'Times They Are A-Changin' Reviews — Page 2

defyinggravity - are you watching the WB CW11?

The commercial just came on.

"It gets worse. The Up-With People staging of "Blowin' in the Wind" is so cheesy it even elicited boos at the press performance I attended. (When was the last time you heard boos during a Broadway show?)"
-Theatermania

Ouch.

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Updated On: 10/27/06 at 12:09 AM

Reuters/Hollywood Reporter is Negative:

"It doesn't seem lightning is going to strike twice for choreographer Twyla Tharp, whose "Movin' Out" -- essentially a modern ballet danced to the music of Billy Joel -- was a surprise Broadway smash.

"The Times They Are A-Changin," her follow-up effort featuring the oeuvre of the commercially resurgent Bob Dylan, is a far less accessible work that never coalesces into the fantastical theatrical experience she had intended.

Working in a more abstract mode than she did with the reasonably linear "Movin' Out," the director-choreographer here has devised a surreal, barely there narrative involving a traveling circus.

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It all plays like an overconceived concert, with Tharp's choreography, as vibrant and physical as it is here, lacking the variety of her earlier work. A lot of it is inspired by the circus theme, including the incorporation of such big top staples as tightrope walkers and contortionists, and much use is made of the trampolines placed strategically downstage. At times, the staging succumbs to cuteness, as when the dancers are forced to imitate various circus animals. But there also are many clever ideas on display, including the adroit use of flashlights for the eerie number, "Knockin' on Heaven's Door."

The seven-member dance ensemble goes through their paces with virtuosic athleticism, but the fact that the show's lead characters mainly sing rather than dance robs the choreography of much of its emotional impact. While the Dylan songs are performed with strong conviction, they often display an inevitable blandness compared to the originals."


http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=reviewsNews&storyID=2006-10-27T031211Z_01_N26192942_RTRIDST_0_REVIEW-STAGE-TIMES-DC.XML

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I'm not sure what it's weekly nut is, but it doesn't appear that it's been doing too badly so far -- attendance in the mid-80s every week, though with a low average ticket price, due to discounts. The reviews will hurt, but I imagine it should stick around until the end of the year.

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For USA Today to use a comparison to RING OF FIRE as a way to say that TIMES THEY ARE A-CHANGIN' is good, doesn't create much of a positive argument.

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Updated On: 10/27/06 at 12:16 AM

Talkin Broadway is Negative:

"The revolution will not be uncivilized if Twyla Tharp has anything to say about it. Trampolines, jump ropes, teddy bears, and oversized beach balls might not be the expected weapons of any counterculture's uprising, but if you really need to bludgeon your elders, preciousness will do in a pinch.

These items, and so many more, materialize from the suffocatingly thin air enveloping the precision mayhem in The Times They Are A-Changin', Twyla Tharp's implosive stage interpretation of Bob Dylan's music that just opened at the Brooks Atkinson. That Tharp needed to fill the play's 90 dawdling minutes with props, specialty acts, and even more specialty effects ("Mr. Tambourine Man" sung while sitting on a floating moon, an ensemble member doing an extended pantomime as a dog) suggests a lack of inspiration with Dylan's catalog that ultimately proves this show's biggest stumbling block.

No, lightning hasn't struck twice for the choreographic impresario who shepherded the dance drama Movin' Out to supersonic success four years ago. I was not especially fond of the Billy Joel-inspired Movin' Out when it opened on Broadway in 2002: It struck me as a rather obtuse, self-interested ballet with little business on Broadway. But it moved effortlessly, was beautifully realized in dance terms, and its artistry was unquestionably evident.

This discordant spectacle seems to exist only to distance itself from that one, and thus has no opportunity to engage on its own terms, assuming it even can: Tharp has given The Times They Are A-Changin' the appearance and feel of an everted haunted house, complete with an ensemble resembling homeless people squatting in a Halloween costume rental store, seldom an enticing way to spend an evening.

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Hailed for a work that excited while challenging preexisting conceptions of both jukebox musicals and pop ballet, she's been forced to follow up with something radically different to protect her status as a free-thinking theatrical artist. But envisioning her as the young rebel is the only way to get much out of The Times They Are A-Changin' - she's otherwise distorted Dylan's voice of the disrespected masses into something with less impact than silence: a rambunctiously ridiculous musical.
http://www.talkinbroadway.com/world/TimesChangin.html

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Dare we say, "Not since In My Life!"

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And now, a few words from the infamous John Simon:

"``The Times They Are A-Changin'' is director-choreographer Twyla Tharp's second go (after the better ``Movin' Out') at a musical in which a story is told mostly through dance.

There's also a lot of singing and some talk in her new show, but they don't help. Neither do Bob Dylan's songs, on which the show is based, lend themselves to the underlying story Tharp has concocted. And telling a story in dance is not her strength.

A brief program note proclaims that story ambitiously and unpersuasively. Without it, however, you could deduce nothing from what you see and hear. Except that the colorful but impoverished circus that serves as the locus is run by Captain Ahrab (get it?), who has a tyrannical personality, a gimpy leg and a son named Coyote.

Both men are involved with a runaway girl named Cleo. There are also one female and five male clowns who impersonate some uncircuslike animals -- a sheep, a cow and, more convincingly, a dog.

We briefly get a huge inflated female doll and a bearded man on stilts supposed to be God. Small stuffed animals are tossed about, numerous big balls are danced with and on top of. A large, lighted crescent moon rises and descends with or without passengers. There are ladders for climbing and ropes for skipping; also, shadow play, unicycling and lots of whatnot.

Trampolines

Most prominently, there are trampolines downstage and upstage on which Tharp's gifted and extremely acrobatic dancers perform dizzying routines. With only one ring, this exhausting (for the audience) circus has enough bustle and bounce for three.

Though the clowns do some singing and are involved in the plot, they lack individual personality. But then so do the hard- working and talented principals -- Thom Sesma, Michael Arden and Lisa Brescia.

Not much happens, except that Captain Ahrab loses his motley leg splint and seems to die.

Tharp can choreograph, and has quite a bag of tricks, although it is not deep enough to justify 90 minutes. No real story emerges, granted that Tharp is up against those Dylan lyrics that are hard to translate into dance and harder to make cohere.

Banal Lyrics

The lyrics are an unhappy marriage of pseudopoetic pretentiousness and banal platitudes. For instance:

Broken bottles, broken plates

Broken switches, broken gates

Broken dishes, broken parts

Streets are filled with broken hearts

Broken words never meant to be spoken

Everything is broken.

Quite aside from their intrinsic lack of value, how do you enact those words? The music, which might mitigate the lapses, is humdrum hurdy-gurdy tunes souped up by Michael Dansicker and Dylan's orchestrations and arrangements, which arguably kill the spontaneity. And the singing of the cast, through no fault of execution, plus the occasional speaking, merely undercut Tharp's terpsichorean forte.

Santo Loquasto's set and costumes are tirelessly imaginative and Donald Holder, the lighting designer, knocks himself out to achieve variety.

Please forget about musicals, Twyla Tharp, and go back to straight choreography."

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601088&sid=aoaAb2Xw2XMY&refer=muse

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The Wall Street Journal is Negative:

"The buzz on "The Times They Are A-Changin'," the new Twyla Tharp-Bob Dylan jukebox musical, was devastatingly negative. Such omens of impending doom are usually right, but I hoped for the best anyway. Mr. Dylan is one of the greatest songwriters of the postwar era and Ms. Tharp one of its most admired choreographers, so how bad could it be? Now I know: "The Times They Are A-Changin'" is so bad that it makes you forget how good the songs are.

If you liked Ms. Tharp's 2002 Broadway hit, "Movin' Out," let me start by warning you that "The Times They Are A-Changin'" is nothing like its predecessor, in which Billy Joel's music was used as the soundtrack for a dance-driven show with a vestigial but nonetheless intelligible plot. This time Ms. Tharp, who is credited with the "conception" of "The Times They Are A-Changin'," has come up with a nonplot so hopelessly addled that you'll have to read her I-am-a-genius program note to know what's supposed to be going on: "A tale of fathers and sons, of men and women, of leaders and followers, of immobility and change, 'The Times They Are A-Changin' uses prophecy, parable, metaphor, accusation and confession -- like the Dylan songs which comprise it -- to confront us with images and ideas of who we are and who it is possible to be."

None of this is evident from the show itself, a maundering fable about a broken-down circus in which such Dylan classics as "Like a Rolling Stone" and "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" are performed by a trio of musical-comedy types accompanied by a Holiday Inn-style lounge band. The focus is on the singers, not the dancers, which makes next to no sense. Not only is the prettified singing all wrong, but there's nothing obviously theatrical about Mr. Dylan's poetic monologues, which Ms. Tharp has turned into a string of literal-minded vignettes in which the lyrics are visualized with the utmost triteness ("Masters of War," for instance, becomes a pantomime show about a whip-cracking ringmaster).

I've long had mixed feelings about Ms. Tharp's jumpy, unfocused choreography, but mine is a minority view, and in any case it had never before occurred to me to question her underlying artistic seriousness. If you went to see this show knowing nothing about her you'd go home assuming that she was a pretentious buffoon. Don't blame Mr. Dylan, who had nothing to do with "The Times They Are A-Changin'" beyond taking the producers' money. I hope he got it all up front."


http://online.wsj.com/article/SB116190298997805341.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

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IN MY LIFE was the work of one person who had never set foot on a Broadway stage before he attempted writing it: indeed had never written a single line or musical theatre song ever!

Twyla Tharp and Bob Dylan are legends of their own genres. This show may be a mess - it may be ill guided, but it really can't be compared to IN MY LIFE, which is a once for the ages kind of flop.

Even critics who hate TIMES are for the most part still respectful of Tharp and Dylan's genius.

Metropolis was never on a Broadway stage.

Wow. Pans across the board, except for the crazy USA Today woman. I wonder sometimes if critics will take the contrary position just so their name can be plastered across all subsequent advertising. I'm dying to see how the marketing team spins and twists these horrible reviews.

The NY Sun's theatre critic is Mostly Negative:

"‘The Times They Are A-Changin'," director-choreographer Twyla Tharp's garbled stab at converting Bob Dylan's song catalog into a sinister Felliniesque carnival, may fail as dance theater or as musical theater or even as basic entertainment. But at least it fails big.

Ms. Tharp is aiming for something challenging and profound, a visual analogue to Mr. Dylan's irascible roots-rock myths. And just as Mr. Dylan's weakest albums still eclipse so many of their contemporaries, I'd personally rather watch Ms. Tharp flounder than see so many other directors succeed at lesser tasks.

As rock 'n' roll's resident sphinx for more than 40 years, Mr. Dylan would appear to be resistant to the "jukebox musical" format, one of the more suspect trends to reach Broadway in recent years. Since shedding his earnest-folkie persona in the late 1960s, the cryptic Mr. Dylan has worn many hats and retained a crucial sense of mystery about his musical and lyrical choices, all of which could easily get in the way of creating a viable theatrical framework.

Ms. Tharp, a modern-dance icon whose "Movin' Out" marked a high point among jukebox musicals in 2002, has jettisoned any sort of naturalism and instead set more than two dozen Dylan songs within a ragtag, underpopulated circus. The wall-to-wall dancing that punctuated "Movin' Out" has given way to an array of big-top antics that wouldn't be out of place in a "Cirque du Soleil" ode to Americana, with the three lead performers singing at some remove from the intrepid seven-member ensemble. The result is occasionally galvanizing and usually misguided, but almost never boring.
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"...now and then, "The Times They Are A-Changin'" attains a dreamlike blend of illogic and inevitability."Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" works surprisingly well as a Broadway power ballad, even with Jason McDole's frantic performance as Cleo's dog upstaging the talented Ms. Brescia. Even less obvious is the oddly resonant juxtaposition of Mr. Arden gently crooning "Mr. Tambourine Man" from atop an airborne moon while the rubber-limbed Charlie Neshyba-Hodges supplies a supple dance on the ground.

More often than not, though, the yoking of music to narrative feels perfunctory.The stilts and tightropes and trampolines carry with them a whiff of bellsand-whistles hucksterism, an admission that the underlying material just won't hold audience interest on its own merits.This concern is borne out whenever the props get put away, as in a pointlessly rowdy "Please, Mrs. Henry." The would-be showstopper, a high-energy free-for-all set to "Like a Rolling Stone," feels so disengaged from Mr. Dylan's inscrutable imagism that the only possible response is to tap one's toes and pretend the song is completely unrelated to Mr. Dylan's original tune. Ms. Tharp's stage chops make this option more tempting than you might think, but not tempting enough."

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It remains to be seen what the Dylan faithful — who worked themselves into a lather over an electric guitar at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, for crying out loud — will make of this undernourished mishmash. From a theatergoer's perspective, messes like "The Times They Are A-Changin'" don't come around very often. Perhaps they don't come around often enough. Or perhaps they do.






http://www.nysun.com/article/42406

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