The six dancers in Tap Dogs work impressively hard to convince us that they would never stoop to anything as sissy as a warm-up before they come on stage. Probably they just break into a couple of six packs with their teeth. These are the hard lads of the international dance circuit, the dancers who have forged their image out of Levi jeans, dockers' biceps, Desperate Dan jaw lines and metal-tapped Blundstone boots. Ever since Tap Dogs first took Sydney Theatre Festival by the scruff of its neck in 1995, the show has apparently been on a mission to prove that dancing isn't just for wimps and girlies.
The resulting testosterone-fest would be comical if the act were any less slick. Tap Dogs is danced on a stage that famously looks more like a construction site or a steelyard than the orchid-festooned ballrooms in which Fred Astaire used to rattle around. The dancers swing from scaffolding, teeter on planks and crash against corrugated iron, working up a seriously macho sweat. All of the visual jokes and puns are emphatically boysie - like the routine in which they pound out the rhythm of a steam train in a cloud of dry ice, dodge between blowtorches, or pretend to take a piss between their tapping toes. At frequent intervals they get out screwdrivers to adjust the screws on their metal taps - a deliberately far cry from dancers retying their satin ribbons or pulling up their tights.
The tap style which the dancers favour is also heavy duty. Though it's partly an illusion created by the amplification of the floor, the muscular heft of the dancers and the heavy percussion of the music, it seems that every step bears down hard into the ground. Compared to Astaire, who could seem as light as a water boatman, his witty feet splintering the dance phrase into staccato beats, these guys are all drum and bass.
But there's an arch self commentary going on too, which allows the dancers to mock their own toughness and occasionally play with a lighter palette of movement. As the show is building to its climax, two of the men swill buckets of water into a shallow trough and the others, clad in rubber boots, make ready to jump boisterously into it. The audience in the front rows flinch back from the expected soaking but of course the dancers place their boots in the water as delicately as ballerinas and perform a sweet splashy quartet. Elsewhere, too, they will stall the racket and skim the ground in lazy syncopation, giving us a chance to listen to nuances of rhythm and phrase.
But these are only brief interludes in the big, noisy picture. At 75 minutes, Tap Dogs does what it does with expert style. Any longer and the show would become a crashing bore.
Until March 3. Box office: 020-7863 8000.
