’ ‘Da Noise’ Traces History of Tap-Dancing : Theater review: New George C. Wolfe musical explores the evolution of dance form from the slave era to today.

Ten years ago George C. Wolfe put himself on the theatrical map with his play “The Colored Museum,” a hilarious vaudeville send-up of every oppressive stereotype the black community endured since the dawn of man, it seemed.

Today Wolfe runs the noble institution that produced his play, now called the Joseph Papp Public Theater. Unlike Papp, whom he has since succeeded, Wolfe is also a brilliant director, currently represented on Broadway by an airy and magical “Tempest.” Downtown, Wolfe has a bona fide hit at his own theater with a new dance musical that, like “The Colored Museum,” also seeks to explode black stereotypes, not so much with words but with a lot of noise.

“Bring In ‘Da Noise, Bring In ‘Da Funk,” conceived by Wolfe and the young tap-dancing genius Savion Glover, creates a timeline of black history from the days of slavery to the days of being unable to get a cab in New York. And it does it with the most dynamic dancing on the stage at this moment in time.

The show’s thesis is that tap was born when American slaves were forbidden their tribal drums. Along with four other explosive young hoofers--Vincent Bingham, James Tate, Baakari Wilder and Dule Hill--Glover gives us an African American history through tap, with an emphasis on today’s heavy-duty street stuff, hard on the ground and rhythmically brilliant. Raymond King and the amazing Jared Crawford perform percussion on tin pans and overturned plastic buckets. On these homely instruments, Crawford particularly combines breathtaking precision with a seemingly impossible nonchalance. He is riveting.

As a choreographer, Glover makes us see how inadequate words are to describe the rage and joy and individuality expressed by this dancing, and yet words are prevailed upon again and again, with only mixed success. The text, written and performed by spoken-word artist Reg E. Gaines, seems awfully at home with the kinds of cliches Wolfe once ridiculed in “The Colored Museum.” In one rap-inspired segment, Gaines doles out history in postage stamps, making bogus rhymes from a list of famous Harlem Renaissance figures, as if reciting names could evoke an era.

The history lessons can be quite plodding, despite (and sometimes because of) the presence of blues singer Ann Duquesnay who boasts a rich, ripe voice and a sexy purple gown (she wrote the show’s score along with Zane Mark and Daryl Waters).

Especially suffocating is a first-act number called “Slave Ships,” which features an interpretive dance by Glover, who plays an America-bound captive. The song consists of a list of the names of the slave ships--the Cleopatra, the Green Dragon, etc.--each name a fresh source of tragic mask for the actress’s face. Lists of names are meant to suffice for drama because of the bounteous tragedy clinging to them. In another number, Wilder performs an interpretive dance of a lynching.

At one point, as the young men talk about what dancing means to them in a voice-over and slide show, “Noise/Funk” resembles a PBS documentary, perhaps entitled “Hoof Dreams.”

Dramatically crude as these moments may be, the dancing wipes pretension away. The less talking, the better and more happily theatrical the number. “The Uncle Huck-a-Buck Song,” for instance, finds a Bill (Bojangles) Robinson character named Uncle Huck-a-Buck (Hill) dancing with a cute Shirley Temple doll, a part that Glover dances with a mildly grotesque rag-doll attached to his midsection. Duquesnay stands to the side, providing the doll’s little-girl voice, singing and asking such adorable questions as, “Why do I make more money than you, Uncle Huck-a-Buck?”

Another number depicts four successive young African American men as they try in vain to hail a cab. Inevitably rejected, they turn to the street drummers to tap away their frustration in brutal rhythms. This number is simply brilliant.

But perhaps the show’s highest achievement is Glover, dancing alone in a spotlight as his straightforward voice-over narration explains what he learned, and adapted, from a great chain of dancers that included Buster Brown and Lon Chaney.

His virtuosity is all the proof anyone needs of the reach and durability and also incredible fragility of tap, an art that must be passed personally from artist to artist through time. That Glover is the current messenger and new custodian of the form is loud and clear in “Noise/Funk.”

* “Bring In ‘Da Noise, Bring In ‘Da Funk: A Tap/Rap Discourse on the Staying Power of the Beat,” Joseph Papp Public Theater, 425 Lafayette St., New York, N.Y. (212) 260-2400.