A sign of 'The Times'
Tharp follows Joel with Dylan circus
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The fact that no one could quite imagine how Dylan's iconoclastic songs might be bent to the conventions of a Broadway musical didn't seem to matter. This was Dylan, after all. And if helmer-choreographer Tharp proved anything with "Movin' Out," her 2002 Billy Joel musical, it was that she could deal unconventionally with popular music and still pull off a big, mainstream hit.
In some sense, the new tuner represents a bigger creative challenge for her than the dance-fueled "Movin' Out." Taking on Dylan meant dealing with the lyrics and, inevitably, the legend.
"Dylan is a poet, so the lyrics had to be addressed," says Tharp. "And that gave me the opportunity to explore something I've been interested in doing for a long time, which is to connect the spoken word to movement.
"Dylan is unique in American art; there's no one even close. The man has written more than 1,000 songs over more than 40 years. It's just an interesting well to go into."
Maintaining total creative control over a project is a Tharp hallmark; it allows her to make sure "it turns out the way it needs to be, so that the show is an expression of what I believe." For "The Times," as for "Movin' Out," she secured the rights to Dylan's songs, got seed money from "Movin' Out" lead producer James L. Nederlander and spent two years developing the concept on her own.
After workshops in New York, Tharp flew west to check out the Globe, which has produced 17 Broadway-bound shows over the last two decades.
In residence at the Globe since Dec. 8 with music arranger-orchestrator Michael Dansicker, music director Henry Aronson and designers Santo Loquasto (sets-costumes), Donald Holder (lighting) and Francois Bergeron (sound), Tharp is readying the show for an expected Broadway run, probably in the 2006-07 season.
But it could come as early as this spring if the troubled "Lestat" falls out of the Nederlander-owned Palace before Tony-eligibility deadline. Still, Tharp says it's too early to speculate on the show's future.
"I'm day-by-day here," she says. "I'm just trying to push through the work that needs to be done."
Once again, Tharp is working from an original concept, inspired by the music of a pop legend. But there the similarities end. While the Vietnam-era story and characters in "Movin' Out" were pulled from Joel's songs and grounded in the crooner's native Long Island, N.Y., "The Times" is a dreamlike fable set "sometime between awake and asleep" amid a ragtag band of circus performers whose creaky wagon has been stuck in the same place for a long time.
In "Movin' Out," the narrative was carried almost entirely by the dancing; the music, performed by Joel doppelganger Michael Cavanaugh, provided emotional pitch.
In the new show, the story is built mainly from Dylan's songs, as sung by the cast and performed by a rock 'n' roll-style band from a platform above the stage. The action centers on a power struggle between the circus' dissolute ringmaster, Captain Arab (Thom Sesma), and his son, Coyote (Michael Arden), who also vie for the attention of Cleo (Jenn Colella), the circus' beloved animal trainer.
At least at this stage, there is no book in the standard musical sense linking dialogue between the songs, and the circus-flavored dancing serves the more traditional role of emotional and narrative amplification. If "Movin' Out" was an evening-length pop ballet, "The Times," which bows Feb. 9, is more like a pop opera.
Because of the way Tharp works -- first in broad strokes, then whittling down through a ruthless editing process -- there's already been major tinkering in San Diego, and there will be more throughout the run. Still, working out the kinks in tryouts is exactly what Tharp did so successfully with "Movin' Out," which had an ominous start in Chicago in July 2002.
A raft of local reviews complained of an intermittently brilliant but unwieldy show with narrative problems and a troubled first act. The bad buzz reached a fever pitch after Newsday reprinted the hard-hitting appraisal from its corporate sister, the Chicago Tribune, breaking a long-standing tradition in the New York press of not reviewing a show's out-of-town tryout. The show, as Tharp later wrote, "had become news for all the wrong reasons."
With morale and Chicago sales sagging, Tharp hunkered down, reshaping the piece to clarify the narrative and characters' relationships. By the time Trib critic Michael Phillips penned a progress report, a month later, most of the problems had been fixed. On Oct. 24, 2002, the show bowed at the Richard Rodgers to widespread kudos. The all-important New York Times review hailed the show as a "shimmering portrait of an American generation."
From "Movin' Out," Tharp learned that "I didn't need the perfect solution to every problem, but I did need a workable solution -- a lot of them," as she wrote in her 2003 book, "The Creative Habit." The lesson for Tharp's producers and other industry watchers was that Tharp could be counted on to make those changes herself, without the aid of show doctors.
Turning around a troubled show, long the stuff of Broadway lore, is a rare enough feat these days to make headlines. Tharp's success with "Movin' Out" sprang from her willingness to make fixes -- and her ability to implement them without opposition. She didn't have to argue with a book writer, or kick a composer out of the room or struggle with a director to do what needed to be done. That m.o. places Tharp in the unique position of being entirely to blame if things go wrong, or deserving of all the credit when they go right.
