Tap Dogs reboot for show at MCA Dance company’s energy dazzles crowd

The latest version of the now famous Tap Dogs company returned to the Maine Center for the Arts on Saturday night as “Tap Dogs Rebooted,” five guys and two girls providing a 90 minute display of energy and dazzling technique that brought the audience to its feet for three standing ovations.

The original Tap Dogs were the Aussie sensation that re-created tap for the new millennium, under the direction of the brilliant dancer and choreographer Dein Perry. Perry grew up in a steel town north of Sydney, and when it looked like a dancing career wouldn’t pay the bills, he took a job in the construction trades to tide him over. A role in the long-running Sydney production of the musical “42nd Street” changed all that, and he brought his dancing school mates together to form Tap Brothers. That endeavor led to offers to choreograph the London show “Hot Shoe Shuffle,” earning Perry his first Olivier Award, England’s equivalent to the Tony. The rest, as they say, is history.

The new show still has the look of a construction site and has lost none of its steam, including lots of machine-generated fog that occasionally spills out into the house.

The amplified percussion score, composed by Andrew Wilkie and performed by Brad Carbone from his own onstage steel aerie, still reverberates in your chest. From the first solo by dance director Sheldon Perry, tapping out an accelerating rhythm with the intensity of an oncoming bullet train, to the favorite and familiar dancing on scaffolding and soft-shoeing in puddles, this is the Tap Dogs company the enthusiastic crowd came to see.

Tap Dogs always had a sense of fun and never took its macho self too seriously, but the addition of the women may also be leading the inventive creative team in a gentler direction. While there is no single narrative thread running through the evening, and many numbers are sheer tapping, climbing, dribbling (think Harlem Globetrotters in tap shoes), stamping pyrotechnics that leave you laughing or gaping with amazement, the overall sense of the show is of a bunch of super-talented kids who have brought their schoolyard games and competitions onto the stage.

With Perry acting as a benign circus ringmaster, the dancers showed what can happen when kids’ games are taken to new heights: follow the leader – bet you can’t tap that!, playing in puddles, using metal poles on scaffolding or on the floor to create rhythms the way kids drag sticks across a schoolyard fence, boys against girls, then suddenly – growing up – boys deciding girls are OK to dance with. Without losing any of its pizzazz or brilliance, the new show has added a dimension.

“Tap Dogs Rebooted” is not your grandmother’s entertainment, but it does pay subtle homage to its tapping forbears. Joshua Allan Cyr gets into a safety harness and is hoisted to tap upside down – shades of Fred Astaire dancing on the walls and ceiling of his state room in “Royal Wedding.” And the get-the-audience-wet near-finale, with the guys trading their Blundstone boots for waders, is a tip of the hat to Gene Kelly’s famous title scene from “Singin’ in the Rain.”

Saturday night it didn’t seem to matter what generation you were, or if your hair was black, brown, blond, white, or unusual shades of red or blue. It was a great night, and everyone left tapping.