The New York Times Magazine has what you’d call an “in-depth” piece on Twyla Tharp today. She clearly gave the writer a great deal of time and access; pity it was wasted on this rambling five page piece of amateur psycho-twaddle. The writer seems to think that what we need to know is the truth about Tharp’s personal relationships (and seems to consider himself herself quite the intrepid reporter for trying to drag this stuff out of Tharp against her will). We learn little about The Times They Are A-Changin’ and even less about Tharp’s work in general. It is, in my opinion, the worst kind of writing that you can find on the arts these days — barely a step removed from Kitty-Kelley-type-gossip-garbage, but actually worse for its disingenuousness and pretension.

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Much more worthwhile is a piece by Jason Zinoman: When Bobby met Bertolt, times changed.

Bob Dylan’s collaboration with Twlya Tharp on the new musical The Times They Are A-Changin’ came as a surprise to some of his longtime followers. “It’s bizarre,” said Michael Gray, who wrote The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, this year’s oversize compendium of all things Dylan. “If you like Bob Dylan, why would you like a Broadway musical? There are theater types and there are music types, and they are rarely the same person.”

Sometimes they are. Among the stew of influences that Dylan identifies in his 2004 memoir Chronicles: Volume One, is the invigorating off-Broadway theater scene that sprang up in Greenwich Village in the early 1960s, during some of his most formative years. At one point Dylan raves about a 1963 production he saw of The Balcony, a play by French existentialist Jean Genet.

“It portrayed the world as a mammoth cathouse where chaos rules the universe, where man is alone and abandoned in a meaningless cosmos,” he writes, adding that it would have been as relevant 100 years ago as it is today. “The songs I’d write would be like that, too. They wouldn’t conform to modern ideas.”

It goes on, an interesting and fine sketch of the influences of Brecht on Dylan’s work.

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