Rat-a-tat, click, crash, swoosh, thump, tap, ting.  These are some of the many percussive sounds you will hear in 90 minutes of audio/visual thrills and adventure at Stomp as eight performers romp about the stage.  What you won’t hear or see is the spoken word or music.  All of the acting – and there is humor as well – is mime.

Having evolved from busker’s performances in the U.K., Stomp celebrates its 30^th anniversary as a stage show, with a stint at the Henry J. Kaiser Center for the Arts in Oakland.  The pounding, frenetic high energy show is a crowd pleaser from beginning to end.

The germination of Stomp is that virtually any item, from match boxes to newspaper, can be used to create sound.  Varying the timing of the beats creates rhythm.  Adding multiple performers to create the rhythm delivers either resounding unison or an orchestra of counterpoint percussion.  Choreograph the motion and you have a well-honed, unique, and entertaining stage show.

Of course, creating percussive sounds from various items to communicate or entertain is universal and timeless.  In the modern era, popular examples of creating a beat from beyond the drum kit was broadly popularized by two legendary dancers.  Fred Astaire taps around and bangs on various props in movies like Easter Parade, and Gene Kelly and friends attach trash can lids to their feet to dance and create crashing sounds in It’s Always Fair Weather.  In fact, one of Stomp’s signature skits using trash cans as drums and lids as cymbals appears to be inspired by Kelly’s idea.  But it is doubtful that any collection of sound and movement sketches has ever been as complex or diverse as Stomp.

The show opens as a realization.  A single performer using a push broom focuses on the brushing sound the bristles make.  He then taps the wooden sides on the floor and adds rhythm.  One by one, the other performers appear, and before long, a symphony of sound and movement emerges.  This is the first of the myriad of overlaid rhythms and movements that astound with their variation, intensity, and accuracy.

The sounds of each prop vary, and some are unexpected.  Various sizes of plastic accordion pipe when extended or when stroked with a stick result in different sounds, as if a cacophony of insects and chattering animals in a jungle.  Amazing as well is how the sound of a straw scraping in the cut opening of a drink cup lid can carry and play off of the pounding of a blown-up plastic film bag.  In another sketch, the performers align on a darkened stage and flick cigarette lighter flames off-and-on in precision for a starlight show.

Apart from the cornucopia of sound, the performers impress with pinpoint timing and athleticism.  In some sequences they hurl large objects to one another at long distances; they stick fight in others; and they stomp and prance throughout. 

Stomp’s brief stay in Oakland is at the Kaiser Center for the Arts, formerly a convention center.  After a 20-year closure, it has been renovated and is now in a soft opening in its new repurposing.  Functionally, its 1,350 seat Calvin Simmons Theater, one of five indoor venues at the Center, fills a performing-house gap in Oakland among the massive (Oakland Arena), the merely huge (Paramount and Fox Theaters), and the intimate (Yoshi’s, for example).  For its size, the whole seating configuration is relatively close to the stage as many seats are in side wings and others in two tiers above the orchestra.

The stately Center sits in a beautiful location at the foot of Lake Merritt, adjacent to both the Oakland Museum of California and Laney College.   Although the Center has a parking lot, it is too small for popular performances, and the event parking fee for this night was $40.  Street parking and other nearby lots are a possibility.  The Center’s entertainment offerings are building, and hopefully they will all be as well received as Stomp.

Stomp, created by Steve McNicholas and Luke Cresswell, played at Henry J. Kaiser Center for the Arts, 10 Tenth Street, Oakland, CA December 6-7, 2025.

For the remainder of the year, my San Jose and Peninsula theater reviews will be posted on Talkin’ Broadway with only introductions to those reviews on this site. Please continue to https://www.talkinbroadway.com/page/regional/sanjose/sj303.html for full review.

”Tengo familia” – “I have family.”  To an American, these words are an innocuous truism.  To an Italian, it is a powerful statement of having and belonging, of the unbreakable bonds of blood.  The Italian bromide recurs throughout Joe DiPietro’s beloved play about immigrant generations, Over the River and Through the Woods.  City Lights Theater and Director Jeffrey Bracco present a loving and crowd-pleasing production of this winsome story of societal evolution through one family’s experience.  Laughs are almost continuous with short breaks for sympathetic moments.

Nick, played as often exasperated yet caring grandson by Filip Hofman, is a 30-ish marketing executive from Hoboken, New Jersey who has dinner with both sets of Italian immigrant grandparents every Sunday in the early ‘90s.  His parents have retired to Florida.  When Nick announces that he received an offer for a better position in Seattle, the grandparents conspire to frustrate the move.  And what better way than to have him fall in love with a young lady of their arrangement.  Enter Caitlin, the appealing and ever-smiling Delaney Bantillo, who is the antithesis of what she regards the dyspeptic Nick.

Relationships operate differently in southern than in northern European families.  Nick’s modal means of communication with his grandparents is to shout with seeming hostility, to the point that you wonder if he really loves them.  His frustration comes from incidents like learning that one set of grandparents want to return the VCR he bought them and give him back the money, because it was too expensive a gift.  Or when he finds that the message recorder he bought them is broken and asks why, he finds that maternal Grandpa Frank threw it on the floor because he didn’t like its squawking.

Stereotypes run rampant in the play, but coming from a Sicilian family on my mother’s side with immigrant grandparents, I can testify that I know equivalents of all of the characters in the play and all of the situations and conversations.  Aida (Karen DeHart) is the hostess and maternal grandmother, who seems to only leave the kitchen to take (or give) food orders.  For her, whatever the question, the answer is food, which solves everything.  It’s always “Can I get you something to eat?” and no is not an acceptable answer, which is another of Nick’s frustrations.  So oblivious is Aida to rejection concerning food, when Caitlin says repeatedly that she is vegetarian, Aida blithely replies “I understand. Have a piece of veal.”……………Continue to https://www.talkinbroadway.com/page/regional/sanjose/sj303.html

Over the River and Through the Woods runs through December 21, 2025, at City Lights Theater Company, 529 South 2nd Street, San Jose CA. For tickets and information please visit cltc.org.