After 29 years and 11,472 Performances, “Stomp” will play its final performance on January 8, 2023.
The show, ensconced at the Orpheum Theater in the East Village since Feb. 27, 1994, creates a wordless percussive dance using martial arts sticks and drumsticks, hands and feet, brooms and buckets and dust bins, oil cans and garbage cans and garbage can lids — also the occasional zippo lighter and shopping cart. “Stomp” is coming to an end in New York City after 29 years for the same reason that “Phantom of the Opera” is after 35 — ticket sales have not picked up when in-person reopened after the pandemic lockdown.
“While we’re sad to see it close at the Orpheum Theater, we couldn’t be prouder of the impact that ‘Stomp’ has had — and will continue to have — as the tours run both here and in Europe,” the producers said in a statement
Below are videos of their performances over the years. (Call it an exercise in rhythm and blues.)
Before the East Village: A commercial for…apples…done in 1992 for the Austrailian Horticultural Society by Steve McNicholas and Luke Cresswell, the duo who created Stomp the year before. The two British-born percussionists, composers and performers first worked together in 1981 as members of the street band Pookiesnackenburger and the theater group Cliff Hanger.
on stage at the Orpheum : the oil can walkers routine
The Zipppo lighter routine
A “number” from Stomp recorded July 11, 2013 in Bryant Park. Afterwards, the MC for the free lunchtime concert said he figured out that they must be the people who live upstairs from him.
Celebrating their 10,000th show in New York City in 2017 by sweeping the streets. By then, they’d swept the world, with productions everywhere from Japan to the United Arab Emirates.
Words! In 2019, various celebrities ( Harlem Globetrotters, Javier Bardem, Bill Irwin top hat and tails, drummer Tommy Lee, ?Sheila E, Quincy Jones, more) — many attempting to make their own rhythm — congratulate Stomp on its 25th anniversary in New York
This clever, by-then familiar (but faux) Zoom video marks the company’s return after lockdown, in July, 2021, one of the first productions to resume in-peson performances.
Two months later, Desmond Howard leads the audience at the Broadway in Bryant Park lunchtime concert September 23, 2021 in, well, Stomp-like clapping, before the rest of the gang…stomps in.
