IN THE WIND.

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 Times" is set at a circus. In an interview with Katie Couric two weeks ago, Tharp said that she got this idea from the circus imagery in Dylan's lyrics and also from their dreamlike quality--their use, as she put it, of transformation. That happens in circuses. Also, a circus setting would legitimatize exaggeration, which she felt Dylan's hallucinatory lyrics called for. In other words, what she tried to create for Dylan was something like a poem or a vision--or a song--rather than a play.

In the end, however, she did make a sort of play, a fusion of her own long-term interest in family warfare (see her 1981 "The Catherine Wheel") with Dylan's songs about the generation gap--for example, "The Times They Are A-Changin'." In her show, the owner and ringmaster of the circus is Captain Ahrab (Thom Sesma), an evil tyrant who abuses his innocent son, Coyote (Michael Arden); his kind, worse-for-the-wear girlfriend, Cleo (Lisa Brescia); and everyone else in his vicinity--namely, six Pierrot-like clowns and Cleo's dog, whom he eventually garrotes. Then the times, they change. Coyote pairs off with Cleo, and the clowns kill Ahrab. (Or I think he died--it was hard to tell, because the scene was lit only by flashlights, but he didn't reappear after that.) Coyote takes over the circus, which now becomes a democratic organization: everyone gets ringmaster wear. They all sing "Forever Young," and the curtain comes down.

I don't think Tharp set much store by this plot. She took little trouble with it. Coyote is all gawky goodness; Cleo is the whore with the heart of gold. Ahrab does nothing but sneer and snarl and show us his big teeth. Tharp seems to have tried to beef up his character with references to his near-namesake, Captain Ahab. Like Melville's hero, Ahrab has a damaged leg and a tendency to raise his arms, in protest, to the unanswering firmament. But he remains a cartoon, like the others.

This would be all right--the teen-agers in "Movin' Out" were also types--except that what takes the place of dramatic richness is not that interesting. A great deal of "The Times" consists of circus acts: stilt-walking, tightrope-walking, contortionism, tumbling, clown routines. This is the thing for which all else--realism, drama--was shoved aside, and which was supposed to convey to us the essence of Dylan. Accordingly, it is elaborately produced. The lighting, by Donald Holder, is very studied; the costumes, by Santo Loquasto, are creepy and fantastic. (One clown wears a frightening-looking crown of spikes.) And the performers lay on a great deal of life-is-a-dream and "Ridi, Pagliaccio" shading. But what is this material, really? It's circus acts, which, in view of the fact ...