Monday, March 21, 2005
Pressure
Posted by Chris Neal on Mon, Mar 21, 2005 at 9:40 PM
Led astray by over-the-moon reviews like this one, the girlfriend and I ventured out to TPAC on Saturday to see Movin' Out, the Broadway hit that gussies up Billy Joel's back catalogue with choreography by Twyla Tharp. The songs were good (well, most of them), the dancing was fine, but if you're going to create characters and a story based on Billy Joel's songs, you should maybe, oh, I don't know, create characters and a story. Movin' Out simply grafted near-random selections to a rote semi-plot in which -- if I have it correctly -- a group of interchangeable friends enjoy teenage hijinks in the '50s (cue songs from An Innocent Man) before the boys go to Vietnam in the '60s (cue "Goodnight Saigon"), then everyone is made blissfully happy in the '80s by jogging. Or something like that.
By employing a (top-notch) rock band to play the songs and a piano-playing vocalist who sounds uncannily like Joel to sing them, Movin' Out passed up a chance at recontextualization in favor of simple mimicry. Nonetheless, the stronger songs -- precision-tooled little mini-stories much more airtight and intriguing than the show built around them -- carried me through a show that otherwise just didn't add up to the sum of its parts. Plus, dude, some of those dancer chicks are hot.
By employing a (top-notch) rock band to play the songs and a piano-playing vocalist who sounds uncannily like Joel to sing them, Movin' Out passed up a chance at recontextualization in favor of simple mimicry. Nonetheless, the stronger songs -- precision-tooled little mini-stories much more airtight and intriguing than the show built around them -- carried me through a show that otherwise just didn't add up to the sum of its parts. Plus, dude, some of those dancer chicks are hot.
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