Fast & easy: pop music invades Broadway - Stage

Commonweal, Dec 20, 2002 by Celia Wren

Deep wisdom dwells in the oeuvre of Billy Joel.

Such, at least, is the implication of Movin'Out, the bizarre dance-theater concoction that opened on Broadway in October to a cavalcade of hype--from blurbs on rock radio stations to a Richard Avedon photo spread in the New Yorker. Conceived and directed by the highly regarded choreographer Twyla Tharp, whose earlier venture into popular music, the witty Nine Sinatra Songs, is a favorite of many of her fans, Movin' Out features veteran dancers prancing up a tale of innocence lost and self-knowledge gained to the accompaniment of Billy Joel's greatest hits. These are performed by an on-stage band and a crooning Billy Joel sound-alike and pianist (Michael Cavanaugh). Remember the querulous couple Brenda and Eddie from the song "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant"? They are among the protagonists who come to terms with death, Vietnam, and low self-esteem in the show, which is set in a lower-middle-class Long Island community in the 1960s. If you have ever desired to see a black-veiled, black-toe-shoed dancer impersonate a war widow to the strains of "The Stranger," your opportunity is here.

Such narrative moments vaguely attempt to tap the energy of Joel's lyrics, but Movin' Out's soul belongs to dance. Within about thirty seconds, the opening number ("It's Still Rock and Roll to Me") has demonstrated not only the exhilarating proficiency of the dancers (Elizabeth Parkinson, Keith Roberts, and John Selya are among the principal performers) but the inherent interest of the choreography, which, even to someone ignorant of the art form can seem to be full of diverting idiosyncrasies, allusions, and intent--dance that means, rather than just dance that moves, the staple of many Broadway extravaganzas.

In upbeat numbers like "Uptown Girl," in which an elegant woman in a hot pink cocktail dress flirts through a pas de deux with a series of slouching jean-and-bandana-clad men, the show's energy is infectious. It's when tragedy steals up on Brenda, Eddie, and their pals that Movin' Out moves into problematic aesthetic territory. Toward the end of Act I, the action briefly shifts to wartime Vietnam; a wedge of military gear and what appear to be uniform-accoutered corpses slides into sight; to the accompaniment of strobe lights and the rebellious anthem "We Didn't Start the Fire," soldiers die.

Now, the music of Billy Joel isn't exactly Top 40 fluff, especially in an era that has given us Britney Spears, but the hell of war and the anguished solemnity of a military funeral (in a subsequent scene) are weighty thematic burdens for a rock song to support, and in these sections, the Movin' Out experiment is not a success. The fusion of pop music and dramatic elegy is simply too jarring: the oddness of the moment fractures the spell that Tharp and her artists, through sheer verve and hit-tune infectiousness, have cast.

The gap between aim and result, here, may be particularly troubling insofar as Movin' Out exemplifies a current theatrical trend: the concoction of shows centered on classic popular-music tunes. Just a few blocks from Tharp's production, the year-old Mamma Mia--a collection of Abba's greatest hits propped on a wafer-thin excuse for a narrative--is playing to 90 percent percent audience capacity. Elsewhere in the country, My Way: A Musical Tribute to Frank Sinatra is one of the most-performed plays in regional theaters this season, while, in the United Kingdom, the Broadway-bound We Will Rock You, based on the music of Queen, proved such a smash that the creators are brewing up a sequel. Dramaturgical machinery has chewed through the songs of Janis Joplin, John Denver, Hank Williams, and the pop groups Culture Club, the Pet Shop Boys, and Madness, just to name a few, and the results have met with considerable popular success.

The phenomenon responds to the same human predisposition for re-embracing the familiar--as opposed to greeting the new--that has turned movie studios into franchise factories (Spy Kids 2, Austin Powers) and that keeps TV channels airing formulaic dramas and sitcoms. Pop-soundtrack plays may also reflect the short attention spans of a public accustomed to sound bytes, the frenetic cinematography of music videos, and the instant gratification of Web surfing. In a show like Mamma Mia!, the cheese-ball narrative (about a wedding on an idyllic Greek island) is so perfunctory as to spare the audience the trouble of suspending disbelief and succumbing to fiction; the songs whiz by with so little artistic impediment, one might as well be sitting next to one's personal CD player.

As greatest-hit productions invade English-language stages, fewer theatrical resources are available to artists creating works of organic originality. The pop-music-theater fad thus represents another skirmish in the perennial aesthetic war between new and old aesthetics--a war that seems to have inspired the current Broadway revival of the 1958 Richard Rodgers/Oscar Hammerstein II musical Flower Drum Song. Because modern ears detect ethnic stereotyping and other cultural insensitivity in the original version of the show, which depicted a Chinese mail-order bride in 1950s San Francisco, playwright David Henry Hwang (Golden Child, M. Butterfly) has woven the original songs into an entirely new book. Interestingly, this "updating" has received the blessing of the fiercely protective Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization, known for cracking down on artists who take liberties with the oeuvre of the famous musical-authoring team.