`'DA NOISE, 'DA FUNK' BURSTING WITH ENERGY.

Byline: Reed Johnson Daily News Staff Writer

Remember who invented ragtime - not to mention the blues, r&b, hip-hop and funk?

Hint: It wasn't Garth Drabinsky.

Nope, as ``Bring in 'Da Noise, Bring in 'Da Funk'' testifies mightily, the irrepressible pulse of American popular music comes from Africa's savannahs, by way of the Mississippi Delta, Chicago's South Side and sundry cultural flashpoints in between. (It also comes from Eastern Europe's shtetls, but that's another story.)

Bursting with sly humor and superhuman energy, ``Noise/Funk'' is the most sophisticated and dramatically compelling of the recent crop of percussive ensemble dance shows (``Tap Dogs,'' ``Riverdance,'' ``STOMP!'' et al.).

To call ``Noise/Funk'' a ``tap review'' is accurate but woefully inadequate. George C. Wolfe, who conceived and directed the show as a vehicle for New York wunderkind Savion Glover, understands the sublimely powerful metaphors unleashed by African-American music and dance. ``Noise/Funk'' pays polyrhythmic homage to one peoples' culture and history, but in the universal tongue of unbridled enthusiasm.

Glover is missing from this excellent national touring production, replaced by the brawnier, ferociously expressive Derick K. Grant. But the company's gifted young dancers - Grant, Dominique Kelley, Jimmy Tate, Christopher A. Scott and B. Jason Young - convey an amazing array of moods and attitudes via their flashing tap shoes.

The fractured narrative they tell consists of 27 high-speed choreographic vignettes, augmented by the magnificent gutbucket drumming of David Peter Chapman and Dennis J. Dove, the roof-raising voice of 'da Singer, Vickilyn Reynolds, and the blunt, streetwise poetry of Reg E. Gaines' book and lyrics - occasionally trite, but at their best sounding like Public Enemy's Chuck D reciting Langston Hughes or Amiri Baraka. Sets and costumes are kept effectively concise, with rear-screen projections inking in background details.

With the astonishingly versatile Thomas Silcott supplying 'da Voice, ``Noise/Funk'' dramatizes the way that call-and-response African rhythms were translated, first, into the aching drumbeats of the slave ships; then the back-breaking motions of the plantation fields; giving way decades later to the machinelike clang and stomp of the Chicago factories; the cool, sinuous shufflings of the beat generation; and, finally, the pounding boom-box defiance of funk and hip-hop.

Here's Grant, convincingly impersonating a steam train in the ``Chicago Bound'' segment. Here's Kelley, showing incredible technique for a 15-year-old, first twitching his body into the horrifying convulsions of ``Lynching Blues,'' then loose-jointed as a scarecrow, with a pasted-on smile and a curly-haired mannequin for a partner, in the wickedly funny segment that parodies Bojangles Robinson and Shirley Temple, ``The Uncle Huck-A-Buck Song.''

Whether turning themselves into human tin cans or hissing like furious pistons against the regimentation of factory life, the hoofers and pan-smackers of ``Noise/Funk'' have put a much-needed primordial backbeat into the iron-poor modern Broadway musical.

One complaint: Sixty-five bucks (top price) for a show inspired by resistance and resiliency isn't just a paradox. It's a serious breach of good sense.

Even so, ``Noise/Funk'' will be well worth the cost of turning your toes toward the Ahmanson Theatre this spring. 'Da beat is the language of cultural dissent, certainly, but of something more fundamental, too. It's the idiom of joy, community, sex, salvation, the city, survival.

Let the heeling begin!

THE FACTS

What: ``Bring in 'Da Noise, Bring in 'Da Funk.''

Where: Ahmanson Theatre, Music Center of Los Angeles County, 135 N. Grand Ave., downtown.

When: 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays. Additional performances 7:30 p.m. Sunday and March 22 and 29, April 5 and 19. Matinees 2 p.m. March 26, April 9 and 23. Through ApWril 26.

Tickets: $15 to $65. Call [phone].

Our rating: Three and One Half Stars.

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Photo

Photo: Dennis J. Dove, left, and David Peter Chapman let body language do the talking in the touring dance production of ``Bring in 'Da Noise, Bring in 'Da Funk'' at the Ahmanson Theatre.