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COPYRIGHT 2006 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Four years ago, "Movin' Out," a musical conceived, directed, and choreographed by Twyla Tharp, to songs by Billy Joel, opened on Broadway, and it was a big success, both artistically and commercially. "Movin' Out" was simple in its conception. It had a bare-bones, iconic plot--some suburban teen-agers were drafted into the Vietnam War, came back damaged, then got better--and the songs were performed by a band on a raised platform, so that the people onstage could devote themselves to the art that Tharp knows best, dancing. The show had no dialogue. It just went song to song--that is, dance number to dance number--with the lyrics, in Tharp's sequencing, roughly keyed to the events of the story and thereby, it seemed, calling them forth. In "The Times They Are A-Changin'," which opened last week at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre, Tharp reuses this formula, with the music of Bob Dylan. Dylan, however, is different from Billy Joel: not just a bigger artist but a symbol, of a period and a generation. So Tharp must have felt that for him she had to come up with a fancier treatment. In any case, that's what she did: "The...
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