Romping Stomp Finds Rhythm of Workaday Life

Blam blam chuffa chuffa! Riffatum, riffatum, riffatum, whomp!

Stomp, the human percussion machine playing at the Orange County Performing Arts Center through Sunday, creates an experience made up of equal parts musical precision, joyous anarchy and silly sight gags.

The sight and sound of eight very energetic people turning miscellaneous everyday objects into rhythmic playthings happily propel the entire 100-minute, intermission-free show.

Cast members wield push brooms as if they were axes, broadswords or drummers’ brushes, extracting a whole palette of sounds: thumping, knocking, scratching. Matchboxes, rubber tubing, garbage cans, oil drums, a pencil, newspapers--even entire sinks strapped to the performers’ necks become vehicles for making organized noise.

After banging away on assorted tableware, sending wild spurts of water into the air, the men performing the sink sequence let the water dribble out the drains, which just happen to be at crotch level. It’s a hoot.

During the course of this virtually wordless show, the mood shifts from mild workaday rebellion (hey, it’s more fun to make broom sounds than to sweep) to the humorous travails of a small man constantly overpowered by his bigger, noisier peers (three of whom clomp onstage wearing huge metal cans strapped to their feet like sci-fi stilts).

Toward the end, a feisty communal spirit takes over: The performers slam trash cans together or pound poles on the stage floor with the intensity of participants in a great ritual.

Swinging gracefully back and forth on harnesses attached to a huge grid filled with objects of various timbres, cast members begin with gentle knockings and ringings and work up a propulsive, samba-like rhythm.

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It’s interesting to see how the current, virtually all-American cast of a show created by two Englishmen, Luke Cresswell and Steve McNicholas, has melded it into a less subtle presentation than it was a couple of years ago on its first U.S. tour, when Cresswell was the lead performer.

Back then, a routine in which people sitting next to one another keep rustling their newspapers and clearing their throats, in a steadily increasing crescendo of rhythmic tics, seemed particularly English: It gently exaggerated the strains of urban coexistence within a famously reserved culture.

Now the sketch seems much broader, with one performer amusingly evoking the sort of maniacally hyperactive nut case New Yorkers tensely ignore on the subway.

As inevitably is true when the creator of a piece no longer performs in it (think of dance groups Pilobolus and Momix), a vital element was lost when Cresswell gave up his stage duties (he remains co-director with McNicholas). Only a few members of the current cast project specific personalities as well as sheer energy while keeping up the rhythmic pace. As a result, the small interactions between the cast don’t work as well, and the piece tilts toward spectacle at the expense of theater.

Still, particularly if you are seeing Stomp for the first time, it’s a unique entertainment: noisy (in a low-tech way) and silly (yes, you get to make sounds, too) and crammed with great, pulsing beats.

* Stomp appears tonight and Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 5 and 9 p.m. and Sunday at 2 and 7:30 p.m. at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 640 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. $17-40. (714) 556-2787.