It's a body slapping, hand clapping, feet stomping sensation!

When I was in London several years ago, I'd wanted to check out what the fuss was about a particularly noisy theatre sensation. Unfortunately, the seahorse fella I was with wanted to catch Les Miserables instead. So you can imagine my excitement when I'd heard that Malaysia Airlines was bringing Stomp to KL.



Stomp is a percussion performance based on rhythm and sound generated by commonplace non-musical props, such as brooms, dustbins, match boxes, plastic tubing, plastic bags, buckets and even the kitchen sink. It's pure and simple noise presented in a rhythm that gets your feet and hand tapping, clapping, stomping along throughout the performance. Noise from everyday items and even junk turned into rhythmic music, it's simply fabulous.

Stomp opened in KL at the Istana Budaya on Sep 13. I caught the performance last night on the 14th. The Istana Budaya is a nice theatre and is surely capable of hosting many more international performing arts productions. It's just a pity we don't get enough of these productions coming this way. After last night's show, I can understand why too. A huge West End and Broadway production comes to KL and it doesn't manage to pull a full house on the 2nd day of it's run. I find that just plain disappointing. What is it about the performing arts that doesn't seem to interest many Malaysians?

Surely not the cost of the ticket? I mean RM250 is reasonable, no? Or RM200, even RM150? In fact, most of the seats that were empty were the RM150 and RM200 seats. On top of that, there was a 15% discount for the early birds attending the first 3 shows. So what does that say about Malaysian's appreciation of the performing arts? I can't imagine the show not pulling a full house due to a lack of marketing. Over the last couple of weeks, you could see flyers, posters, newspaper articles and television ads highlighting this amazing show coming our way. Getting tickets was also easy through online booking at axcess. Yet, the theatre was surely no more than half full. Hopefully, they start pulling in more crowds.

Oh well, looks like Singapore will still be the place to go when one feels the need for more variety and options in the performing arts. Which is fine by me anyways and it's not like I need an additional excuse to head south frequently anyway.

That aside, I thoroughly enjoyed the show. It was excellent, and absolutely enthralled me from the start to the end. Lasting just short of 2 hours, the rhythm of dustbin banging, plastic bag rustling, newspaper crumpling, basketball bouncing and so much more will have you tapping and clapping along with them all night. I especially liked the rhythms created by the plastic tubings. I think over the next couple of weeks, we'll see and hear a lot of people try to rhythmically play everything from matchboxes, keyrings, tabletops to anything they can get their hands on.

Overall, it was a dustbin banging, body slapping, hand clapping, feet stomping sensation. Simply brilliant. Check it out.