Manhattan transfers, successful and not so

In Hollywood, where your realities become dreams, no single word can unmake someone’s day like “turnaround.” When a script goes into turnaround, it means it has been dumped by its studio and must search for a new home. Leave it to the film industry to transform a chipper phrase into something euphemistically heinous.

Happily, “turnaround” hasn’t become common parlance in the theater, so the notion of turning a project around still carries the old optimistic ring. This is precisely what director-choreographer Twyla Tharp has done with “Movin’ Out,” scored to the songs of Billy Joel, since its Chicago tryout last summer.

Now settling in for a long Broadway run at the Richard Rodgers Theatre (if such a kinetic show can be said to settle anywhere), “Movin’ Out” has officially and rather remarkably turned around. On Tharp’s own terms, it works. Audiences are going even crazier for Act 2’s choreographic fireworks than they did in Chicago and, crucially, Act 1 of Tharp’s story ballet no longer appears to be sending a certain percentage of ticket holders up the aisles and out the door at intermission, disoriented and muttering.

How did this happen? After the July tryout opening, Tharp, unencumbered by the usual Broadway cadre of collaborators with competing ideas for improvement, went to work with her dancers. For weeks during the Chicago run, the dancers performed the old show at night and rehearsed the evolving one during the day.

These weren’t cosmetic changes; these were numbers wholly revised, largely for clarity but also for dramatic selectivity, which is a higher form of clarity. “Movin’ Out” now begins with a prologue danced by the company to “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me” (not heard in Chicago). At one point, Tharp sends her five principals sliding straight to the lip of the stage, as if to declare: We are the people the show is about. It’s not memorable choreography, but it fulfills its mission.

As before, Eddie (John Selya), Tony (Keith Roberts) and James (Benjamin G. Bowman) experience hell on earth in combat. James is killed. Now, movingly, the late Act 1 passages focus more intently on the grieving war widow, Judy (Ashley Tuttle). Without squandering the full ensemble, “Movin’ Out” now boasts five fully rounded and artfully balanced characters, the fifth being Brenda (Elizabeth Parkinson), whose bruised and bruising relationship with Tony becomes a postwar war unto itself.

The exasperated tone of many of the Chicago “Movin’ Out” reviews had to do, I think, with Tharp’s overcrowded and hammering impulses, otherwise known as “the Oliver Stone effect.” All the same -- here is the crow-eating sentence -- I don’t think I fully appreciated how good the five principals really were, and are. In Chicago, at the press opening, you couldn’t always find them, amid Tharp’s visual aesthetic. Now, on Broadway, each of the five pops out with a kind of glorious confidence.

Selya’s the flash-master and a true star, but the entire company responds to Tharp’s best dances: “Angry Young Man,” “Big Shot” and, especially, the beautiful, thrashing “Shameless,” a reunion for Parkinson and Roberts that ranks with Tharp’s peak achievements. In an entirely different emotional key, it’s as joyous as the ensemble swirl Tharp imagined years ago to Willie “The Lion” Smith’s “Echoes of Spring.”

Some of what I initially resisted in “Movin’ Out” remains. Eddie’s descent into Greenwich Village S&M; nastiness (“Captain Jack”) is as silly as ever. The Vietnam battle sequence is more lucid, but Tharp backs herself into a narrative corner here, required by the story to paint Eddie as somewhat and somehow culpable in James’ death, but not really, so ... confusion. But a lot less of it.

In form and content, “Movin’ Out” may not relate to many other Broadway-minded musical-theater projects -- that’s a plus, not a minus -- but any director can learn a lesson from how thoroughly Tharp revisited this show.

Take, for example, the mighty Harold Prince. Twenty Tony Awards notwithstanding, he might’ve taken a cue from Tharp as he oversaw the Chicago-to-Broadway transfer of “Hollywood Arms,” the play based on Carol Burnett’s early years, written by Burnett and her daughter, the late Carrie Hamilton.

“Hollywood Arms” tried out at the Goodman Theatre earlier this year. Since then, Burnett has tweaked bits here and there, setting up the conceit of the younger and older Burnett stand-ins (played by Sara Niemietz and Donna Lynne Champlin) more effectively at the top. But a few new lines don’t make a full-on revision, which the script, sweet as some of it is, really needed. The play remains the same soft, synthetic mixture of laughter and heartbreak -- however smoothly staged -- that it was at the Goodman.

Performers of a certain caliber often give very different performances in an out-of-town tryout than they do on Broadway. Linda Lavin, now billed above the “Hollywood Arms” title in large capital letters, has amped up the comedy (the passing-gas sight gags and such) big-time. It’s as if someone slipped Lavin, who is a deeply pleasing actress, a license to kill under her dressing room door at the Cort Theatre.

Watching a licensed scene-stealer can, of course, be exhilarating. But a license to kill can easily become a license to overkill. The same can happen to an entire production. Last season’s best musical Tony Award winner, “Thoroughly Modern Millie,” began a year earlier at the La Jolla Playhouse as a goofy but entertaining improvement on its source material, the 1967 Julie Andrews movie about the flapper era. By the time it reached Broadway, every change effected by director Michael Mayer had conspired to make “Millie” twice as garish, three times as pushy and about half as funny.

In a less radical but dispiriting fashion, a similar pushiness has diminished “Flower Drum Song,” another Southern California transplant. Now at the Virginia Theatre, this David Henry Hwang-penned revision of the 1958 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical started out as a modest, thrust-stage lark at L.A.’s Mark Taper Forum. Now, with a few extra million and an overriding impulse to impress, director-choreographer Robert Longbottom’s staging has become larger and more opulent, with lots more pan-Asian cheesecake in the nightclub numbers, more but not better material for the creaky gay dresser character (Allen Liu), and longer, gabbier book scenes “amplifying” the love story of Mei-Li (Lea Salonga) and Ta (Jose Llana).

Something, too, has happened to even pros such as Jodi Long, who plays a brash theatrical agent. The pacing is off; lines that were made for simply tossing off, and quickly, now go drip ... drip ... drip. I would suggest coffee. Speed counts for a lot with musical comedy.

Even discounting the shrill amplification levels afflicting “Flower Drum Song” and “Thoroughly Modern Millie,” both of which were louder than “Movin’ Out,” the shows in question now operate with a tiring, life-of-the-party desperation to them. They didn’t have it during tryouts. “Movin’ Out” has gone in the other direction, much to Tharp’s credit.

Watching the show on Broadway the other night, I thought of an utterly unrelated old war horse of a comedy, the 1930 Moss Hart-George S. Kaufman Hollywood spoof “Once in a Lifetime.” In tryouts, the Kaufman and Hart collaboration was not going well. Its craziness was unvarying. Then the writers put in a nice, quiet scene for the female protagonist, and suddenly everything worked better.

In a nonverbal way, this is what Tharp has done, at key junctures, with her show about a generation at war and peace. She has sharpened the focus and delivered the goods, without merely making everything bigger, louder, more obvious.

And that’s what you call the right kind of turnaround.

*

Michael Phillips is theater critic at the Chicago Tribune, a Tribune company.