‘Pinoys make great Stompers’

LONDON — It’s a little past 3 p.m. at The Ambassadors Theatre, a storied West End venue built in the early 1900s, which has seen many a “new and challenging” production. Today, it’s the home of the musical Stomp.

As we meet the Stompers (as what the cast members are dubbed) Emma King, Hugo Cortes, Adam Buckley and Shae Carroll for an interview, they are already in their costumes such as overalls, working boots, basically regular workwear, standing on a stage carrying sticks and sweeps.

Behind them are water drums, garbage cans and basins, while stashed backstage are shopping trolleys, kitchen sinks, inflatables, among others. All these stuff that you’d normally dismiss as ordinary are the “music instruments” that form part of a stage and setting you’d probably not expect from a West End musical.

By 7:30 p.m., Emma, Hugo, Adam and Shae are joined by four others in the show that has had been described as anything but ordinary. Loud yet symphonic, it moves along telling stories without a single dialogue, but loads up on choreography and physical comedy.

You’ve got to hand the energy level of the show to the Stompers who are backed by a dance or percussion background.

Hugo is a classically-trained Brazilian dancer who is also into acrobatics and martial arts. He has performed in different musicals before joining Stomp and calls it his best gig ever. When Hugo, who also starred in the UK box-office hit StreetDance 3D, finds out we are a bunch of Filipino reporters, he shares he has given contemporary ballet workshops to Filipino dancers living in Ukraine and Vienna, Austria. 

Emma, a Michelle Rodriguez dead-ringer, is a classical percussionist and was trained as an orchestra musician. She is one of the Stomp newbies. Shae is another new face, who was schooled in hip-hop.

Adam, on the other hand, has a dance-oriented background who “sort of tap-danced as a child” and got into a classical ballet school for college before “being released to the West End world.”

Yes, they weren’t strangers to movement and music prior to Stomp, but they needed more than that to be a Stomper.

“You just have to have the will to learn because the whole Stomp process is unusual and different from anything that you learn,” Hugo says, “If you have a music background or a dance background, I think Stomp completes you as an artist. You only have to be open to learn and have a good ear, I think.”

“A good personality as well since you want to learn from your peers,” Emma chimes in, “and yeah a little bit of fitness will help you.”

Hugo adds, “You have to have a sense of humor. Every cast member has a little bit of crazy in them. Some of us don’t really act on stage, they are as crazy on stage as they are off it.”

How about good looks?

“It’s nothing about the looks,” Adam laughs, “They would rather that you look weird — honestly, we’re crazy-looking people. Although on stage, it looks amazing!”

It’s no joke how they got to be “amazing” on stage.

Adam recalls auditioning a couple of times before finally making it on his third try in 2007. He remembers his first day at work as “so, so daunting.” These days, he gets to play “Sarge” (short for sergeant, the leader of the cast in any Stomp show).

Any newcomer to the company, Adam says, undergoes a six to eight-week intense training period wherein he gets to study every character in the eight-person show. “Stomp is one of the most lenient companies in the world in the sense that they will give you time (to learn),” he adds.

One of the foremost things a Stomper has to cultivate is coordination. “Even for a drummer, if you come in and you know how to play with your hands, in conjunction with your feet, but there is stuff happening on the side like you have to act at the same time. So, there’s this whole theatrical part of it that you have to pay attention to as well, so I think that makes the whole show very, very hard,” says Hugo. “Being in tune with yourself is really hard, and being in tune with other people doing something different is also hard. This show is extremely challenging and even it takes a while to get used to (it). Even if you do it for seven years, you never relax and say, ‘Okay, I have it.’”

But there’s a lot of room for improvisation. Shae says, “They have characters for you, but they want you to be you.”

Because things can “really get manic and exciting” during the live show, mishaps do occur such as getting bruises from manning the props for the quick-paced routines, bumping into each other, even smashing a tooth or two like in the case of Adam.

But, “one of the things that I love the most when things go wrong is how the cast comes together and deals with it,” says Hugo. 

They all claim that the show has changed them a great deal.

Says Shae: “It’s still changing me. Being new, it has definitely taken me to a different path to what I usually do. I used to have drum lessons when I was 16 for a year, but then dance took over and being able to take myself into a more musical path through Stomp, I love it!”

The members say that another “amazing” thing that happens to every Stomper is that they get to listen to music differently, and that anyone can be a Stomper — as long as you’re willing to hear beats from what is perceived as offbeat — like this writer, who’s hearing funky little beats from the computer keys while typing this. But that’s another story.

Meanwhile, Adam, Shae and Emma will make Manila their next “stomping ground” come June 17 to 22 at the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) Main Theater. It’s actually the return run of Stomp to be mounted again by Lunchbox Theatrical Productions with Concertus Manila. It first came to the country in 2011 and became a hit. The Filipino audience can expect fresh segments, one of which is the “frog” routine featuring pipes.

Also joining the Stomp crew in Manila is the kababayan Andres Fernandes, who is not the only Filipino in Stomp productions (be it Off Broadway, West End and the touring editions), reveals Steve McNicholas, who co-created the show with Luke Cresswell in 1991 as a street comedy-musical act for the Edinburgh Festival.

Steve tells us, “I don’t know what is it about the Philippines, but you make great Stompers.”

(For tickets, call TicketWorld at 891-9999.)