The first “mainstream media” review of the new Twyla Tharp / Bob Dylan musical, The Times They Are A-Changin’ appears today in the San Diego Union Tribune, by Anne Marie Welsh:

The big news about choreographer Twyla Tharp’s startling, eye-filling new stage work: Dancing takes a back seat to the music of Bob Dylan. Whether that’s a good thing for “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” Tharp’s much-anticipated show that opened Thursday at the Old Globe, remains an open question. The editor in her is already tweaking this exciting, flawed, phantasmagoric fable for an expected Broadway run.

In Twyla Tharp’s new stage work, “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” Captain Arab (Thom Sesma) resigns himself to loss, while Coyote (Michael Arden) and Cleo (Jenn Colella) dance their love to Bob Dylan’s “Simple Twist of Fate.”
Tharp’s genius has always resided in the tension between her mathematical mind and her vaudevillian heart. The vaudevillian carries the day in “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” a galvanic theater piece so far out and so original it surely doesn’t belong in that kiss-off category of “jukebox musical.”

And so it continues; read it all.

Bottom line: the reviewer believes it needs tweaking, but it has the makings of a very powerful show. Particularly interesting is her description of how the songs are transformed in the context of the play, taking on “new rhythms, phrasing, harmonies and emotional resonances.”

That was always going to be the key to making this show work. The songs needed to step out of the contexts that casual Dylan fans or the general public might remember them in, and instead convey the emotional narrative of the play in a congruous and affecting manner. If a professional theater critic is acknowledging success in that goal (and this one certainly is) then I think it bodes extremely well for the musical’s future.

Of-course it shouldn’t be surprising that the songs could work in this way. For his whole career, and conspicuously during the “Never Ending Tour,” Dylan has been turning the songs around, testing their angles, squeezing their middles, and stretching their extremities. He’s demonstrated how much could be done with the songs, and he goes on doing so. And it sounds like Twyla Tharp is succeeding in demonstrating still more.

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Addendum 12:54 pm: A remarkably similar review is also published today in the San Francisco Chronicle: Tharp takes Dylan and runs off to the circus. Much the same bottom line: Great show, needs a little tweaking, definitely Broadway-bound.

And from PittsburghLive.com just a nice human interest story on one of the dancers in the cast, Jason McDole, who doesn’t let a hearing handicap prevent him from pursuing his career in dance.

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