Troupers’ rout The Music Hall Follies in Portsmouth, plus the Saigon Water Puppets and Frente de Danza Independiente BY MARCIA B. SIEGEL

Fayard Nicholas, the surviving member of the famous tap-dancing Nicholas Brothers, is 88 years old. When he came out for the closing number of the Music Hall Follies at Portsmouth Music Hall Saturday night, he seemed barely able to walk. After five minutes of talk and song, he was jiving across the stage, chipper as a 50-year-old. Dancers, like troupers in any profession, can put life in their creaky old bones when the occasion calls for it. But tap dancers are masters at developing ways to keep their stage lives going when the legs give out. Seeing how they do it was just one of the pleasures of the Music Hall Follies.

Subtitled " A Vaudeville in 9 Acts, " this was the culminating event in the week-long Portsmouth Percussive Dance Festival. Both the festival and the Follies were the brainchildren of Drika Overton and the MaD Theatricals company. The three-hour show featured an engaging line-up of stars and neophytes practicing the endangered craft of all-purpose music-hall entertainment. The participating youths, children, and mature folks all seemed to be good at dancing, singing, reciting, telling jokes, playing an instrument, or acting out goofy skits — or several of those trades at once. That the props looked homemade and the jokes sometimes weren’t funny made the whole thing quite endearing.

The Follies replicated an old-time vaudeville show, with assorted acts and entr’actes played in front of painted drops advertising local business establishments, and maybe some scenery left over from a previous production. Bob Thomas, who bills himself as a physical comedian, MC’d the show, introducing the performers and instructing the audience when to cheer and boo while a leggy girl in a waitress costume set up the placards identifying the acts. Apart from the nine headliners, there were interludes (extra skits, monologues, and dance numbers), and peculiar characters ambled through at random, like the woman with the empty dog leash and the man with the oversized butterfly net who seemed to be chasing her. Although there weren’t any magicians, aerialists, or trained canaries, the bill of fare did include a dancing cow and a quartet of teenagers rendering garbled Shakespeare with wonderful conviction.

After the cow and the farmer who tried to milk her ( " Fritz & Elsie " ) came " Ham & Legs, " with Overton as a grinning tap dancer accompanied by a man who sang " I Can’t Give You Anything But . . . Gloves " and then presented her with a pair from the guitar case in which he’d carried his ukulele. The man looked suspiciously like tapper Josh Hilberman, though he was called something else in the program. To beef up the cast of characters, the company members all appeared in several roles and disguises during the performance. Hilberman closed the first half of the program with a tap routine ( " 3 Wing Circus " ) on three little round platforms.

Bob Thomas did an extra-strenuous version of his routine about the musician who becomes entangled, entrapped, in his music stand while his attendant, a willowy woman in a long pink gown, long white gloves, and a tiara, waits patiently to give him his tuba. Overton and Dean Diggins, with a back-up chorus, the Bowery Girls, imitated " A Couple of Swells, " the hobo duet Judy Garland & Fred Astaire do in the movie Easter Parade.

After intermission came the big visiting artists. Brenda Bufalino, who seems to get lighter on her feet and more suave every time I see her, danced three numbers, including a very quiet and slow " Takin’ a Chance on Love. " Bufalino reinvented herself several times over during the evening, appearing as a torch singer in a slinky black dress, feather boa, red pumps, and rhinestones ( " My Man " ), as a 95-year-old chorus girl who could still shake a thing or two, and as the peppy teacher of the " Hot Foot Tappers, " an ill-assorted ensemble of beginners.

The Bamidele Dancers & Drummers, two men, a woman, and a little boy, represented African dance, which MC Thomas called the root of all tap. No further information was to be had about who the members of this troupe are, or what part of Africa they may have come from, but they held forth with galvanic energy. The woman and one of the men danced with quick foot-to-foot patterns and flung-out arms. He had a repertory of acrobatic flips and barrel rolls and a few breakdance prototypes. The woman got the audience clapping an accompaniment, and soon the whole theater was overtaken by rhythm, clapping, calling, and even gesturing against the drummers’ bell pattern.

Before the culminating Fayard Nicholas number, we were treated to the great Bill Irwin, who gave an extended dissertation on the meaning and technique of Baggy Pants Comedy. Irwin, a genius clown, dancer, and comedian, has a body made of rubber and a philosopher’s sense of doom. Offering the basic equation Character + Dilemma = Baggy Pants, he created a sour asthmatic with a sunken chest and a strutting extrovert whose whole upper body jutted so far forward he had to shift his rear end way back as a counterbalance. These two types reminded him of his high-school coaches, he said.

After demonstrating several possible reactions to one of his favorite dilemmas, the Trip (a character trips over something and attempts to recover his dignity), he offered an example of high art, or Extreme Baggy Pants: an interpretation of Shakespeare’s Seven Ages of Man. Putting on a pair of blue satin baggy pants, a hulking T-shirt, and a pair of hightops over the baggy pants, shirt, and shoes he was already wearing, he shrank himself to infant size and went through Youth, Middle Age, Chiropractic, Cranky Old Man, and a few other stages the Bard may not have had in mind.

Our popular entertainments now are so often slick packages, with every laugh calibrated and niche-driven and every headliner begging for a standing ovation. Vaudeville was a simpler affair, guileless and good-natured, and it made us feel the same way. Probably all popular entertainments depend on tradition without feeling imprisoned by it. They rely on old customs, characters, jokes, but they can also bring what the public knows and loves up to date. Popular entertainment doesn’t have to reinvent itself as art does in order to survive. It can keep on speaking the language of the present while honoring the skills of the past. I thought the Saigon Water Puppets, who were presented last weekend by World Music, had affinities with vaudeville in this way.

The Water Puppets played for an audience of excited small children and parents at the Boston Center for the Arts’ Cyclorama, where their pagoda stage with a four-foot-high pool of water was set up in front of bleachers. The show was accompanied by five musicians playing traditional instruments into microphones cranked up to raspy high volume. The puppets are doll-size figures attached to rods that move them through the water from below. Water birds swim in circular formations, dragons thrash about spitting showers of sparks, animals dive and swerve and somersault out of the water. Farmers go fishing with nets and baskets, and at one point they plant a field of rice.

The Water Puppets draw on South Asian mythological tradition, the auspicious lions and dragons, the cycle of planting and harvest with its festivals and deities, and the more modern celebration of nationalism. I never discovered exactly how the puppets were manipulated, but at the end of the show the eight puppeteers waded out in front of the backdrop and took a bow, thigh-deep in the water.

At the Cambridge Multicultural Arts Center, Frente de Danza Independiente, a contemporary dance company from Quito, was making its American debut, sponsored by Prometheus Dance of Boston, which has had an informal interchange with Frente for several years. Its choreography seemed grounded in everyday behavior and gymnastics, and in themes of sexual relationships and physical challenge.

In Deeper, choreographer Marcela Correa stood over a wide plastic cylinder illuminated from below. As she gazed down, we could see that there was a bowl of water set into the top of it. Ella Fitzgerald sang Cole Porter’s " In the Still of the Night " and Correa dreamily dabbled her hand in the water, fondled it, stroked it onto her face. Later a man (Terry Araujo) entered and they gradually developed a game of dunking each other’s heads into the water. Well, they were having sex metaphorically, and it was a struggle, the forcing down, the gasping for breath, the breaking free and splashing water in upward arcs. It went on for what seemed a very long time.

I noticed that just about all the dances and interludes of the evening began with someone discovering, testing, inventing his or her body, as if no one before had realized what a foot can do in contact with the floor, or that water make ripples and feel cool on the skin.