I know digital programs carry an eco-friendly stamp of approval, and that scanning a QR code means never having to handle paper someone else has touched. That process started during the pandemic as everybody scrambled to find hands-free/contactless ways to deliver food, dispose of trash, wash and dry hands in public toilets, etc. In my recollection, the pandemic officially started on March 12, 2020, the day that Broadway theaters shut down because an usher tested positive for covid-19.
Nevertheless, I miss theater programs. Broadway shows still supply them, but cash-strapped smaller theaters have embraced the cost-cutting step of passing out one piece of paper with a QR code on it, and sometimes not even that. I thought about that this morning after spending a perfectly pleasant hour at Little Island last night watching Twyla Tharp’s How Long Blues as the sun set over the Hudson and a breeze from the river cooled off the crowd after a sweaty day.
The ushers distributed no programs. I’d gotten an advance email that included a link to the digital program, which I didn’t look at. I enjoyed the show, which in the Tharp canon falls somewhere between a longer dance (like, say, In The Upper Room) and a full-blown Broadway musical (Movin’ Out or The Times They Are A-Changin’). It seemed to tell some kind of story but as a dream-like montage of snippets, many of which required their own props, sets, and costume changes. So many costume changes! It was like ADHD theater.
Fifteen dancers rolled and jumped and played with soccer balls while two older gentlemen walked among them, sometimes interacting and sometimes seemingly invisible, like ghosts. Michael Cerveris, a Broadway actor who played the lead in the original production of The Who’s Tommy and won an Tony Award for Fun Home, played a tweedy pipe-smoking gent who seemed to be more interested in reading his newspaper than anything else, while John Selya, a longtime Tharp dancer who starred in Movin’ Out, seemed to pay a lot of attention to the pretty gals, which was not always reciprocated.
Only when I got home and checked out what the reviews had to say did I remember, oh, those guys are meant to represent Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. I don’t know how much that would have changed how I watched the show unfold. Would the grab-bag of images have made more sense? On the whole I respect Tharp’s willingness to toss out all rules and follow her instincts. She almost always sets her dances to music from a single source, whether it’s the Beach Boys, Fats Waller, or Philip Glass. For this piece, she enlisted T Bone Burnett and David Mansfield, two musician and composers who toured with Bob Dylan before forging big-time careers as record producers, to write and arrange an hour-long score played live by an eight-piece band led by Dan Lipton.
The music went all over the place. Some of it had a ‘20s-‘30s-‘40s hot-jazz feel (Cab Calloway here, Count Basie there, a hefty sprinkling of Jelly Roll Morton). But then there would be a snatch of Donovan’s “Hurdy Gurdy Man” or a blast from the Master Musicians of Jajouka or some New Orleans joy from the Wild Tchoupitoulas. From the bandstand, an elegant vocalist named Andromeda Turre crooned “I’ll Be Seeing You” and “April in Paris,” but sandwiched between them was a Janis Joplin favorite, “Get It While You Can.” Never a full song, just a few bars then on to the next, like a hip dance-floor DJ or psychedelic radio show (my favorite: Cosmic Odyssey, curated by Martin “Youth” Glover).
Silent most of the show, Cerveris finally broke into song with “St. James Infirmary.” He’s not really a blues singer but he approximated a Sinatra-style rendition. He also had the formidable task of weaving in Leonard Cohen’s once-lovely, now-overexposed “Hallelujah,” which apparently has hundreds of verses to pick and choose from. Cerveris sang a few that were familiar and some that I suspected he was making up on the spot. His uncertain deliovery might have had something to do with distraction because of a staging glitch – a rolling set-piece got stranded onstage and had to sit there through two or three segments until a calvary of stagehands (in their I’m-not-here all-black outfits) found a way to drag it off.
Luckily they did so shortly before Cerveris wrapped up “Hallelujah” and ceded the stage to the most beautiful section of the show, a dozen white-clad dancers whirling like dervishes while trippy hypnotic black-and-white light patterns washed over them. What do whirling dervishes have to do with Leonard Cohen or Albert Camus? No time for such questions before the dancers had to strip down to sarongs or put on giant plushy doll heads or co-celebrate with a figure in shamanic ceremonial garb. A chunk of that shamanic costume flew off the stomping, twirling dancer and landed in my lap in the second row.
I have loved Twyla Tharp’s work since I started seeing her original company back in the mid-1970s. In 2002 I had the pleasure of interviewing her for a New York Times article about Movin’ Out, when she was working on the pre-Broadway tryout in Chicago. It’s one of my favorite interviews ever because it turned into a genuine back-and-forth conversation, really fun and highly specific. I’ve posted the complete transcript online – you can read it here. (Only some tiny scraps from the interview appeared in the Times article, which you can read online here.) Some of what she said about adapting Billy Joel’s songs into a Broadway musical seems to apply to How Long Blues, especially when she references MTV-era music videos. We were talking about how to follow the narrative as a story:
Tharp: Forget the word story. Let’s come back to the word story. It’s an interesting word, but in this context let me just say action instead. Story involves adjectives and adverbs. We don’t have adjectives and adverbs, we can do action. As Balanchine so famously said, “There are no mothers-in-law in the ballet.” That would be called story. Action would be called who’s standing center stage and why. I’m striving to get all the mother-in-laws out of the first act.
Me: I hadn’t thought about opera structure -- it’s an intriguing way of understanding this show. I’m curious about the relationship to the song lyrics.
Tharp: I’ll come back to the song lyrics, but while we’re talking about the opera component, let me say that it’s deep background. There’s also another one, which is music videos, the three-minute non-literal emotional context that that genre has developed. If it were a video, each scene would be different, would be realizable as a self-contained music video, which again is very different from musical comedy. It would be a string of these and they would hold themselves together.
With How Long Blues, you can see a similar focus on non-linear action. Today TikTok represents a whole other version of combining dance, music, and visuals in short non-narrative bursts, for an audience that is not expecting a Story. But the way Tharp talks at the end of the interview about story ballets and how they differ from what she was doing with Movin’ Out – separating the sound and the visuals – suggests another way to understand Illinoise, the innovative musical that Justin Peck and Jackie Siblies Drury built out of Sufjan Stevens songs: my favorite new Broadway musical at the moment.
A real critique/review, generous and informative. And makes me want to see the work (which I think I have missed). But we have you to bring it to us!