thrift shop. Pre-show music plays above you, everything from industrial to, puzzlingly, the kind of music you might hear at an Indian family restaurant in the suburbs.
The show begins before you’ve even realized it, you’re still commenting on the fully stocked toilet paper dispenser you’ve just noticed beside the lower half of a naked mannequin on the wall to your left. A man who looks and seems every bit a techie enters calmly, sweeping the floor. He peers out at the audience utterly befuddled, as if he has no idea why in the world people would gather in the theatre to watch him sweep up. He goes about his business and little by little, is joined by fellow cast members from every imaginable entrance, each also with a broom in hand. The sweeping takes on a pulsing, almost tribal, and occasionally even violent beat; the group begins to jump and bang around the theatre. They look like a bunch of young, fit, and rather pissed off garage mechanics who all happen to have extraordinary rhythm. The house lights go down, stage lights come up, and STOMP has begun.
Created and directed by Luke Cresswell and Steve McNicholas, STOMP has been a staple of the downtown off-Broadway theatre scene since 1994. Like its East Village neighbor Blue Man Group, one can see why it is highly sought after by both international tourists and younger audiences looking for something different. It is practically performance art; there is no plot and while the performers are vocal on occasion, there is no dialogue.
As mentioned above, the members of the cast look like they’d be just as at home in an auto repair shop; the premise feels as though the group of them, while on break from their shift, have found us, another group of people to whom they can show off everything they can do with all the strange trinkets they have found around their shop. Throughout the next hour and 45 minutes the six men and two women of STOMP (Camille Armstrong, Sean Edwards, Brad Holland, Jason Mills, Yako Miyamoto, Joseph Russomano, Marivaldos Dos Santos, and Dan Weiner) perform a series of vignettes, sometimes comedic and sometimes explosive, melding dance and percussion. Their instruments of choice: everything from boxes of toothpicks, to their own bodies, to toilet plungers, to portable metal sinks worn on chains around their necks complete with spoons, cups, pans, and even water.
The performers find ways of turning anything they come across into instruments, even discarded paper cups and plastic bags. The sheer imagination of the show, in addition to the drumming, makes it throb with life. Amidst all the percussion there are comedic vignettes including torn up newspapers, a highly inventive bit with lighters done entirely in the dark, and an incredible segment featuring three men on stilts made of gigantic black metal garbage cans. (A quick cautionary note: STOMP has certain sections in which the percussion just about envelops the entire theatre. The drumming vibrates through the floors and threatens to rattle your bones. It can also be very, very loud. If you feel you might be sensitive to the sound level, don’t hesitate to ask an usher for earplugs.)
As impressive as all this is, it is the performers themselves, and the personality they bring to the piece that keeps it all from getting old. Otherwise we’d just be sitting there watching people inventively bang on stuff for over 100 minutes. As the piece goes on, each of the ensemble members display different personality traits in how they interact with each other and the audience. Some are serious, even severe. Others are playful and sometimes downright loveable. The fact that you actually begin to care about these people as more than just clogs in a well-oiled, perfectly timed, clanking, clunking, banging machine is what puts the heart in the heartbeat of STOMP.
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