Tap Dogs.

Imagine a bit of Stomp, throw in a dollop of Fred Astaire, blend with your wildest dreams of machismo (not to mention rumors that at least three cast members are gay [see In Profile], and you've got Tap Dogs, the industrial-strength, all-male, Australian tap-dance revue that has already left heel marks on the better dance floors in North America and Europe. Choreographer and creator Dein Perry's six-man romp should leave similar impressions when it opens in New York March 13.

The saga of Tap Dogs is compelling enough to have been written in publicists' heaven. Perry ran a dance school in Newcastle, outside Sydney, but the lack of dancing opportunities there led him to a career as an industrial machinist. However, the tap experience of his youth was indelible, and after spending a while as a Down Under gypsy, he struck up a collaboration with designer-director Nigel Triffitt, which led to a tryout engagement at the 1995 Sydney Theatre Festival, thence to Scotland's tony Edinburgh Festival and prestigious Olivier award the following year.

What you get is tap dance with a different emphasis. This is not the tap of RKO movie musicals. And it is not the tap of Harlem's legendary African-American hoofers (though Perry is clearly indebted to them). It is tap as a percussion orchestra and tap as a shared male music. And it can be made on any surface.

Perry and his cohorts come dressed for the occasion in construction-site chic--skimpy cutoff shorts, tatty jeans, flannel shirts, and tank tops. And they perform by themselves, with a live band (led by composer Andrew Wilkie), on dangerously sloping ramps, on the ceiling, and even in a trough of water (patrons in the first three rows of the theater are given Day-Glo pink slickers; you won't want to steal them). Any surface offers possibilities. And for an uninterrupted 75 minutes these chaps hold you enthralled.

It's easy to understand why audiences everywhere--and gay audiences in particular--have succumbed to these fellows. They look fabulous, and they dispense enormous charm in their self-deprecating feats of rhythmic abandon. Tap Dogs also sustains an aura of improvisation, though it has been calculated down to the last rat-a-tat-tat. Still, the show leaves the impression that almost anyone with a pair of Blundstone boots in working order could be a star; in fact, one dancer is a former plumber with no previous performing experience.

It may also be the way the members of this sexy sextet relate to each other that lends Tap Dogs much of its appeal. The atmosphere is chummy rather than competitive--they could all be bunk mates--and when one dancer bests his instructor in a contest, both parties seem mildly abashed at this reversal of fortune. The community feeling is everywhere--in an amicable game of cat's cradle, in the tenderness with which a dancer is fastened in a harness and upended, in the impromptu fabrication of a stairway, in the sense of an exclusively male universe that devises its own rules and lives within them.

Triffitt and lighting designer David Murray have enveloped Tap Dogs in a smoky, indigo ambiance that lends a wondrous, ultradisco atmosphere to Perry's troupe. Its members assume personas and stick with them throughout the show. And in a little more than an hour, we feel we have known (or would like to have known) Perry's rugged leaders of the revels, slick, bare-chested Darren Disney and unassumingly boyish Ben Read. Tap Dogs derives from a mongrel background, but as far as entertainment is concerned, it is the king of the kennel, the purest of the breed.

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BILLY BURKE

Australian Tap Dogs performer Billy Burke may be new to the States, but he's not new to the stage. He's been dancing since he was 4--which wasn't always easy, growing up in the working-class city of Brisbane. "I got called `poofter' every day of my life," he says. "At such a young age, I didn't even know I was gay yet. There were times when I really wanted to give up dancing. I just wanted to be normal and play sports like the rest of the boys."

But Burke didn't give up. In fact, after years of formal dance training, Burke turned professional without finishing high school. At the age of 19 he joined the Australian touring production of Cats, and ever since, he says, "it's been one musical after the next." That is, until Tap Dogs.

Since joining the hit dance troupe during its 1996 London run, Burke, 28, notes that being out among his fellow cast members isn't a problem. If anything, the idea of coming out in The Advocate was what scared him. "Why should about it?" he asks. "But then I thought, Why not talk about it? A friend of mine committed suicide last year. She was a lesbian, but she never discussed that side of her life. Rather than embracing it, I don't think she felt very good about it." He pauses, then adds, "If my coming-out can help someone else, it's worth it."