Stomp...so that was it?

Do you remember a couple of years ago when Stomp broke into the American theatre scene (originally a UK production) and it was thee thing. I saw snippets of it here and there I think mostly on the variety shows like in living colour?

Well it is almost over twenty years later and finally, us South Africans get to see what the fuss was about 20 years ago. yippee. So I went to go see the matinée show yesterday at the Artscape.

Now, what I had scene previously of Stomp was a huge sexy cast, mostly black male with out-of-this-world dance rhythms and drumming. It was hard core and it was real. To choose to be creative (making music out of everyday objects) in a harsh unforgiving world type-of-thing was the story. Because this is how it started isn’t it? The creators were originally buskers in the UK trying to make a living on the streets by entertaining passerbys?

Now enter Stomp 20 years later and as in many things, it has been tweaked to appeal to a larger audience. The thing with that though is if you want to please 5 year olds and 15 year olds and 25 year olds and 55 year olds in the same audience, chances are none of them will be pleased.

The show was not bad and you have to give (is it) props to the poeps? It was well done and all and all. And one can see why it has been so successful. The kids enjoyed the beginning, the brat behind me stopped asking its mother questions about a third of the way through, finally, hopefully realizing that there actually is no plot for her to figure out in this show. She sat back and enjoyed the dancing and percussion.

The Brokensword that I am, I needed the hard core black dudes, I needed the attitude, I needed well, something to move me. See the thing that just did not help was that the cast was mostly made up of one very tall lanky awkward dude who could not crouch to save his life, two fat dudes who could hardly lift their legs to do the stomp, a nerdy looking dude with glasses and a beanie who provided comic relief.

There were only two black chicks and one black dude who were convincing to me and there was this one white dude who played the lead and he was not too bad either.

All in all this was a commercialized version of Stomp and I can not say this for sure as I did not see the original some twenty years ago. Even the audience got to be part of the show, being prompted to provide some of the percussion by clapping.

A few people stood and applauded at the end, which goes to show that this show still has major appeal!, but not for me. The row in front of me stood and I could not remain sitting because I could not see so I had to stand too. This is how standing ovations are made!

Brokensword