Viewing page 8 of 33

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

"We don't want audiences to come in expecting a standard Broadway musical," says Tharp. "There's a narrative, but there are no book scenes. The movement and the action tell the story."

[[image]] Michael Cavanaugh (above) and Elizabeth Parkinson and cast (right) in Movin' Out

the Rain. On television, she co-directed "Baryshnikov by Tharp," which won two Emmy Awards. And in 1992, she won a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship - also known as the genius grant.
     After she thought of using Joel's music, Tharp says, she tried it out with several of her dancers and made a tape, to see "if it was a doable idea, if the music really did dance. And then I called Billy," she says. "I told him that we never had never met, and that he didn't know me, but I asked him to come see it. He came and looked at the tape. He said he liked what he saw, and he said, "O.K., go for it.""
     Joel, who in his long and phenomenally successful career has won five Grammys, has told interviewers that he wasn't sure what Tharp wanted to show him - that he was concerned it would be a "cringe-fest" - but that he loved it, that old songs "sounded new again."
     Tharp says that she finds the narrative, the story of Movin' Out, "difficult to talk about. In part that's because it's told without language. But it comes down to three main points. At the beginning, there's the post-World War II idealism that suffused this country, the sense that if something was broken we could fix it. This is our simple, fablelike way of beginning. There's a car - yes, it's a 1960's Mustang - and the car has broken down. And Eddie gets out of the car and starts to fix it. In those days, that was the American spirit."
     But then the Vietnam War intervenes - and with it, says Tharp, comes "the corrosive effect that the war had on our national ethos, that it created in our culture a rift unlike any other in our country's history - that we couldn't make the 

[[image]] Joan Marcus

world over in our image that time, any more than we can today."
     It is with that feeling, she says, that the curtain comes down on Act One. "Act Two is easy. It's about survival. And we come out of it, as I feel Billy music's does, with the belief that the cup is half full, not half empty." The goal of Movin' Out, Tharp says, is to make audiences feel that they, as well as the characters, "have really made a progression.
     "We want them to feel that the dancers are amazing, and the band is great, and the songs are wonderful. But we also want them to see that the people have made a voyage, that in front of the audience's eyes they have grown up - and that it's not easy to do. It's a redemptive ending, and it has a sense for the audience of being rejuvenating. There's an old-fashioned word for it. It's catharsis. That's what I think we all strive for in the theatre." [[white block]]

WWW.PLAYBILL.COM
[[pointer]]
PURE THEATRE ONLINE

bloomingdales
[[image]]
OUR IRRESISTIBLE LITTLE BROWN BEAR YOURS FOR 12.00 WITH ANY 50.00 PURCHASE.

BEARER OF GLAD TIDINGS. A big hit last year. Little Brown Bear is made exclusively for us by Gund and he's dressed in a cable-knit sweater (all the better for hiding his plump tummy). More than a gift that keeps on hugging, a portion of the proceeds for every bear purchase will be donated to Radio City Entertainment Cheering for Children, a division of the Madison Square Garden Cheering for Children Foundation. Quantities limited.