Jabbawockeez roll with the flow into their new theater — PHOTOS

"Our culture is just rolling with the punches," Kevin Brewer says. "That's what we do."

Yes, that's a metaphor, even if you do see some theatrical stage punches during a "Street Fighter" tribute in the Jabbawockeez's new show, which opened Monday at the MGM Grand.

But the bigger story is that the hip-hop dance troupe even has a new show, one it didn't really know about until midsummer.

"All of a sudden, monkey wrench!" Brewer says of July's news that MGM Resorts was building a 5,000-seat theater at the Monte Carlo to compete with the Colosseum at Caesars Palace.

That meant the Monte Carlo's smaller theater, of late home to the Blue Man Group, was getting torn down to make room. That in turn meant (for the second time in three years) the Blue Man Group was bumping the Jabbawockeez, this time taking over the 830-seat Luxor venue that was built to the break-dancers' specifications in 2013.

But MGM Resorts didn't want to lose the masked break-dancers, the rare enterprise to solve the modern-Vegas riddle of how to sell show tickets to nightclub-age audiences.

Now it is club promoter Jeff Beacher giving up most of his "Beacher's Madhouse" space at the MGM Grand to the Jabbawockeez. A Halloween test of "Madhouse" proved the room could be set up with enough straight-row seats to fit 350 for the Jabbawockeez and still get the booth seating back in place for "Madhouse" on Saturday nights.

"What's going to happen is we'll be at occupancy throughout the year," the always upbeat Brewer says, cracking himself up with a contagious laugh after a run-through of the show.

"We just flow like water," adds Jeff "Phi" Nguyen, another co-founder of the troupe who still dances in the show. "Just like Bruce Lee says: 'Be water.' "

It's been that way since the troupe emerged from the California "b-boy" scene to win the Randy Jackson-produced MTV competition "America's Best Dance Crew" in 2008.

It turned out the way to make your faces unforgettable was to lose them. The Jabbas gave up their individual identities to take one for the team, wearing blank white masks and gloves.

Originally, the masks forced audiences to look at the larger geometry of the ensemble. Now they push the dancers deeper into pantomime and physical comedy — and ever-more creative costumes — as they reach out to expand their Las Vegas audiences by playing up humor as much as their acrobatic dancing.

"Let me tell you, it's a lot funnier without the masks, but unfortunately we have to have have (them)," Brewer says. "We try to find a way to convey the same thing: 'Got you sucker!' That type of thing. You can't see that, so we got to kind of act it out."

But lose the masks? Even for a few minutes? Never. "That's our legacy," he says.

Comedy and video projections help make up for the ramps and trampolines the troupe gave up with the Luxor theater.

The new show is subtitled "Dreamz: Journey Within" and tells a story with the help of production designer Robert "Hydro" Mullen, who amazed the troupe with his work on Justin Timberlake's "The 20/20 Experience" tour.

"We know we were kind of limited in space," Nguyen says. "We want to able to literally take you into our world, with the amount of space that we had. It actually seems a lot bigger."

The new stage, and the walls bordering it on either side, are a blank white canvas for the projected video dreamscapes, be they the "Street Fighter" game or a mushroom forest as trippy background to Sting's "Englishman in New York."

(The "Street Fighter" graphics projected onto a scrim for a 3-D effect are the real deal, licensed from gamemaker Capcom. "I'm a big fan ... you gotta understand, that's legit!" Brewer proclaims.)

If the barren-forest beginning is a little creepy, it's because the Jabbawockeez learned of their musical-chairs Las Vegas move after they agreed to provide the live entertainment for the just-concluded "Halloween Horror Nights" at Universal Studios in Hollywood.

"It was kind of killing two birds with one stone," Brewer says. "We didn't want to just bring (the last show) 'Prism' over here, and we were in the middle of making this new show with Universal, which we had to chop down tremendously."

"Dreamz" is about a zombie, as a lot of things are these days. But, Nguyen says, "the zombie concept was more of a metaphor."

The zombie, PJ, is dressed like a pilot. Because his life is on autopilot, "just going through life, the mundane day to day," Nguyen says.

But he has a dream that becomes an awakening, thanks to some spirit guides collectively known as "SWAG" — Style, Whimsicality, Audacity and G — a recurring character from previous productions who serves as the sensei, or Enlightened One.

Spoiler alert: By the time PJ "gets back to the real world, his collision just wakes up every zombie. Now he's living in this world where everyone's awake and colorful," Brewer says. "At least that's what we wrote down on our whiteboard."

If you don't quite follow the plot, you can enjoy the physical comedy and amazing break-dancing, set to everything from James Brown and Michael Jackson to Digital Underground's "The Humpty Dance" to a live intro to "Hotel California."

"Las Vegas is all demographics. Our playlist is a little more eclectic and we can play around with songs," Nguyen says. "We've learned how to make your average 14-year-old go 'Wow,' and a 60-year-old who listens to Don Henley. We're able to touch each genre and make it a family-friendly show."

And make it all work in a smaller space? The Jabbawockeez feel they will find a way, like water.

"Looking back, we've definitely evolved with the character thing," Brewer says. "We feel like this theater is probably right up our alley in reference to us growing here."

— Read more from Mike Weatherford at reviewjournal.com. Contact him at mweatherford@reviewjournal.com and follow @Mikeweatherford on Twitter.