‘Stomp’ Still Delightful and Amazing

Created in 1991 after five years of related projects and experiments, “Stomp” is the primal post-industrial rhythm show, the plotless, all-percussion musical that looks on urban blight as the ultimate creative opportunity and reminds us that art can be made anywhere out of anything.

Since it first played a UCLA engagement in 1994, this brainchild of Luke Cresswell and Steve McNicholas has cloned itself many times over, invaded the ritziest culture palaces and become absorbed into the commercial mainstream. Indeed, you could argue that nothing performed by the original British cast onstage at the Veterans Wadsworth Theater on Wednesday matched the sheer kinetic force of its delirious ice-chopping Coke commercial and other media incursions.

No matter. It’s a joy to have “Stomp” back for the rest of March if only for its capacity to evoke childlike wonder in the most jaded of us. When a cluster of performers stands in total darkness making a sound-and-light spectacle out of the coordinated use of metal cigarette-lighters, the effect is witty, delicate, magical--classic “Stomp,” just like the trash-can cymbals, oil-drum footwear and other transformations of the most mundane objects.

On this fourth visit to Southern California, three new sequences offer expanded opportunities for rhythmic virtuosity without any shift in the show’s overall approach or impact. Six long poles wrapped at the ends like cotton swabs serve as horizontal drumsticks to pound a dozen plastic barrels in one forceful new section.

Relatively undeveloped, a quintet involving plumbers’ plungers (two plungers per performer) exploits the whack of the object striking a wet floor versus the very different sound when the suction cup lets go of that floor as it gets pulled away.

Chair-size wooden cubes loom large in the 1997 “Stomp”--first as the furniture in a social satire that starts with newspaper-reading and makes every rustle of Calendar and every cough by an onlooker into a component of an increasingly intricate rhythmic edifice. Next the brilliant, tireless Cresswell begins another showpiece quintet--new material requiring the performers to sit on the cubes, pound the sides, kick them, slide them and stamp on the floor in (as usual) dauntingly complex percussive patterns.

Eventually everyone hops across the stage while crouched inside the cubes--a sight so improbable that it becomes comic fodder for the resident nebbish, David Olrod, who can be counted on to deflate “Stomp” every time it’s in danger of growing too slick, too macho or too pleased with itself.

Obviously “Stomp” is incessantly noisy, deliberately grungy and occasionally vulgar--but if you think it throws in everything but the kitchen sink, you’re wrong: Midway through the 90-minute event, genuine kitchen sinks full of water and dishes are hung from the performers’ necks like barrel-drums and played with crazy intensity.

In its crusade to turn the whole world into a drum kit, “Stomp” thus not only redefines our notions of what music can be but nullifies some of our most cherished cliches.

* “Stomp” continues through March 30 at the Veterans Wadsworth Theater, Veterans Administration grounds, Brentwood. Tuesdays-Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 5 and 9 p.m.; Sundays, 2 and 7 p.m. (No show March 14.) $15-$39. (310) 825-2101.