Theater Review - Foot Loose
Savion Glover’s Noise taps through black history
When Savion Glover moves, and in Bring in ‘Da Noise, Bring in ‘Da Funk he moves nearly non-stop, he could be many things, like a whirling dervish or a shaman in street clothes casting a spell. Seeing the combination of his pounding footwork and the concentration on his dreadlock-framed face, the tap virtuoso looks like nothing so much as a rodeo trick-rider trying to keep his own feet from throwing him.
Glover brings noise, funk and a surplus of Broadway showmanship to the Alliance Theatre, which co-produces and hosts the first stop of Glover’s national touring revival of his 1996 Tony Award-winning show. A touring Noise has played Atlanta before, but the reprise at the Alliance is the first to locally feature Glover himself, co-creator and director Geoffrey C. Wolfe and several original cast members for a lavish celebration of “Da Beat” that cannot be beaten.
“Da Beat” is the show’s label for rhythmic music and dance, especially tap. Noise means to reclaim tap from minstrel show stereotypes and celebrate it as an essential African-American art form. The show makes a compelling argument, as some musical numbers explore the history of tap, while others use tap to illuminate the sweep of black history.
Joining Glover on stage for the show’s multi-generational survey are four additional tap dancers, two drummers, power singer Lynette Dupree and Thomas Silcott, who raps and recites the show’s poetic interludes.
The show constantly finds surprising combinations of performers while seizing on social trends. Dupree sings the haunting “Slave Ships” while Glover does a routine combining tap and modern dance that expresses a slave pining for freedom, the striated light suggesting the hold of a ship. Next, all the performers but Glover join in for the hoe-down “Som’thin’ From Nothin’,” which demonstrates how slaves made music with their feet when their drums were confiscated.
For many numbers, the performers are accompanied by a seven-piece live band, whose explosive arrangements would raise your heart rate even if the cast was merely washing dishes on stage. In “The Pan Handlers,” drummers Jared Crawford and Raymond A. King do almost literally that. They enter dressed in metal kitchenware, pushing a tinker’s cart, and rap out xylophonic rhythms on themselves, each other and a variety of dangling cans and skillets. It’s one of the show’s most exuberant moments.
The historical concept gives Noise more weight than a similarly entertaining show like Stomp, although some of its ideas are a little fuzzy, like the appearance of Hitler in a montage of photos from the Harlem Renaissance. Director Wolfe frequently finds inspiration in the past of African-Americans (as in such shows as The Colored Museum and his latest, Harlem Song) and Noise’s costumes alone offer a study of changing fashions. But the show doesn’t strictly adhere to the conventional staging of dance. During evocations of the Chicago Riots and the 1977 New York blackout, the dancers frequently keep in shadow, urging us to listen to their tapping rather than watch their footwork.
Noise has some heavy moments, as when Dupree sings “The Lynching Blues” and a hanged man atop a bale of cotton rapidly taps his death throes. But the evening has plenty of humor as well. In the medley “Where’s the Beat?” an aspiring dancer called “The Kid” (Cartier A. Williams) seeks to break into showbiz and sees a variety of old-fashioned styles. In one vignette, Marshall Lewis Davis plays “Uncle Huck-a-Buck,” a thinly disguised Bojangles. Before launching into his routine, he hilariously replaces his sour, jaded expression with a wide, phony grin to cater to racist stereotypes. And he’s joined by Glover, who dances with a diminutive white dummy, a la Shirley Temple, attached to his hands and feet.
Some of the show’s most entertaining moments come when the history lesson gives way to personal experience. Glover offers not just a solo but a kind of soliloquy in “Green, Chaney, Buster, Slyde.” While we hear a recording of his voice describe the styles of tap predecessors, he performs before three mirrors, in a tight spotlight, turning tap into an unusually introspective art form. And “Taxi” is a mere lark, showing four of the dancers failing to hail cabs and expressing their frustration with their feet.
Bring in ‘Da Noise, Bring in ‘Da Funk is the inaugural show of Susan V. Booth’s first season as the Alliance artistic director. As a co-produced touring revival, it may not be, strictly speaking, an “Alliance” show, but talent of Noise’s caliber can dismiss all qualms. Never before have I seen such enthusiastic response from an Alliance audience, which roared approval at Noise like an arena rock show, and included Glover fans in hysteria worthy of The Beatles’ heyday. If Noise fairly represents Booth’s future tenure, bring it on.