CRAZY EDDIE'S.('Movin' Out,' Richard Rodgers Theatre, New York, New York)(Theater Review)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 04-NOV-02

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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

Throughout her career, which is now almost forty years long, Twyla Tharp has been thinking about America, and also about teen-agers, who, in their recalcitrance and idealism, and in their gum-snapping cool, seem to be, for her, the primary repositories of the American soul. Ever since the seventies, she has been choreographing dances to pop music, but not to the exclusion of "art" music. She combined the two, or switched back and forth between them, just as, in her choreography, she mixed high styles--modern dance and classical ballet--with various sock-hop forms.

In this fascination with the high-low formula, Tharp was true to her generation-- she started out in the sixties--and when others of that generation got tired of the formula she didn't. High-low is fundamental to her, her defining trait, related, I am sure, both to her brooding on America and to her personality. (As her 1992 autobiography, "Push Comes to Shove," makes clear, she is intensely ambitious, and does not welcome the idea that she might have to give up one thing for another.) She didn't just embrace popular styles; she sought popular venues. She made television programs; she choreographed for the movies ("Hair," "Amadeus," "Ragtime"); in 1985 she directed a Broadway musical, "Singin' in the Rain." Even when she wasn't doing a musical, she wanted to be on Broadway, and staged her company's dance seasons there when she could afford to. In this sense, she is actually more a product of the fifties. Like the old Life magazine, like "educational television"--and not like the alienated vanguard of the sixties--she thought that ordinary people should enjoy art, or her art....

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