His Songs, Her Call

In the summer of ‘75, Brenda and Eddie, king and queen of the Parkway Diner, were still going steady, unaware that deep-pile carpet and a couple of paintings from Sears would not stem their inevitable fall. In the spring of ‘02, Twyla and Billy, shooting to be the king and queen of a Broadway fall, did not look much like they would be sharing a bottle of white or a bottle of red any time soon.

The stakes for Brenda and Eddie, characters in a rock song called “Scenes From an Italian Restaurant,” were merely fictional. But Twyla Tharp and Billy Joel have staked their hefty real-life reputations on “Movin’ Out,” an expensive and highly unusual new theatrical entertainment that began performances at the Shubert Theatre in Chicago last week and will open on Broadway in the fall. Instigated and developed by Tharp, a woman hitherto known almost exclusively for choreography, the show has no dialogue (and thus no book writer), no incidental music and no original songs. Although “Movin’ Out” is rooted in dance, not traditional narrative, it is billed as the story of six friends whose stormy friendships wax and wane through the bucolic 1960s, the agony of Vietnam, and pain and reconciliation in the years that followed.

This story has been put together from 31 existing compositions by Joel, the perennial piano man. Tharp says it all began with the central question of what happens to Brenda and Eddie.

And if the song implies that Joel’s characters Brenda and Eddie were an unlikely pair, Twyla and Billy seem equally mismatched.

It’s a Thursday morning in May at a spiffy new rehearsal studio overlooking New York’s 42nd Street, which these days looks more like Downtown Disney than a haven of urban sin. Tharp has opened her rehearsal to visitors from the Midwest. Clearly, this is one aspect of the Broadway process that she does not especially enjoy.

Tharp is tense and Joel is late.

“I don’t think we should wait another half-hour for him,” says Tharp, a noted perfectionist and self-confessed workaholic who has won two Emmy Awards, choreographed five Hollywood movies (including “Hair” and “Ragtime”) and created more than 100 dances for everyone from the Royal Ballet to Hubbard Street Dance Chicago. Since 1965, she has maintained, off and on, her own company of dancers.

“Billy’s in the elevator,” says one of the production assistants.

Sure enough, Joel finally ambles into the rehearsal studio, spilling coffee and apologies. The night before, Joel was up very late playing the piano, unannounced and without charge, for a group of delighted investment banker types who happened to be hanging out in the lobby of the swanky St. Regis Hotel.

So this morning, when the car showed up at his hotel, he had the blinds down and thought it was still the middle of the night. “Actually,” he says with a laugh as he finally sits down in the rehearsal studio, “it was the middle of the morning.”

The hot beverage in Joel’s hand, where the nails are bitten down short, still is wavering. “I haven’t had coffee in so long,” Joel says. “I’ve forgotten how to hold it.” Ever on task, Tharp is already moving to the first number, taken from the first act of the show, in which Brenda and Eddie are enjoying their halcyon days.

“This is 1967,” says Tharp, setting up the number, “when things were all perfect and rosy.” “Summer love,” adds Joel.

“Summer love,” allows Tharp.

An assistant hits a button and a voice sounding very much like Joel’s begins to sing, and a band sounding very much like the kind of musicians you can hear on such Joel albums as “The Stranger” or “The Nylon Curtain” begins to play. Joel looks worried and leans over.

“You do know,” he asks, with nary a trace of irony, “that this is not me singing.” For “Movin’ Out,” Joel’s longtime musical director, Tommy Byrns, found a singer--Michael Cavanaugh--who sounds enough like Joel that one will have a Joel-like experience. Cavanaugh, who will head an onstage band made up mainly of longtime Joel backers, sings all of the songs in the show.

The recording moves unmistakably into the introduction of “Just the Way You Are.” Perched on a folding chair, looking at the dancers with a rather touching combination of awe and pride, Joel begins playing the chords in the air. “I didn’t like this song for a long time,” Joel will later say, nodding in Tharp’s direction. “I thought of it as a chick song. Thanks to her, I like it again now.”

A few minutes later, Tharp is setting up another number. She starts to talk about Eddie and Tony fighting together in Vietnam. Tony? That’s Anthony, the fellow who worked in a grocery store, savin’ his pennies for someday. He is, of course, warned about heart attacks from a note-bearing woman named Mamma Leone and, thereafter, decides he’s “Movin’ Out.”

In this show, Tony becomes involved with the restless Brenda. But Tharp is getting ready to move on to where Brenda and Eddie make up--a scene she calls “The Reconciliation.”

Joel, who clearly wanted his visitors to see more of the emotional guts of the show, seems sorry there are not more dramatic scenes on the day’s agenda. “I guess we’re only showing you the happy parts,” he says.

Joel has been asked several times if he would compose a Broadway musical. Scott Zeiger, who runs Clear Channel Entertainment and was involved in musicals written by Barry Manilow, Jimmy Buffet and other pop musicians, says the only way the commercial theater will attract baby boomers and younger audiences is to get classic rock author-musicians to write for the stage.

“These are the composers with whom we all grew up,” Zeiger said. “Younger people are comfortable with their music.” In addition to Manilow and Buffet, Elton John, Randy Newman and Paul Simon have been involved with musicals, albeit with varying degrees of success.

The prolific Joel (he wrote 10 songs in seven weeks for his “An Innocent Man” album in 1982) was an obvious target for these suitors from Broadway. For one thing, his compositional range--which includes ballads, classical-influenced work, Tin Pan Alley, jazz, Motown and hard-driving rock--is larger than most of his peers. For another, his big hits are more lyrically complex than most other artists’ works.

Then there’s the matter of Joel’s ability to attract an audience. Over a long career, the 53-year-old composer and singer has won six Grammy Awards. In 1977, “The Stranger” spawned four hit singles (“Just the Way You Are,” “Movin’ Out [Anthony’s Song],” “Only the Good Die Young” and “She’s Always a Woman”). In October 1979, Columbia Records declared that Joel was its bestselling solo artist of the 20th century.

But there have been some less positive issues of late. Earlier this year, Joel’s tour with Elton John suffered from postponed engagements after Joel declared he had been diagnosed with acute laryngitis, inflamed vocal cords and an acute upper respiratory infection.

In February, he was nominated for a Grammy Award for his collaboration with Tony Bennett on “New York State of Mind,” but it has been nearly a decade since he has had a hit album. And the last hit single that many Joel fans recall was “A Matter of Trust” in 1986. (Last week, a Joel spokeswoman confirmed that the singer had entered a Connecticut psychiatric and substance-abuse treatment center.)

Still, the main issue with Joel and Broadway has always been the difficulty of persuading him to actually let his songs be used.

The obvious question is: Why now?

“It was explained to me that this was dance,” Joel says. “It was not proposed to me as someone making a musical out of my songs. They were not going to cobble together a book. My words were to be the dialogue. That was the difference this time.”

Joel leans back on his chair. “To be honest, I was ready for a cringe fest. This could have been cornballed to death.”

His eyes mist. “But then I saw these incredibly beautiful, finely tuned dances. For me, dance is a whole other dimension.” As he frankly admits, Joel is not so much a Tharp collaborator here as someone who has allowed his existing songs to be used. It is Tharp who has put the overall narrative together and picked which songs will be used (some are lesser-known Joel compositions such as “I’ve Loved These Days”).

But Joel is clearly emotionally--as well as financially--involved. Like many artists at a similar stage in their careers, he’s thinking not of financial or popular success (he has all he needs of both), but of artistic legitimacy.

“I don’t know anything about the people, politics and machinations of Broadway,” Joel says. “I’ve written what I’ve written. These songs are my children. They now have a life of their own. They’re going out and making a living.”

Tharp has been at the top of the dance world’s pile of contemporary choreographers for many years. On the face of it, a musical based on the songs of Billy Joel looks like a risk she does not need to take. But Tharp knows the attention--and the cultural relevance--that can come from working with popular music. One of her most celebrated compositions was “Nine Sinatra Songs,” contemporary dance choreographed to such songs as “My Way.” A populist as much as a perfectionist, she also has long craved what entertainment industry people call “crossover appeal.”

Aside from her work in Hollywood (most of which is not recent), Tharp choreographed and directed a Broadway production of “Singin’ in the Rain” in the mid-1980s, which, although not a critical hit, did return its investment. Despite Tharp’s reputation for choreographic excellence and her driven personality, the world of contemporary dance has never been an especially lucrative field--especially for a choreographer with her own company of dancers to maintain. It’s been a long struggle to keep those who make up Twyla Tharp Dance on constant payroll (many of them make up the cast of “Movin’ Out”).

But one senses that a show such as “Movin’ Out” was the only way for Tharp to get the broader exposure of a major Broadway show with the kind of control she insists upon. The only way to get that control is to actually construct the narrative. With this show, which she first conceived two years ago, she gets the populist hook of Joel’s music along with an $8-million budget and the freedom to forge her own vision.

Still, her affection for the Joel canon seems born both of genuine affection--and of the choreographer’s eye for finding the right roots for dance.

“Sinatra was a stylist, but he wasn’t a songwriter like Billy,” Tharp says, fingers tapping on a desk. “Billy captures the impulse of time and character. There’s a vivid quality and a sophistication to his work. We’ve lived through the same times, and I feel very comfortable with his material. I’ve really looked at these songs almost as shards.”

From those shards, Tharp has put together a narrative arc. She says she did this by listening to Joel’s entire body of songs in chronological order and finding the bigger themes in his canon--getting out of Hicksville, dealing with Vietnam, finding love and beauty in blue-collar America. She picked the dramatic songs, but she tried to avoid the kind of literality you would find in “Mamma Mia!”

In other words, although the central characters of “Movin’ Out” are Brenda, Eddie and Tony, along with James (from the obscure Joel song of the same name), Judy (from “Why Judy Why?”) and Sgt. O’Leary (a “Movin’ Out” character), there’s the kind of fluidity to the characters that comes only from dance. Elizabeth Parkinson, who plays Brenda, for example, also is the “Uptown Girl” at another point in the show. So, at that point, is she still Brenda? Or another character?

Well, yes. But Parkinson, a longtime Tharp collaborator, prefers to see the question in another way. “This show is unlike anything that has ever been seen on Broadway,” she says. “There is no book. This is a play that’s told through dance.” Unlike Susan Stroman’s “Contact,” “Movin’ Out” makes one self-contained narrative arc out of existing pop song lyrics.

“This could be the antidote to what is ailing the dance world,” says John Selya, who plays Eddie. “It’s honest dancing. It’s genuine. And it’s real. And everybody loves Billy’s music.”

Still, one cannot help but think that the show’s success--critically and at the box office--will depend on how well the story hangs together. Unlike “Mamma Mia!,” this is not a comedy. Yet Tharp still has had to shape a story from songs penned, initially, as self-contained pieces.

That said, both Joel and Tharp say that bigger stories are to be found in everything Joel has penned. The worst that could be done would be to worry too much about the lack of a book. “I’m sick of being literal,” Tharp says. “Dance is figurative and abstract.”

Joel doesn’t stay long at the rehearsal. Interviews done, he’s on his way out. But his emotional commitment to this project--and admiration for Tharp--is palpable. Tharp, relaxing for a moment just before Joel leaves, points first at herself and then at the piano man with the droopy features and the restless eyes.

“I’m really rock ‘n’ roll,” she says, eyes flashing. “He’s really high art.”

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Chris Jones is an arts reporter for the Chicago Tribune, a Tribune company.