A Movin' Dancical of Waste of War, Power of Art

By Linda Winer | STAFF WRITER

October 25, 2002

It's that time again - time to shake and bake definitions of a Broadway show. In the next weeks, producers will be mixing up expectations with a Puccini opera, "La Bohème," in subtitled Italian, and a "Def Poetry Jam" produced by hip-hop impresario Russell Simmons.

We can't guess the fate of the other demographic interlopers. But "Movin' Out," the virtually wordless dance musical that brings Twyla Tharp and Billy Joel together for a frisson of boundary-defying virtuosity, is an ecstatic throwback to what we called dancicals in the Bob Fosse-driven '70s. It is also a true-heart original.

Here is concert dance more challenging and cheeky than even the best decorative and narrative Broadway movement. Here is bone marrow, mainstream pop authenticity on a street best known for the ersatz and the sanitized.

The two-hour dancical, which opened last night at the Richard Rodgers Theatre after an agonized tryout in Chicago, requires some initial perceptual adjustments. Tharp's primal Vietnam-America story seems thin and obvious at first flush. The elevated onstage 10-piece band with the singing piano man (the hard-driving Mich- ael Cavanaugh at night, the funkier Wade Preston at matinees) is raised and lowered, slid forward and back, so often that we fear we're in for high- tech karaoke from people who don't trust their material and want their money's worth from the machinery.

It would be a mistake, however, to be lulled into lazy watching. In 1973, Tharp cracked open the separations between brainy modern dance, formal ballet and pop culture forever with "Deuce Coupe," the willfully wonderful marriage of the Beach Boys and the Joffrey Ballet. After putting herself in a stylistic straitjacket for the 1985 "Singin' in the Rain," Tharp has finally set loose her nervy, cerebral, slinky, fiendishly difficult, deliriously pleasurable self on the broad commercial audience she has always deserved.

This time she went to Joel, at the top of the short list of gifted pop balladeers who, in another life, might have wanted to become Richard Rodgers instead of Bo Diddley. She has arranged 24 of Joel's most personal yet universal songs into a narrative about the devastation of Vietnam on a bunch of working-class Long Island kids. The result is probably the best anti-war ballet since Kurt Joos' 1930s "The Green Table" and an American pop anthem to disenchantment and reconciliation.

The dancers are real Tharp dancers, which means they are multitasking demons of athletics, attitude and art. Any time the story feels simplistic - which it inevitably does - fix your eyes on any one of these dancers, costumed with a sense of era and a delight in these bodies by Suzy Benzinger. The hairpin changes in tempo, direction and attack, the off-center balances, the jumbled focus all are visualizations of the complexity of emotions - how many contradictory things people think and feel simultaneously.

Santo Loquasto's set is wisely kept simple. For the realism-fixated among us, there is a genuine classic red Mustang in the alley where the gang hangs in prewar innocence and returns years later to heal a decade of wounds. Mostly, however, courtships and sex, boyish play-soldiering and subsequent degradation are danced before a chain-link fence, lit from behind by Donald Holder.

Given the physical demands, there is a separate set of lead dancers for matinees. Seeing both is a lesson in the subtle possibilities in these characters and the depth of the company's bench. The name to remember is John Selya, whose Eddie has a heartbreaking loner heroism and whose nervous system can maneuver Tharp's polyglot dance languages so seamlessly and with such psychological subtlety that we never see a twitch of preparation. His afternoon counterpart, William Marrie, has a tougher exterior and a lower center of gravity for quick turns, but he can't touch Selya's muscular switches from giddy break-dance to harrowing calisthenics to lyrical reverie.

We meet Hicksville's youth in the jitterbugging clarity of "It's Still Rock and Roll to Me." There is the breakup of Brenda and Eddie - the exquisitely extended Elizabeth Parkinson at night, the supermodel-formidable Holly Cruikshank at matinees - in "Scenes From an Italian Restaurant." Brenda becomes seeker, the "Uptown Girl" of Tony (the exuberantly gangly Keith Roberts, then David Gomez with the hawk's wingspan). Judy and James (Benjamin G. Bowman) have the balletic courtship, before Judy (the lyric Ashley Tuttle, then the space-eating Meg Paul) puts on the widow's black toe shoes and haunts guilty Eddie like a Wili from "Giselle."

How smart of Tharp to locate untapped danceability in Joel's songs - not just the doo-wop sex potential in "This Night," but the rhumba in "Innocent Man" and the mambo in "I've Loved These Days." She also uses his new orchestral work in shocking, ironic ways - a Schubert-like scherzo during Army drills, a baroque invention for the vets' drugged-out panhandling. And she makes a genuine Walpurgisnacht from "Pressure," when Army buddies rise from the dead to haunt Eddie, and us, with the waste of war - and the power of moving theater.

BROADWAY REVIEW

MOVIN' OUT. Conceived, directed and choreographed by Twyla Tharp, with music and lyrics by Billy Joel. Richard Rodgers Theatre, 46th Street west of Broadway. Seen at previews on Tuesday and Wednesday afternoon.