THE MESSAGE HAS GROWN AMBIGUOUS: in this Age of 9/11.
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Most of the people screaming and rocking at the Opera House last Wednesday night probably thought they were at a Billy Joel concert. Actually, Billy Joel only wrote the catalogue of songs that Twyla Tharp mined and crafted into the spectacular dance show Movin’ Out. The production is back in Boston for the second time, through May 28, and though the Broadway edition closed a couple of months ago, the tour that visited here in 2004 is still going strong.When Tharp started workshopping Joel’s songs with her now-extinct Tharp Dance company, it was the summer of 2001. The counterculture and the Vietnam War had fallen into nostalgic memory, and she wanted to deliver a stern message to the anti-war cadres who spurned that war and its returning veterans. A few months later, Vietnam would start to seem eerily familiar. Movin’ Out hasn’t changed significantly over the past five years, but its message has grown ambiguous, like the whole meaning of patriotism and coming-of-age in this Age of 9/11.
School friends Eddie, Tony, and James and girlfriends Brenda and Judy seem like teenagers in an old movie, bopping around with cars, flirting, getting mad and making up. Judy and James get married. The boys play at being soldiers, transitioning straight into boot camp. The real war results in the loss of James and the destruction of the remaining souls through guilt, grief, rage, and drugs. Finally, in another wink, they find forgiveness and love and cross over to sanity again.
After many cast changes, the show is still powerful, with its extreme dancing and its terrific band led by singer/pianist Darren Holden. Brendan King as Eddie has the rough, tough irrepressibility of the originator of the part, John Selya. He’s a little less adept at manic manipulation of ballet acrobatics than Selya, but he can do his own tricks, like hopping on his hands while his feet walk in the air above him.
As the petulant Brenda, Laurie Kanyok makes a real character change, from pert Sandra Dee adolescent through reckless bar-hopper to passionate grown-up. Keith Roberts returns in the role he created as Tony, the most thoughtful of the friends, who also endures his doubts and torments. It seemed to me that all the characters, including the more vulnerable Judy (Laura Feig) and James (Troy Edward Bowles), have deepened as Movin’ Out has aged. This happens in long-running sit-coms, too.
The show has gotten tighter in other ways. It’s always had its big dramatic moments, like the battle scene and the solemn ceremony honoring the fallen James. But some threads in the plot seem clearer now: the philandering that leads to Eddie’s break-up with Brenda in the first scene, his basic decency after he’s fallen in with a disreputable crowd of dropouts, the girlfriends’ desperation as their partners go off to war. The performing style of the ensemble has gotten more “Broadway” too, with open-mouthed smily audience appeal, and the big dance numbers have never looked so balletically organized.
