STOMP In Modesto: A Preview

by Michael P Coleman

STOMP, the “international percussion sensation” that has been taking audiences by storm for years, came to Sacramento earlier this year.

In thinking about how I was going to tell you about the show’s return to northern California, this time to the Gallo Center for the Arts in Modesto on November 23, I decided to take a look at what I’d written about STOMP last February, first published with the Sac Cultural Hub:

I wish I could tell you that STOMP’s eight member cast used everything but the kitchen sink to drive the “music,” but that would be inaccurate: four of them rocked the house with four kitchen sinks.

During other sets they used buckets. Inner tubes. Match boxes. Trash cans. Plastic tubing. Push brooms. Mops. Oil drums. Their own hands and feet, and even each other’s bodies. It was a raucous symphony derived from the mundane, stunning us alternatively between rapt silence and rousing applause.

“We were stunned from rapt silence to rousing applause.”

That’s not bad! And quite accurate! I need to keep drinking whatever I was drinking on the morning I wrote that!

Here’s more from me, coming out of STOMP last February:

As a handful of cast members marched onstage pushing four run-of-the-mill grocery carts, I figured out the show’s appeal. STOMP has tapped into the kid in all of us, the kid who got yelled at for jumping onto a rolling grocery cart at the corner grocery store, or beating on a wall or the floor or the bed post or his brother’s head (I am revealing too much here?). As children, we were powerless to ignore the available object’s inherent utility for something beyond its original intended purpose.

Click here to read MPC’s full preview / review on STOMP, coming to the Gallo Center in November 23!