The search for a perfect show:

By Kristi Casey Sanders

STOMP cast member Louis Labovitch didn’t play drums until he was 17. “But after I started playing them, I became obsessed with them and played five hours a day every day,” he says. Playing in a band proved unglamorous (he slept in his van with his drum kit for six months). Theater school at Fresno State was an interesting experience. But the majority of the jobs Labovitch held (dishwasher, greenhouse worker) had nothing to do with his passions.

Then, one day on London’s Portobello Road, Labovitch stopped to watch some street performers drumming and dancing Brazilian capoeira. He started clapping along and stuck up a conversation with another man clapping along.

“He was friends with these people,” Labovitch remembers. “And I asked him, ‘What do you do?’ And he said, ‘I’m in STOMP .’ He told me they were having an audition next week; it was the first time they had held auditions in two years.”

Labovitch signed up for an audition time on the show’s Web site hours before the request line closed. When he received an e-mail with his audition time, he thought, “Man, I’m in!” But 1,000 other people showed up for the audition. “I kind of put that out of my head and thought, ‘I’m just here to learn something.’”

More than three years later, Labovitch is still learning. “STOMP is like comedy in movement,” he says. “It’s never perfect. STOMP is like a constant search for a perfect show. It’s been handed down through five generations of Stomp-ers, and some say they’ve found it.”

The show combines the art of clowning with a percussion ensemble of unlikely objects. “It’s kind of a template that’s passed down when you’re in training,” Labovitch says. “There’s the funny guy who’s always messing up, the august clown who’s kind of in charge … he leads the audience in call and response. There’s the guy who’s crazy in the head, the quirky girl who’s kind of off in her own world, the bitchy girl who’s tough … my character is the big, tall, stoic man who’s the main guy’s right hand. There’s another guy who’s the mover [and] another guy who’s a regular guy who can play music, but can also throw in a gag. I couldn’t throw in a gag; I have to concentrate on the music … and being tall … and playing rocking music.”

The opening number is one of Labovitch’s favorites. “It’s very subtle and looks really cool,” he says. “We’re janitors in this world where inanimate objects start to make music in our hands and it’s like [the movie] Fantasia .”

The clowns’ ability to bring forth music from objects such as brooms and lighters is part of what Labovitch loves most about the show. “I like hanging from the wall and playing on a bunch of pots and pans,” he says. “When I first saw the show, the music, the beats were so phat, I couldn’t believe that you could make those sounds with pots and pans and skips [trashcans].”

Labovitch was born in Africa and has lived all over England and America, but now he calls Atlanta home. “I first came to Atlanta with the show and totally fell in love with it,” he says. “I met [my daughter’s] mom in a club called Halo.”

And, he says, his 22-month-old daughter Finnley is a chip off the old rhythmic block. “I say, ‘Can you clap?’ and she claps. I say, ‘Can you stomp?’ and she stomps. When my drumsticks are out, she’ll rip them out of my hands. She loves the drumsticks. When I bring my snare drum out, she’ll just bang on it till I’m like ‘Stop!’ She doesn’t really look like me, but that’s what I’ve given her, and I love it.”

STOMP plays The Fabulous Fox Theatre Sept. 18-23.