So Tharp is welcome to put this in the newspaper ads: I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO THINK–NEWSWEEK. It sure held my attention, so it must’ve been a success, right? But a success at what?
Tharp has strung together 26 Dylan songs, early and late, to deliver a “fable” about a father-son struggle–like the story of Abraham and Isaac, which kicks off the second number, “Highway 61 Revisited.” And there’s an ingénue to stir the pot–or just because you can’t have a show without one. Naturally, not every word of every song connects to Tharp’s sketchy plot: by theatrical standards, the numbers offer as many tangents as signposts. But they sort of get the job done. And you can always just watch an intelligent, ingenious and witty choreographer at work.
The aging Captain Ahrab (from “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream”) is a sinister, cynical ringmaster, whose circus performers include his fresh-faced son Coyote and a comely runaway named Cleo. (You know she’s a runaway because it says so in the Playbill.) Yep, the kids are in love and the old man is nostalgic, envious, defiant. After the setup, it gets murky: dancing, acrobatics, love duets, confrontations. We gather that Ahrab dies while singing “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.” At any rate, five more numbers go by and we don’t see him again until curtain call.
The fiercely energetic Thom Sesma plays Ahrab in makeup that evokes both the present-day Dylan and Christopher Lee’s Dracula. In “Summer Days, Summer Nights,” Sesma makes Ahrab a crepuscular hellrake, running on fumes at 90 miles an hour, even though “the girls all say, ‘You’re a worn-out star’.” Sesma is commanding when he’s shouting and rasping his way through a song, but sooner or later he defaults to the usual Broadway baritone.
Coyote (Michael Arden) is a too-familiar compound of youthful idealism (“Blowin’ in the Wind”), tenderness (“Lay Lady Lay,” etc., etc.) and prophetic rebellion (“Masters of War,” sung at his father). Arden may be a generically handsome juvenile, but when he’s not being all sensitive, he’s a powerful and focused singer. And it’s not his fault that in “Not Dark Yet,” he’s made to kick petulantly at a bit of rope at his feet as he sings, “There’s not even room enough to be anywhere.”
But does Tharp mean this to be lame? Is this show some sort of metamusical, playing with the very incongruity of Dylan on Broadway? But is it incongruous? If you’re a hard-core Dylan person, you won’t want to hear this, but some of the songs–“Dignity” and the surefire tear-jerker “A Simple Twist of Fate”–actually work as show tunes. If you can entertain the possibility that this isn’t the worst idea ever dreamed up, it becomes possible to consider a Dylan song in relation to Kurt Weill or Cole Porter or Stephen Sondheim–without Dylan’s powerful, intimately personal voice to sell it.
But of course this is Tharp’s show, not Dylan’s. There’s always something to look at on her stage, and sometimes there are more wonders than you can absorb. And you get the fun of spotting her visual allusions: “The Wizard of Oz,” “Touch of Evil,” “The Seventh Seal,” Vincent Price’s “House on Haunted Hill” (I swear) and two from “42nd Street.” Not to mention a Pietà, the Sistine Chapel ceiling and the annual pillars of light at Ground Zero. (Such appropriation is just the way Dylan works.) One thing I do know: inside my head, there was never a dull moment during “The Times They Are A-Changin’.” And I’m pretty sure that wondering whether you’re watching a train wreck isn’t the way Tharp means you to be entertained. No, I lie. I’m not sure at all.
