Full of sound and fury, signifying little

TAMPA -- If you don't like football but do like halftime shows, then Shockwave is for you. With tuba players in tutus, a baton-twirling ballerina, acrobatic sax players and trombonists who wade right into the audience, it's like the most amazing show ever dreamed up in a high school band room.

Shockwave, the sequel to last season's drum and bugle corps spectacle, Blast!, opened a weeklong run Tuesday at Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center.

With snappy arrangements of middlebrow classics, from Carmina Burana to Blue Rondo a la Turk to Good Vibrations, and a relentlessly wholesome cast, Shockwave is a fun night out. But any claim that it and Blast!, both conceived by James Mason, a veteran of the Midwestern outdoor pageant scene, constitute a new kind of theater is overblown.

At its best, Shockwave is very good indeed -- in Drum, Drum, Drum, a pulse-pounding percussion version of Sing, Sing, Sing, for example, or the big sax solo in Buddy Rich's signature piece, Channel One Suite, or Chuck Mangione's lilting Lullaby for Nancy Carol. Mason is on to something wonderful in his tribute to bandleaders like Stan Kenton, Woody Herman and Benny Goodman.

But Shockwave doesn't really go anywhere. Some of the transitions are clever, as in the cell phone interlude between Carmina Burana and Good Vibrations, but you would be hard-pressed to identify an emotional or even musical arc to the show. With no narrative, it's basically one powerhouse band number after another, and that wears thin after a while.

Unlike the most successful productions of Cirque du Soleil, to which Mason and his creative team have plainly paid close attention in developing their sometimes surreal staging, Shockwave never manages to fashion its own distinct world. For all its big-band flash and dazzle, the show is surprisingly uninvolving.

Part of the problem is the dancing. Although the music is played with tremendous verve by the youthful instrumentalists, Shockwave often must rely on its eight dancers -- called the Visual Ensemble -- to carry a number. While proficient enough, they just aren't that great.

The choreography by Jim Moore, George Pinney and Jonathan Vanderkolff flirts with schlock throughout and sometimes goes completely off the rails, as in Carmina Burana, which features brass players in hooded monk's robes and dancers who look like refugees from Up With People.

REVIEW: Blast II: Shockwave runs through Sunday at Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center. Tickets: $23.50-$64.50. (813) 229-7827 or toll-free 1-800-955-1045. There are also two shows Dec. 8 at Van Wezel Hall in Sarasota. Tickets: $40-$50. (941) 953-3368 or toll-free 1-800-826-9393.

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