Schmaltzy sentiments
Twyla Tharp and Billy Joel's Movin' Out dances through the '60s.

By Robert Avila

POPULAR MUSIC HAS consistently inspired Twyla Tharp, more than most modern dance choreographers, so her choosing to choreograph and direct to the songs of Billy Joel comes as no surprise. But where previous work – set to the likes of Jelly Roll Morton, Fats Waller, and Frank Sinatra – tended to be nonnarrative, Tharp's Movin' Out uses a very clear story line, told exclusively through ballet-rooted dance and pop music, one that aims simultaneously to push the boundaries of musical theater and to resonate with war-poisoned present-day America.

In terms of pushing the limits of what audiences will accept as musical theater, Movin' Out succeeds surprisingly well, as evidenced by its Tony Award-winning Broadway run and now the touring show presented by Best of Broadway. Without recourse to any overture, the show snaps to life with the immediacy of a needle being dropped onto a record groove. The dancers take the stage to the accompaniment of "It's Still Rock and Roll to Me," and for the next two hours the pieces fall together effortlessly: a loud, entirely credible rock band (headed up, on alternate nights, by pianist-singers Darren Holden and Matt Wilson) perches atop the split-level stage, the mute cast attack with gusto and impressive athleticism Tharp's sensuous and ludic choreography, and Joel's lyrics and melodies sweep over the audience with all the redolent nostalgia of a warm summer-evening breeze. The only baggage turns out to be the narrative stringing these elements together.

We're introduced to a small circle of Long Island teenagers who, in the course of two acts, come of age during the Vietnam War in a modern end-of-innocence tale. (The leading roles of Brenda and Eddie, played by company members in nightly rotation, come straight out of Joel's "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant.") Tharp's story, however, resolves on a high note of survival and quiet wisdom, when the surviving characters have become parents on the cusp of middle age, ultimately moving past the bitter contrasts and sense of evanescence that mark the conclusion of a similarly themed musical like Hair (which she also choreographed) or a film like American Graffiti.

If the story line seems less than inspired, it's at least one that rises organically from Joel's oeuvre. It's not hard to construct a narrative of the generation that came of age in the 1970s and '80s from Joel's songbook. With his reverence and nostalgia for early rock and roll and anonymous working-class lives, his songs regularly took the pulse of the times, converting it into a series of stories, anthems, romantic ruminations, and angst-fueled rebellions, all the while glancing back at a seemingly more innocent era – innocent by virtue of youth, if nothing else.

But as far as the salient theme of war goes – elaborated in darkly hallucinatory scenes of battle casualties and their lingering hold on the minds of America's discarded veterans – the play strangely fails to arouse much interest. The conceit feels perfunctory and awkward in its stylized presentation. And in general, while the physicality and energy of certain scenes can be effective, culling a grand narrative from the music invites a melodramatic overload. The sentimentalism Joel manages to sell so well reaches a point of diminishing returns when augmented by the stage story, and it borders on schmaltz. Despite its Broadway orientation, the show is still more dance than musical theater, and the syncing up of song and movement in a familiar, overarching narrative tends to lessen, more than it enhances, the emotional content of the theme. Even with the inescapable context of a present-day Vietnam, the life represented onstage feels as aloof as a Saturday Evening Post cover.

Part of the problem may also be that throughout the vicissitudes of love, the inevitability of loss, and the primacy of survival, the narrative ultimately limits the agency of the characters to their personal lives – their roles as friends, lovers, and family members. They weather the larger storms of those decades like they were, well, natural phenomena instead of man-made disasters.

Then again, were it not for the withering sentiment that abounds, such a depiction could be in keeping with a more central, tacit theme. The ominous, incomprehensible battering of these young lives by war reminded me, for instance, of Virginia Woolf's essay "The Death of the Moth." Describing a drama unfolding at her windowpane at once insignificantly small and all-encompassing, the essay's depiction of the final futile burst of life in tiny kicking legs and fluttering wings shakes both author and reader awake with life's unassailable purpose: to dance.

'Movin' Out' runs through Aug. 29. Tues.-Sat., 8 p.m. (also Wed. and Sat., 2 p.m.); Sun., 2 p.m., Golden Gate Theatre, 1 Taylor, S.F. $34-$81. (415) 512-7770, www.ticketmaster.com.