An excerpt from

nytheatre.com review
Martin Denton · October 30, 2002
reviewing the Broadway production

A scene from Movin' Out (photo © Joan Marcus)

Movin' Out moved me deeply; I'm not sure that I've entirely recovered from the experience almost a week after seeing it. The energy in the theatre during this show is wondrous—by the time the show reaches its home stretch in a jubilant prolonged finale, performers and audience members seem to breathe as one, hearts and souls wrapped around Billy Joel's anthemic tunes and Twyla Tharp's evocative dances. I haven't had this kind of a time in the theatre in ages. This is a transcendent, thrilling, cathartic show. It's the only truly must-see production on Broadway right now.

Enough hyperbole: let me try to convey Movin' Out to you, for it's not like anything I've ever seen before. Some frames of reference to help you peg it: Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake (classical ballet in a Broadway house); Des McAnuff's staging of The Who's Tommy (rock favorites brilliantly realized by an artful director); Jonathan Larson's Rent (unabashed youthfulness and social consciousness); Jerome Robbins' West Side Story (pulsating youthful energy and abandon). Movin' Out is a dance play in twenty-four scenes (plus an overture), with a score of songs by Billy Joel. Tharp's dances tell a story at once timeless and exactly of our time ("our" referring, with characteristic tunnel vision, to the years when the Baby Boomers came of age, roughly 1965-1980). The music functions as soundtrack to an era and background music to the rituals of young people growing up: Movin' Out tells the story of three friends—Eddie, Tony, and James—who fall in love, go to war, die (one of them), return home (the other two) and try to make a life for themselves.

The genius of Movin Out' is the way the songs and choreography mesh. Tharp interprets Joel's music with astonishing acuity; yet the dances are less "to" the music than in juxtaposition with them, creating a tension that burrows under your skin. Tharp establishes the show's ground rules with a prologue to "It's Still Rock and Roll to Me," introducing us to the band and the principals and getting us acquainted with a form that feels strange for about two minutes and then becomes comfortable: an abstract kind of theatre that's aware of itself as formalized band and ballet corps, yet at the same time feels like a bunch of pals from the neighborhood jamming and cutting up on someone's front lawn. . . .

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