‘Tap Dogs’ presentation a muscular brand of dance

Leave it to the Australians to reinvent a particularly American tradition.

Sure, the dance being done in the production “Tap Dogs,” at 3 and 8 p.m. Saturday at the Maine Center for the Arts in Orono is definitely tap. But it’s a more muscular, if no less energetic, brand than most Americans are used to seeing.

“Tap Dogs” is a production that’s part theater, part dance, part rock concert and part construction site. It features six athletic male dancers performing on a wood and steel set in a 90-minute rocking, tapping spectacle. The show is the creation of two-time Olivier Award-winning composer Dein Perry, designer-director Nigel Triffitt and composer Andrew Wilkie.

Perry built the show around his days at a makeshift dance school in Newcastle, Australia, a steel town north of Sydney where, as young boys, he and the future “dogs” learned how to tap. At 17, with no opportunity in sight for a dancing career, he earned his union papers and worked as an industrial mechanic for six years.

He then moved to Sydney. Small chorus parts eventually led to his big break when he was cast in the long-running Sydney production of “42nd Street.” When that closed, Perry decided to create a contemporary show around the theme of his industrial experience with his Newcastle tap-dancing mates.

With a small government grant, Perry contacted his old friends, who had also taken up various “real” jobs by this time, and formed Tap Brothers, an early incarnation of “Tap Dogs.”

From this, he was offered the chance to choreograph the London musical “Hot Shoe Shuffle,” which earned Perry his first Olivier Award – Britain’s equivalent to the Tony – in 1995. A subsequent offer from the Sydney Theatre Company led to the collaboration with Triffitt and the creation of “Tap Dogs.”

After a smash debut at the Sydney Theatre Festival, then the Edinburgh (Scotland) Festival, the show moved to London, gaining Perry his second Olivier. The production made its North American debut in 1996 at the Just For Laughs Festival in Montreal, and has gone on to tour North America for 21/2 years.

It’s a show that has dazzled the critics as well. The Chicago Sun-Times called it “astonishing, high-adrenaline excitement,” while Entertainment Weekly termed it “an amazing reinvention of tap for our generation.”

Tickets for “Tap Dogs” are available at the MCA box office, by calling 581-1755 or (800) MCA-TIXX or by accessing www.MaineCenterfortheArts.org.