Knockin’ on Broadway’s Door
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On Broadway, where familiarity is a strong lure for both producers and ticket-buyers, two factors tend to spell safety for a new show: a huge celebrity name and a creator whose track record includes a big, fat, recent Broadway hit.
So the Bob Dylan-Twyla Tharp collaboration, “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” which opens Thursday, would appear to have nothing to worry about. After all, Ms. Tharp’s 2002 Billy Joel musical, “Movin’ Out,” was showered with critical raves, won Ms. Tharp her first Tony Award, and ran for more than three years.
And yet a sense of risk hovers about the project — possibly because, although the Dylan show might seem to be a mere repetition of Ms. Tharp’s work with the Joel show, they are very different animals.
Donald Holder, the Tony-winning lighting designer who lit “Movin’ Out” and has rejoined Ms. Tharp for the Dylan show, said he believes the Dylan musical “delves deeper into the social fabric” than the Joel show did, despite its Vietnam War theme.
“I just think this operates on a more abstract and less literal plane. Given the music and the words, I think it absolutely needs to,” he said, noting that he did not mean to diminish the Joel show. “When Billy Joel wants to say something, he says it, and it’s clear. When Bob Dylan does something in his songs, you have to think about it. Once you get what he’s saying, it’s a revelation.”
And when Ms. Tharp says something?
“You have to live in Twyla’s world if you’re going to do Twyla’s work,” an actor who plays one of the lead characters in “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” Thom Sesma said.
Mr. Sesma’s rule could apply equally to the audience, which might as well abandon expectations of having a standard-issue Broadway experience in Ms. Tharp’s domain.
“She’s a person who always wants to be in opposition to what is expected or what’s comfortable or what’s typical,” Mr. Holder said.
Aside from the little overture co-orchestrator Michael Dansicker managed to sneak in (“just to quiet the audience down,” he said), virtually nothing about “The Times They Are A-Changin'” screams “Broadway.” But the show doesn’t seem to belong to any other genre either.
It isn’t a concert version of Mr. Dylan’s music, and Mr. Dylan himself is not in it. Nor is it a pure dance piece aimed at the audience that embraced Ms. Tharp’s choreographic forays into popular music, such as “Deuce Coupe,”set to the Beach Boys; the coolly elegant “Sinatra Suite,” performed to recordings of Frank Sinatra, or “Eight Jelly Rolls,” set to music by Jelly Roll Morton.
Perhaps confounding expectations, “The Times They Are A-Changin'” is set neither in the 1960s nor in any other specific time. Rather, it is set simply “sometime between awake and asleep,” a territory that turns out to be an unsettling chiaroscuro dreamscape, where childlike frivolity is never far removed from danger.
The visual and emotional tone of the piece reflects the influence of Fellini’s bleak and brutal “La Strada,” about a traveling-circus strongman, but here conventional storytelling is largely absent. The intensely physical, song-driven scenes in “The Times They Are A-Changin'” are linked by only the thinnest narrative thread: a struggle between an evil circus ringmaster, Captain Ahrab (Mr. Sesma), and his rebellious son, Coyote (Michael Arden).
“These are episodes that everyone recognizes. Call them clichés if you will, but that’s what an allegory is, what a myth is,” Mr. Sesma said. “These are shards; these are episodes; these are fragments of a dream.”
Charlie Neshyba-Hodges, a Twyla Tharp Dance company member who appeared in “Movin’ Out” and plays one of the main circus clowns in the Dylan musical, offered a different analogy. “I equate it to walking through something like the Met, where each scene is a different painting,” he said.
The music that accompanies those scenes, however, is distinctly un-Met-like. Mr. Dansicker, who arranged, adapted, and co-orchestrated Mr. Dylan’s songs for the musical, also assembled a rock band to play them. That may come as something of a relief to Dylan fans who cringed at the thought of their hero’s musicalization.
“I wanted to be true to what the music was. I didn’t want to turn it into a Broadway show,” Mr. Dansicker said, meaning a musical with a characteristic Broadway sound. “I knew Twyla would never go for that. There had to be an air of authenticity about it.”
Toward that end, the five-piece band on the platform above the stage includes guitarist John “J.J.” Jackson, who played with Mr. Dylan for several years; former “Saturday Night Live” band bassist Paul Ossola, and drummer Brian Doherty, who recorded and toured with They Might Be Giants.
“None of them are really Broadway babies,” Mr. Dansicker said.
Even the listing of songs in the Playbill for “The Times They Are A-Changin'” has bent to Tharp’s will. From “Blowin’ in the Wind” to “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” to the title song, the 25 musical numbers appear alphabetically, not according to their order in the show, as musical-theater tradition dictates.
“Her theory is that if you put the songs in the order in which they’re sung, people start flipping through their programs to see what’s next,” Mr. Dansicker said.
Ms. Tharp developed the piece at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego, where it made its premiere early this year. The production was subsequently extended twice, and proved enormously popular with people who had never before been to the Old Globe, perhaps indicating future success with newcomers to Broadway as well.
But Broadway success is never a sure thing, especially for artists who choose experimentation over homogenization, as Ms. Tharp consistently does.
“To do a piece like this on Broadway and put herself out there,” Mr. Holder said, pausing, “very few people would do that.”