Noise & Funk With Its Exuberant Dancing And Driving Rhythms, Broadway Tribute To Black Music And Dance Is A High-Energy Triumph

Maybe you’ve experienced this much pure rhythmic power in a rock concert before, or maybe in a steel rolling mill, but probably never in a Broadway musical.

“Bring In ‘Da Noise, Bring In ‘Da Funk,” which opened a two-week stint at Seattle’s Paramount Theatre on Tuesday, is just the jolt of raw energy that the Broadway musical needed. This virtuoso tap-dance show has given this sometimes stodgy theatrical form an injection of youth, soul and hip-hop vitality.

To call it a tap-dance show can be wildly misleading. That’s because tap has, in the last 40 or 50 years, come to mean an arm-flailing,piece of cute show-biz - entertaining at best and silly at worst. But choreographer Savion Glover has reached back into African-American history to rediscover the roots of tap. In “Noise/Funk,” tap becomes a powerful folk-art form, capable of expressing anguish and longing as well as joy. It’s bebop for the body, drumming for the feet, Delta blues for the insole.

In fact, the first half of this consistently exhilarating show is essentially a review of black music and dance in America. A slave ship plies the ocean in an overhead projection, while Derick K. Grant (who has taken over the lead role from Glover in this tour) does a slow, agonized dance. The true roots of tap then begin to emerge as the company, dressed as tobacco field workers in the 1700s, begin to move in rhythm. Another overhead projection tells us that in the 1730s, drumming among slaves was forbidden by law because it was felt to stir up insurrection.

So we see the slaves begin to use their bodies, their feet, as drums. Tap dancing as a means of expression is born. Within 100 years it has become a full-blown folk art, as we see when a young slave performs a wild and joyous dance atop a load of cotton.

Meanwhile, we also see the development of “‘da beat,” which means the music. We hear the blues, ragtime and the beginnings of jazz. We also hear, literally, the beat, in a pair of all-drumming vignettes.

In one of these, drummers David Peter Chapman and Dennis J. Dove begin to hammer on a rack full of ancient pots and pans. Then they turn to reveal that they have pots and pans hanging off their clothing. Soon they are hammering on themselves, and then each other. This develops into a breathtaking percussion solo, filled with the sound of pops, claps, crashes, chimes, gongs, retorts and bangs. It’s a jazz suite for kitchen utensils.

Later, we see the same two drummers using only white plastic pails - discarded paint buckets. Glover originally came up with this concept when he saw street kids playing buckets in New York for spare change. The entire drum-manufacturing industry may go out of business once people hear how much rhythm can come out of something plucked out of a Dumpster.

The show’s finest melding of music, visuals and “hitting” (Glover’s word for his forceful style of tap) comes in a piece called “Industrialization.” The nation’s black laborers have moved north from the cotton fields and are now at work in factories.

A scaffold provides the setting. Hammers ring out against steel; chains scrape rhythmically across bar iron. Meanwhile, the tap dancers engage in a riot of sound and motion, stomping on the floor, scraping across gratings, sliding down metal ramps.

The show moves through segments that lament the loss of “‘da beat” through the middle of this century, meaning that tap becomes vaudeville-ized and Hollywood-ized. In one hilarious vignette, the show satirizes the syrupy routines of Bill “Bojangles” Robinson and Shirley Temple. But then, in a loving tribute, Glover’s choreography pays homage to the tap men who kept the genuine art form alive: Jimmy Slyde, Chuck Green, Lon Chaney and Buster Brown. Glover saw many of these men dance when he was small, and later learned at their, and from their, feet.

Director George C. Wolfe said that he originally conceived the show after he realized that Glover, only 21 at the time, was a “living repository of rhythm.”

“There are these old black tap dancers who were taught by the old black tap dancers, and so on,” Wolfe recently said. “All of these guys passed that information on to Savion, and it landed in his feet and his being and his soul.”

The finale of the show brings tap up to the ‘90s as a potent and sometimes startling hip-hop force. The performers are in street clothes, baggy sweats, and they move with the almost impossibly fast machine-gun rhythms of a furious rapper. I could see how hip-hop evolved from deeper roots, and suddenly, I found myself appreciating it more. This show does the same, and on a much larger scale, for tap itself.

This production does not feature the virtuoso dancing of Glover, who is working on other projects. This tour is more of an ensemble piece. The talent level is equal, and astonishingly high.

For those of us in Spokane, the bad news is that this show probably won’t arrive anytime soon. It is playing only the larger markets; it won’t arrive here for at least a few years.

The good news is, it will be at Seattle’s Paramount Theatre through Feb. 15, and plenty of tickets are still available for all performances.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 2 color photos

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: “Bring In ‘Da Noise, Bring In ‘Da Funk” will be staged through Feb. 15 at the Paramount Theatre in Seattle. Performances are Tuesday through Saturday at 8 p.m., and today and next Sunday at 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. Tickets range from $17.50 to $47.50, available through local Ticketmaster outlets (Payless Drug Stores) or by calling (206) 292-ARTS.