It’s Brass and Percussion With a ‘Blast!’

“Blast!” is writing a new chapter in musical theater history, although certain connoisseurs would rather see it quickly erased. Some of the reviews that greeted the show’s Broadway premiere last spring were downright scornful.

The no-story, all-spectacle production is rooted in drum and bugle corps pageantry, a subcultural slice of middle-Americana far removed from the bright lights and the big city. “Blast!” hews to some of the basics--the traditional brass-and-percussion instrumentation and the comely young people tossing and twirling sabers and rifles and waving banners. But it dispenses with the marching formations, the brocaded uniforms and the fancy billed caps. That gear is far too bulky for the flash dance moves and acrobatic stunts that even the instrumentalists in the 52-member cast must execute. Instead of John Philip Sousa, the program favors such numbers as Ravel’s “Bolero,” a hymn from Aaron Copland’s “Appalachian Spring” and a drum-corps-as-street-gang take on “Gee, Officer Krupke” from “West Side Story.”

The show makes its West Coast premiere this week at the Orange County Performing Arts Center. A truncated, 25-minute version called “The Power of Blast!” has been playing several times a day since late November in the 2,000-seat Hyperion Theater at Disney’s California Adventure in Anaheim.

It arrives with a resounding vote of no confidence from the bulk of New York’s theatrical press corps.

“Blast!’ Bored me cross-eyed,” point-blanked Bruce Weber in the New York Times. He found it “so smiley and good-natured that it makes you suspicious.”

Newsday’s Linda Winer described it as an “Indiana school assembly with delusions of Las Vegas ... a cheerfully unrelenting, amazingly whitebread amateur show.”

Clive Barnes of the New York Post allowed that “Blast!” was “quaintly beguiling” and “very winning,” but ultimately dismissed it as an unfit intrusion on the Great White Way. “To be frank, I rather resent it taking up valuable theater space.” The show survived those barbs and had a five-month run; it won a Tony Award for best special theatrical event.

James Mason, the Indiana drum corps director who created “Blast!,” shrugs off the critics’ salvos as the turf-guarding of theater traditionalists. He prides himself on having created “a new musical genre that’s unfolding in front of our eyes,” and points instead to the final, valedictory paragraph of jazz-pop eminence Quincy Jones’ new book, “Q: The Autobiography of Quincy Jones.” Appraising what the future holds for music, Jones proclaims his faith in “the voice of a people and the voices of the many, like the cast of the current Broadway show ‘Blast!,’ whose work moved me to tears. I salute the young artists... who’ll be solidifying their own contributions in years to come.”

Mason, 47, aims to keep filling valuable theater space with more and more new volleys of “Blast!” Taking “Riverdance” and Cirque du Soleil as models, he wants to build a showbiz franchise by revising the “Blast!” concept, starting with a big band jazz-inspired follow-up called “Shockwave” e in 2002. Future shows might include story lines, unlike the current spectacle, which is impressionistic and mostly all-instrumental. Meanwhile, the current road show is booked through 2004.

“Blast!” grew out of Star of Indiana, a drum and bugle corps founded by Don Cook, a wealthy Indiana businessman. Mason, a drum corps lifer, led it from its beginning in 1984. The group won the field’s top honor, the annual Drum Corps International championship, in 1991. Then Mason set his sights on bigger things: taking a performance style designed for football halftime shows indoors and making it a theatrical event. “Blast!” evolved through the mid- and late 1990s as Star of Indiana toured as a backing ensemble for the Canadian Brass quintet, a major classical music attraction with a humorous, theatrical bent. A residency in the tourist town of Branson, Mo., was a platform for further experimentation. When Cook and Mason sought theatrical producers, a British group came forward. “Blast!” premiered in a 22-week run in London during 1999-2000; a video of the London show became a staple on PBS and won an Emmy this year for best choreography.

For Vincent D. Oliver, “Blast!” means never having to twiddle his thumbs--which is what the 23-year-old from Modesto did during most of his career as a percussionist for the University of Southern California’s student orchestra.

“A lot of the time you’ll wait 25 bars until you get one triangle hit, and you’ll sit down for the rest of the piece,” Oliver said. His outlet, during the summers, was walloping a marimba as a member of a couple of crack Northern California drum corps, the Concord Blue Devils and the Santa Clara Vanguard.

Drum corps contacts invited him to try out for the original London cast of “Blast!,” but Oliver, who is pointing toward a career as a film composer, couldn’t see the point.

“I thought of it as an eccentric idea to put a marching band indoors.”

Now, he is a touring marimba player in “Blast!” During an intensive training camp last summer, he learned to act and dance, and to unlearn some standard marimba techniques while mastering others that no one had conceived of before.

“For a marimba soloist, a minimal amount of movement is customarily considered best,” Oliver said. “Your head’s always down, because you’re going to have a better chance to hit the right keys. But in the idiom of theater, that’s not the most exciting thing. I constantly have to look up, and I move my body much more than would be the common practice.”

That is certainly the case during a madcap sequence in “Gee, Officer Krupke.” Oliver gets to chase a spinning marimba on wheels across the stage and do a 360-degree whirl in tandem with the instrument while playing the famous, frenzied theme from Aram Khachaturian’s “Saber Dance.”

“I could play it 100 times note perfect standing still,” he says, admitting that the best he can achieve with a moving target is a reasonable facsimile. “I get really close. My percentage is getting better.”

Oliver says the “Blast!” cast has been offered tickets to the Tournament of Roses parade--a chance to take stock of the road show’s traditional marching band roots. “But we’re probably going to have a big party on New Year’s Eve. I’m not sure any of us are going to be able to get up that early.”

One newly minted admirer of the flash of “Blast!” is Arthur C. Bartner. As director of the USC Trojan Marching Band since 1970, including its landmark performance on Fleetwood Mac’s 1979 rock hit “Tusk,” Bartner is a leading expert on drum-and-brass music. He recently saw the version of “Blast!” at Disney’s California Adventure, where a USC marching band alumnus, flugelhorn player Mike Fleischmann, is in the cast.

“It was good show biz. It’s very impressive what these kids are doing,” Bartner said. “I know every trick in the trade, and I’m looking at these drummers and going, ‘Whoa!’” The show’s most important impact, he said, may be on youngsters who will be inspired to take up horns or percussion instruments, much as the Beatles’ tours and TV appearances launched a thousand guitar bands. “What a great incentive for kids. They’re not all going to make ‘Blast!,’ but they can all enjoy making music. That, I think, is the biggest message.”

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“Blast!” Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Thursday, 8 p.m.; Friday, 2 and 8 p.m.; Jan. 1 through Jan. 4, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 and 7:30 p.m. Ends Jan. 6. $22 to $57. (714) 556-2787.