Stomp has enjoyed four previous engagements in Boston, but the production that opened last week at the 460-seat Stuart Street Playhouse is the first to play here in such intimate surroundings. What this means is that the cast of eight are in your face all the time. From the moment these dancers/percussionists enter the stage sweeping their big brooms, they’re kicking up dust, spraying water, shaking sand, and teasing or leering at the audience. The allergic, the freshly coiffed, and the excessively shy might want to book seats in the back of the theater. The rest of us can take pleasure in watching these stompers-with-attitude at close range.

As just about everyone must know by now, Stomp is the Olivier-, Obie-, and Drama Desk Award–winning show that exploits the percussive potential of everyday objects, from brooms to garbage-can lids to matchboxes. It originated in Brighton in 1991 as an outgrowth of street cabaret and the outdoor percussion events staged by creators Luke Cresswell and Steve McNicholas. It went indoors at London’s Bloomsbury Theatre and then began to tour internationally, opening in New York in 1994. The Off Broadway company is now entering its 10th year of continuous performance. The show has also been recorded for an HBO special, a Sony home video, and an IMAX film. It has even spawned a variety of imitators, including the marching-band show Blast.

Although Cresswell and McNicholas can’t supervise every production, they keep tabs on things through close associates. For this show, original cast member Fiona Wilkes serves as rehearsal director. David Olrod, another founding cast member, takes on the comic role of the older, nerdy guy who is often " bullied " by the others. Among the special delights for this viewer were some of the more subtle riffs. One performer enters the stage with a length of black PVC tubing and begins to tap, rub, and bounce the " instrument. " It produces an attractive, slightly hollow-sounding, pitched tone. Another performer enters with another tube, this one a little shorter; the pitches are different and the two make harmony. One by one, the remaining performers join the ensemble, each with a different-length pipe. Together they make a bizarre kind of Aeolian-harp music.

Some of the percussion fun is broadly humorous. Take the quartet of sinks with drainboards. Four men, looking like dropouts from a marching band, wear these sinks suspended from their necks like drums. They beat the sinks and the metal dishes in the basins. Water from the sinks flies through the air, sparkling in the light and spraying everyone within range. At the end, the four performers stand before four buckets and release the drains in their sinks. Water cascades into the buckets in a most suggestive and naughty fashion. (Potty humor, it’s clear, has no age limit.)

Then there are the big, brilliant, bravura numbers. In one, three performers, perched on a horizontal pipe above the stage and suspended by bungee safety cords, " skate " from side to side to strike a battery of metal lids, tools, and hubcaps. The " music " begins with almost inaudible tinklings and builds to a ferocious cacophony with the rest of the ensemble pounding on drums and cymbal-like instruments arrayed on three different levels of the stage. It’s deafening and thrilling.

Stomp is such a feel-good show that it played for two and a half years in San Francisco. The Stuart Street Playhouse is hoping that Boston audiences will be similarly smitten: though this production is scheduled to play through March 23, the producers are contemplating an indefinite run that would put the Hub version in the same evergreen category as Blue Man Group and Shear Madness.