In Chaotic ‘Movin’ Out,’ Dancing Off to the Vietnam War

CHICAGO--If Oliver Stone did a Broadway dance musical--and truly, that’s not a suggestion--it might come out like the more risible passages of “Movin’ Out,” the Twyla Tharp/Billy Joel collaboration that opened its Shubert Theatre pre-Broadway tryout Friday after several weeks of previews. It is a strenuous, chaotic, occasionally exhilarating dance-play, in which America’s war in Vietnam gets blue-bagged for one more pop-cultural recycling.

“Don’t worry, the second act’s better--much better,” said the waitress working the sidewalk tables at the Grillroom, across the street from the Shubert, during Friday’s intermission. She was reassuring a couple of Playbill-wielding “Movin’ Out” first-nighters. And she was right; it is. Yet with a first act so pile-driving and ill-conceived, the question remains: Is “better” better enough?

The dance quotient alone may be enough to alienate a lot of Joel fans, especially those who would’ve been content with a night of nostalgic karaoke, in the style of the Abba-fueled “Mamma Mia!” Even when director-choreographer Tharp’s 27-person cast throws itself into her sweatiest, most manic-depressive choreography, the engaging athleticism of Act 2 cannot erase the misjudgments of Act 1. There’s a marijuana dream sequence that’s at least as silly as anything in “Reefer Madness,” and when “Movin’ Out” takes three of its central characters to war, the resulting combat leaves half the audience asking the other half: So what just happened? Who died? Huh?

The story thread of “Movin’ Out” covers 20 years in the lives of archetypes from the Joel catalog. It begins in Hicksville, Long Island, where the tune “Scenes From an Italian Restaurant” (from “The Stranger”) introduces Brenda (Elizabeth Parkinson) and Eddie (John Selya), married but already bickering their way into a split.

Brenda wants more of a life. She finds it with Tony (Keith Roberts), the kid with the Peter Frampton hair who works in the grocery store, savin’ his pennies for someday. Meanwhile, Tony’s clean-cut brother, James (Benjamin G. Bowman), proposes to Judy (Ashley Tuttle), to the tune of “Just the Way You Are.” Then Eddie, Tony and James go to Vietnam; James does not return; Tony suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder; and Eddie descends into a vaguely S&M; Greenwich Village milieu. The surviving characters emerge sadder, wiser and, in the end, still friends.

Tharp appears to have had a devil of a time determining how much, or little, to deal with in terms of linear narrative. The introduction scene, which brings Eddie onstage behind the wheel of a Mustang, degenerates into a muddle of “local color” and guess-the-principals. As the men march reluctantly into war--Scott Wise plays a drill instructor, as well as Sgt. O’Leary, everybody’s favorite cop back home--the military maneuvers recall Tharp’s work for the film version of “Hair,” albeit far less effectively.

Act 2 improves, with the rageful “Angry Young Man” trio, led by Selya, echoing Jerome Robbins’ “West Side Story” anguish; “Big Shot,” a shattered-nerves duet for Roberts and Parkinson; and a bookend duet “Shameless,” full of flying, grasping leaps. In these sequences the show acquires some emotional lucidity, as well as storytelling clarity.

Ever-present piano man and Joel sound-alike Michael Cavanaugh handles lead vocals. He fronts a good 10-piece band, suspended above the frantic action onstage. The band gets a lot of visual competition from Donald Holder’s annoying “interactive” lighting design, periodically blinding the audience with zap effects. Santo Loquasto’s unit set is a simple, rather disappointing amalgam of chain-link fencing and Long Island anywhere-ville.

A crazily uneven show is better than a relatively solid bore anytime, and “Movin’ Out” is, in fact, the former. More story isn’t really the answer. But the whole show needs to relax. Tharp and company are going for a more dance-oriented version of “The Who’s Tommy,” with its elegant assaultiveness, but they haven’t shaped the key relationships very well. The production is often stunningly danced, with standout contributions from the menacingly gorgeous Parkinson (her curls were destined to meet up with Roberts’; when they pair up, it’s like a curl-off) and the buoyant, anti-gravitational Selya. Yet there’s a hard-sell quality to “Movin’ Out,” when it’s not testing the audience’s ability to track the often opaque action.

In “Nine Sinatra Songs,” Tharp brought out the harsh beauty and violence in a great American conundrum. If the Vietnam War was a conundrum of a different sort, then “Movin’ Out” is a spiritual cousin to the Sinatra project--Tharp’s attempt, on a bigger canvas, to match a spiky dance vocabulary with popular song. There’s probably enough stuff in “Movin’ Out” for Tharp to extract “Nine Joel Songs” (well, six or seven, anyway).

But first things first. If the satisfactions of the second act are to add up to anything, the first-act quagmire must be addressed in time for the planned October Broadway opening.