A Weird Sort of Cymbalism : Looking for real heavy metal? Consider ‘Stomp.’ The British import mixes theater, dance, performance art and percussive pop using the oddest instruments.

A guy in baggy pants and Doc Martens wanders onstage pushing a broom. Sweep. Sweep-sweep. Sweep-sweep-whoosh .

At first glance, he looks like the classic image of the stagehand cleaning up for the show, but you sense that he’s up to more.

Soon the lone sweeper is joined by more blokes with brooms. Sweep , goes one. Sweep-sweep , responds another. Sweep-whosh-plunk , answers a third.

It doesn’t take long before there’s a cadre of muscled urchins onstage, pushing their poles and stomping their custom-made boots in a choreographed dance of whirling whisks and stylized syncopation.

Clomp-clomp, whoosh-whoosh, clack-clack-clack . It may not have a tune you can hum, but the British percussion act known as “Stomp” has certainly got a rhythm you can tap.

The 90-minute show consists of more than 20 interludes in which six men and two women use everyday objects such as trash can lids, brooms and rolled newspapers to make their own brand of rhythm. The show has been playing Off Broadway since February.

But now, with an American replacement cast performing in New York since May, the original crew of “Stomp” is set to launch the show’s North American tour at the Wadsworth Theater on Friday, presented by the UCLA Center for the Performing Arts. (“Stomp” is also part of the ongoing citywide UK/LA Festival 1994, focusing on British arts.)

Like the also-popular, long-running Off Broadway show “Tubes” by Blue Man Group, “Stomp” is a high-energy (and sometimes high decibel) romp that revels in a simple but exuberant kind of good clean fun.

It’s not just theater or dance, nor is it as rarefied as that amorphous genre known as performance art. Instead, “Stomp” is a mix of all three forms, with a healthy dose of pop appeal thrown in.

Structurally, “Stomp” also has ties to rock music. “We’re looking at theater from a musician’s point of view,” says director-performer Luke Cresswell, who also composes music for television. “It’s like a group of virtuosos in a band, except they’re using their bodies and unusual instruments to play. We know that we’re in a theater but it’s the mentality of a band.”

And “Stomp” owes a debt to street performance too. “Good street performance is an odd combination of aggression and assertion and vulnerability,” says director Steven McNicholas, who co-created the show with Cresswell. “We started out on the street years ago and we learned how to hold people’s attention with spontaneity. We’ve always worked instinctively rather than intellectually. You’ve got to be likable and skillful.”

The 30-year-old, Brighton-born Cresswell’s father is a painter and his mother is an art-school dean. Although he started drumming as a boy, he never had any formal training in the arts and was playing in bands by the time he was a teen-ager.

McNicholas, who comes from a small town near Leeds, is 39, and, like Cresswell, a musician. Unlike Cresswell, his early creative life was spent in the theater, including a stint performing with a comedy group called the Cliff Hangers.

C resswell and McNicholas first worked together as founding members of Pookiesnackenburger, a popular British “busking” (street performance) band that rose to prominence in the early 1980s. The group went on to make two albums and was featured in an ill-fated TV series on the country’s Channel 4.

Pookiesnackenburger, though, is best remembered in Britain for a beer commercial in which Cresswell and others did a routine with trash cans. That effort provided the seed for a trash can number that’s now one of “Stomp’s” set-pieces--a mock clash in which the Stompers square off against each other in a tightly choreographed, and increasingly complex, routine involving the metal cans and their lids.

“One of the first things we did years ago was the trash can routine,” McNicholas says. “We all played trash can lids from the sort of standard British trash can. But over the years, we’ve explored (using) every other (kind of) trash receptacle.”

After Pookiesnackenburger fizzled, Cresswell and McNicholas formed the dance band Yes/No People in 1986. The troupe went on to a variety of ventures, including composing and performing works for television and theater in Great Britain.

But the biggest Yes/No People hit has been the show “Stomp,” which premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1991, toured Australia and has been seen in Montreal, as well as at a number of festivals throughout Europe.

“Stomp” happens on and in front of a large scaffold-based set-piece full of junk--trash can lids, street signs, car parts, metal pipes and scraps and more. “The set is there as a backdrop and it’s there initially to play,” Cresswell says. “We try and make the (entire) space a drum if we can.”

The cast of eight wears casual, albeit cool, street clothes with steel-tipped Doc Martens. “You’re going to wear baggy pants and a cotton T-shirt because you’re going to get hot,” says Cresswell, who bridles at the suggestion of deeper meaning or symbolic value. “A lot of that is really necessity. The clothes are plain and ordinary so you see the person. To me, it’s neutral. To you, maybe it’s saying more.”

Although writers have tended to impute meaning to “Stomp’s” street aesthetic, Cresswell insists that neither the look nor the content should be read too closely. “I don’t see any meaning in brooms,” says Cresswell, referring to a “Stomp” sequence inspired by London street sweepers. “If other people want to read something into it--sweeping away the blues or whatever--that’s fine.”

Cresswell stresses instead the pleasures of abstraction--rhythm and motion for their own sake. “I liked the way they (London street sweepers) looked and the rhythm was interesting,” Cresswell continues. “Nothing more.”

Yet “Stomp” has an undeniably theatrical side--primarily based on personas that emerge during the performance--and where there’s theater, there’s room for interpretation. “It’s more theater to me than it is to Luke (Cresswell),” says McNicholas. “It’s my job (as the non-performing director) to make sure the characters are there.”

“The characters keep you involved,” McNicholas continues. “They add color and humor. The characters add to the confrontations, speaking to each other rhythmically, making threats. If they were characterless, that rhythmic expression wouldn’t necessarily mean the same thing.”

L ate last May, Cresswell and McNicholas sat in a noisy East Village cappuccino joint talking about what it’d been like to bring their show from London to New York. Around the corner at the Orpheum Theatre, “Stomp” had just passed the 100th performance mark--without missing a beat.

“Stomp” ran at Sadler’s Wells in London’s West End before opening in New York in February, where it has won Obie and Drama Desk awards. The show came to America backed by the powerful Columbia Artists Management Inc. (CAMI)--whose John Luckacovic first spotted the group in 1992--which is credited in the program as one among 10 producers.

Although the reviews have been mostly favorable, the initial reception was not all that everyone involved had hoped. “It’s taken weeks of getting people in suits to come see the show, get the reviews,” Cresswell says.

Nor were Cresswell and McNicholas happy with the early audiences. “Playing New York has been totally different than anywhere else we’ve played in years,” McNicholas says. “The first six weeks playing here, the audiences that we had were decidedly theater audiences. They were quite critical, with a lot of intellectualization.

“There’s a feel of intelligentsia in New York that you don’t get in London,” McNicholas continues. “People were trying to be overly analytical about what we do.”

“Stomp” has frequently been compared to Blue Man Group’s “Tubes,” yet the powerful producing and marketing machine driving “Stomp” deemed the “Stomp”-Blue Man Group comparison a problem--and so excised a paragraph from “Stomp’s” New York Times review before including it in the group’s press package. The missing text said, in part, that “Although neither so sophisticated nor so witty as ‘Tubes,’ ‘Stomp’ has . . . even more popular appeal. . . .”

Still, New York has seen other acts that might be even better examples of the genre in which “Stomp” lies. An even clearer artistic fellow traveler than Blue Man Group, for example, is composer David Van Tieghem, who performed his concerts of junk percussion using car parts and other objects at Lincoln Center in 1987, 1988 and 1991.

The Stompers also have a thing or two in common with those anonymous New Yorkers who make their own trash percussion, banging out their rhythms on plastic drums and whatnot in subway stations and on sidewalks in the hopes that passersby will drop change.

But unlike those non-professionals, the Stompers have progressed beyond their street roots without forgetting the lessons they learned there. “Being a street performer is hard,” McNicholas says. “When you’re working on the street, you’re stopping 20 people who are on their way somewhere else. If they’re paying money to come, they’re going to tolerate you for 20 minutes, even if you’re rubbish. Whereas on the street, you’ve got two minutes.”

The street also teaches an artist how to play to a crowd. “How the audience is can affect how you want to play the show,” Cresswell says. “A straight audience in the theater makes me want to be more aggressive, to kick out more with that rebel feeling.

“If the audience is younger in mind, it’s more like we’re going to have a party,” Cresswell continues. “You want to be more vulnerable. You can do an aggressive show or a light show.”

The difference in tone resides in part in the Stompers’ individuated stage personalities. “If you work in a band, there are characters,” Cresswell says. “The stereotyped drummer is the angry guy at the back and that’s a character. Every musician is his own character and most characters in ‘Stomp’ are the same way.”

These personas have emerged over the three years that the ensemble has been performing together. “It’s not written line-by-line or beat by beat. In that sense, there’s room for everyone to be themselves and do what they want to do.”

Also as with a band, the various interludes are like numbers, grouped in a particular order within the set. “There’s a set list on the wall backstage, same as with a band,” says Cresswell. “If you think the slow number is going to work best a bit later, then you change it so that it’s later.”

Even if the order remains unchanged, the mood of any given performance can alter the feel of the material. “You could watch it one night and everyone is in an ‘up’ jokey mood,” Cresswell says. “You could see it another night with a few hangovers and it’s quite violent.”

It leaves room for interpretation. “Two people on two different nights and one will come away saying it’s vaudeville and another will come away saying it’s post-apocalyptic punk,” Cresswell says.

Nor are the Yes/No People likely to remain the same, now that they’ve had a taste of the possibilities that America has to offer. Following its three-week engagement at UCLA, “Stomp” embarks on a 22-city North American tour, produced in association with UCLA and sponsored by Target, for whom they’ve done a “back to school” commercial.

They’ve also completed a commercial for Coca-Cola, and there may be other gambits and ventures coming down the pike as well. Heavily marketed and promoted by the CAMI machinery, “Stomp” has shown up on “Letterman,” “Good Morning America” and other television shows.

Yet Cresswell and McNicholas aren’t about to let the business of it all make them lose sight of the spirit of unpretentious fun they knew in their busking days. “We’ve removed instruments and drama and (the show) really is just a bunch of ordinary people that you can relate to,” McNicholas says. “You can identify with them and get into it, so maybe you’ll go home with a different attitude toward music and sound.”

Meanwhile, the “Stomp” beat goes on.*

Vital Stats

“Stomp”

Address: Wadsworth Theater, V.A. Grounds, Westwood

Price: $13-$35

Hours: Wednesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m., Saturdays, 2 p.m., Sundays, 7 p.m. Sept. 30-Oct. 23

Phone: (310) 825-2101