Grabbing History by ‘Da Beat

George C. Wolfe and Savion Glover have plenty of valid ideas about the relationship of tap and rap and hip-hop to the primal pain of the African American experience. But you can stay at home and read Cornel West or Stanley Crouch if ideas are what you’re after. The reason to go see “Bring in ‘Da Noise, Bring in ‘Da Funk,” the hit Broadway show created by Wolfe and tap dancing wunderkind Glover, is that it makes its strongest arguments without words. Tapping, stomping and gliding out a Morse code of rage and celebration and passion, the young performers onstage turn ideas into pure experience.

“Noise/Funk” opened at the Ahmanson Theatre on Wednesday night, as part of a beautifully produced national tour, thanks to the Joseph Papp Public Theatre, where the show originated in 1995. This is a glorious, hard-driving and lyrical history of blacks in America told both in narration (the book is by spoken-word poet Reg E. Gaines) and in Glover’s trailblazing choreography, which takes what we normally call stage dancing far off the margins, onto a new page.

The history lesson starts with an incantation of the names of the slave ships, sung mournfully by the sexy Vickilyn Reynolds. The show then quickly moves to the South, where field slaves in rags dance out the rhythms of their repetitive, manual labor. On the street, men dance for pennies, a tattered hat placed on the ground. One man (the electrifying Dominique Kelley) steps forward to offer a pleasing soft shoe, wearing an eerie, phony smile, while slide projections behind him flash statistics about the number of lynchings in 1916 and Reynolds intones some of the causes, which include “insult” and “hog stealing.” Kelley’s steps accelerate and all at once it becomes clear that his feet are imitating the desperate, clawing movements of a man hanging from the end of a rope. For all of its artiness, this number delivers a visceral, hair-raising wallop that is repeated in various ways through the show.

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When “Noise/Funk” first opened, Glover starred in it. He danced with a mesmerizing, peculiarly inward kind of energy, focusing attention on the seriousness and concentration his virtuosity required. His part is danced here by Derick K. Grant, a more muscular, less introverted dancer. Where Glover was the genius boy-man, still close to sullen adolescence, Grant reveals a leonine elegance, though he dons the slouch and the sweats favored by his predecessor. Further, in Act 2, Grant is required to dance Glover’s highly personal tribute to the choreographer’s own favorite dancers. Grant doesn’t--he can’t--perform this number with the autobiographical intensity of Glover. But as he imitates the unique styles of Glover’s mentors, dancers like Buster Brown and Chuck Green, he brilliantly illustrates what made each of them unique.

As impressive as Grant is, the eye is drawn again and again to Dominique Kelley, a slimmer, more mercurial and goofier dancer, with a long, animated face. In one of the show’s most talked-about numbers, Kelley plays Uncle Huck-a-Buck, based on Bill (Bojangles) Robinson, a movie star of the most unjust second-tier status. As he performs with his partner, an adorable Shirley Temple doll strapped to the dancing Grant, Kelley wears an inane smile that suggests Uncle Huck-a-Buck has absolutely no idea how he came to be performing the absurd role of gentle black pet to a hyperactive white child.

Playing ‘da Voice--the narrator--Thomas Silcott is a real find. Wearing short dreadlocks that seem to dance around his handsome face, Silcott has a warmth and good humor that goes very far to detox the pretentiousness in Gaines’ often leaden book. Whether delivering his lines in rap rhythm or with a Noel Coward insouciance (in a section on the Harlem Renaissance) or in a Mike Hammer clipped diction (for the Hollywood chapter), he infuses the book with a charm that it did not have before.

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The rest of the main cast--dancers Jimmy Tate and Christopher A. Scott, the amazing drummers Dennis J. Dove and David Peter Chapman--perform Wolfe’s clean staging with passion and heart.

“Noise/Funk” focuses on something it calls ‘da beat, which it contends began out of frame of American history, in Africa. ‘Da beat acquired anguish aboard the slave ships. It was almost killed in Hollywood, where it was forced to grin and flash.

In the show’s crowning achievement, the great second-act number called “Taxi,” ’da beat is danced out by four black men who each try, one at a time, to hail a cab in New York and are passed by. That dance--performed by a street dude, a student, a lawyer and a soldier holding up a copy of Colin Powell’s autobiography--is a propulsive anthem, an exhilarating hip-hop ballet to defiance, frustration, to joy, to life in the city, to life itself. As danced by this amazing cast, ‘da beat is thrilling and profound; Wolfe and Glover have achieved their ambition to change the American musical, to broaden it, to use it in a new and highly emotional way.

It needed some noise, and it needed some funk.

* “Bring in ‘Da Noise, Bring in ‘Da Funk,” Ahmanson Theatre, 135 N. Grand Ave., Los Angeles, Tuesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7:30 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 2 p.m. and March 26, April 9, 23, 2 p.m. Ends April 26. $15-$65. (213) 628-2772. Running time: 2 hours.

With: Derick K. Grant, Vickilyn Reynolds, Thomas Silcott, Dominique Kelley, Christopher A. Scott, Jimmy Tate, B. Jason Young, David Peter Chapman, Dennis J. Dove, Vincent Bingham, Debra Byrd, Marc Durham, Scan C. Fielder, Khalid Hill, Tyrone Mitchell Henderson, Miles Jeffries

A Joseph Papp Public Theater/New York Shakespeare Festival production. Book and lyrics by Reg E. Gaines. Music Daryl Waters, Zane Mark and Ann Duquesnay. Conceived and directed by George C. Wolfe. Choreography Savion Glover. Choreography recreated by Derick K. Grant. Based on an idea by Savion Glover and George C. Wolfe. Sets Riccardo Hernandez. Costumes Paul Tazewell. Lights Jules Fisher and Peggy Eisenhauer. Sound design Jon Weston. Production design Batwin + Robin. Music supervision and orchestrations Daryl Waters. Musical director Richard Cummings. Vocal arrangements Ann Duquesnay. Production stage manager Doug Hosney.