Movin' Out - Billy Joel/Twyla Tharp

Tour:
Japan	July 27 - September 2
Honolulu	September 8 - 17
Sacramento	September 27 - October 8
San Diego	October 10 - 15
Detroit	November 1 - 19

Click the poster to buy at Dress Circle

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official site

Internet Broadway Database

Billy Joel Movies

Original cast recording

Best of Billy Joel:
Piano/vocal/chords songbook

Harmony Shoji 71"H Screen

   The Broadway musical--the fair-haired child of Viennese operetta and indigenous vernacular music and dance--has long been the gold standard of commercial American theatre. Its successes are the hardest tickets in town, particularly when you have to entertain your visiting relatives from Chicago. Some claim that it represents America's only original contribution to the art of the theatre. There is no doubt that from the 1920s to somewhere in the early sixties its practitioners left an impressive legacy that made an international mark.This Golden Age (roughly from Show Boat to Gypsy) may have ended, but its melody lingers on with a few worthy successors like Steven Sondheim and John Kander striving to follow in the inspired footsteps of Berlin, Gershwin, Porter, and Rodgers.
    A glance, however, at current musical offerings reveals that the form desperately needs an infusion of new creative energy. As rock ascended to popular dominance, the musical lost the symbiotic relationship with popular music it enjoyed from the 20s through the 50s. Unsure of what represents an authentic contemporary voice, producers and creators of recent musicals have imported British or European spectaculars, or returned nostalgically to the past, relying on revivals of past hits like Oklahoma! or The Music Man, or on a theatrical recycling of old movies (The Producers, Thoroughly Modern Millie, Hairspray).
    Unsurprisingly, then, adventurous claimants to the form have worked to redefine what we accept as a musical (as opposed to a revue which has always been held somewhat apart). One such effort, Contact, was awarded the 1999-2000 Tony Award for Best Musical despite the fact that it had no original score or live orchestral accompaniment. In this popular piece, choreographer Susan Strohman created three independent dance-narratives without songs or over-all book. Dance alone (to the backdrop of familiar recordings) carried the burden of musical originality.
    And now we have another attempt at musical redefinition: In the present exciting collaboration between Twyla Tharp and Billy Joel, Movin' Out, dance again is foregrounded as the central conveyer of musical meaning. But the vital difference with Contact is that dance here has a full collaborator in a score which consists of an anthology of songs by Billy Joel over several decades that may not be original to this production but which are presented live by an on-stage rock band of great proficiency. Fronted by a talented pianist/singer (Michael Cavanagh) who stands in admirably for performer/composer Joel, the band--on a platform that often ascends to afford the dancers more room for movement--exudes a performance energy that commands attention, whereas in Contact music seemed merely illustrative background. With dance and song as equal partners, Movin' Out invigorates the musical form by appropriating and transmitting the raw energy of the rock concert.
    Innovation lies in the theatrical context. Serious American dance has long drawn inspiration from vernacular dance. From Fancy Free, the Robbins/Bernstein 1940s ballet about three sailors on leave which evolved into the musical On the Town onwards, choreographers have striven to connect with the energy of popular music (such as Paul Taylor's Company B to the music of the Andrews Sisters). Twyla Tharp, in particular, has a long history in this regard. In 1973 she startled the dance world by creating the ballet Deuce Coupe for the Joffrey Ballet to the music of the Beach Boys. Since then she has created dances to, among others, the music of Frank Sinatra, Paul Simon, and Bruce Springsteen. So the theatrical equation of song and dance represented by Movin' Out would be quite familiar to dance audiences.
    In a theatre context, however, Tharp has refined the connection by drawing, without adding any dialogue, a narrative line through the anthology of Joel's songs. Although Joel wrote these songs under different circumstances at different times, they often create characters who are rooted in specific milieus, suburban Long Island (the composer's home turf), New York City, Saigon (during the Vietnam troubles). So out of such songs as "Uptown Girl," "Movin' Out," "Why Judy Why?," "Angry Young Man," "James," "We Didn't Start the Fire," (and 18 others) a plot has been created about six life-long Long Island friends over the course of two decades from the sixties to the eighties. The narrative is a familiar one: the lives of ordinary suburban blue collar young men and women with ordinary preoccupations--romance, marriage, work--are radically disrupted by the "dirty little war" in Vietnam, resulting in trauma, and in one case death, for the young male participants and the agony of separation, fear, and loss for their girl friends. That's where Act I ends. In the second act the vets strive to put their lives back together, at first with great difficulty. Ultimately, the friends rediscover the solace of the bond of friendship that united them in the first place.
    Surely not the most original of scenarios, but in the context of the conventions of this piece a more than adequate armature on which to graft some spectacular singing and dancing. Michael Cavanagh, Joel's young stand-in, has the unenviable task of matching the master himself. He succeeds in creating musical stylings that are faithful to Joel's original performances while at the same time projecting a very distinctive musical personality of his own, one utterly unlike the saturnine Joel. His energy and musicianship being first-rate, Cavanagh has no problem in winning satisfied attention.
    But the heart of the production is the dancing. Twarp has assembled an admirable ensemble of about twenty dancers led by a particularly attractive core who portray the principal characters. All are first-rate, but John Selya as Eddie and Elizabeth Parkinson as Brenda, the king and queen of the prom, whose breakup initiates the plot to the strains of "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant," are first among equals. The initial dance scenes in which the characters are introduced builds on the awkward but exuberant energy of adolescents in transition, moving through moods of tenderness, gender posturing and youthful high spirits. The move to Vietnam, of course, radically darkens the dance vocabulary with an Apocalypse Now surreality.The return from combat breeds a lyrically somber dance led by Ashley Tuttle as grieving Judy whose fiance, James, has been killed; the dance evokes the ceremonial expressiveness of Martha Graham. The mood continues dark in the second act's focus on themes of self-destructiveness and substance abuse, but returns to life-affirming exuberance in celebrating the process of healing.
    More than any other current musical, Movin' Out passes the Do-you-want-to-see-this-again test. Its energy is irresistible. But it highlights the American musical's present crisis of confidence, its disconnection from the best contemporary popular musical composition. Gershwin and Berlin moved from Tin Pan Alley to stage and screen and back again, but apart from a few anomalies like the Who's Tommy, there are no original theatre scores by such character driven, inherently dramatic composers as Lennon and McCartney-or Billy Joel. Paul Simon engaged the form unsuccessfully in The Cape Man because he tried single-handedly to master unfamiliar conventions. Joel knew better; having provided the text, he stepped back and allowed the experienced Tharp and her talented dance and musical ensemble to be his interpreters.