Tony-winner to bring Bob Dylan musical to Broadway
Finding success on Broadway can be tough for shows based on the music of real-life musicians, but a new production inspired by the songs of Bob Dylan is heading for the Great White Way.
Dylan called the musical 'the best presentation of my songs I have ever seen or heard on any stage.' (Canadian Press) Choreographer Twyla Tharp will present the musical The Times They Are A-Changin' on Broadway this fall.
Tharp conceived the musical, which tells the tale of a young man's coming of age and is set to Dylan's music. She will also direct and choreograph the production, according to a release issued Monday.
During a pre-Broadway run in San Diego in February, the musical won mostly encouraging reviews from critics and has the approval of Dylan himself.
"I have no talent for flattery whatsoever but Twyla's artistry knocks me out," Dylan says in Monday's statement.
"Her production of The Times They Are A-Changin' is the best presentation of my songs I have ever seen or heard on any stage. It had a hold over me from start to finish."
In addition to the title song, the musical will feature Dylan classics including as Blowin' in the Wind, Mr. Tambourine Man, Lay Lady Lay and Don't Think Twice, It's All Right.
Preview performances for The Times They Are A-Changin' are scheduled to begin Sept. 25, with the official opening set for Oct. 26 at New York's Brooks Atkinson Theatre.
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Bob Dylan's Fans 今年秋天有耳福了!
我说自打阿富汗反战巡回演出后,迪伦怎么隐身了?(但愿不会是那个剽
窃日本人的歌词什么的...)
Paul Simon以前搞过一个The Capemen,讲西裔少年的,演了一段时
间就消隐掉了。
百老汇摇滚戏最成功的当是Tommy,The Who的。
- Re: The Times They Are A-Changin'(Broadway)posted on 08/12/2006
我喜欢迪伦,他是“愤青”,他有思想和独立的人格,他的艺术也超越他的时代。我最喜欢的是他的口琴,好像一抹阳光照耀在他的吉他上,出其不意的画龙点睛。 - posted on 11/05/2006
今天去看了这戏,老歌串连,说实在的,有点失望的。
编舞不错,马戏团也不错,就是有些游戏歌曲,听不出真味了。
这样编百老汇戏,是不是江郎才尽了呢?
转一下Stagebill:
The Times They Are A-Changin', the Twyla Tharp-created musical featuring Bob Dylan's songs currently making its world premiere at San Diego's Old Globe, is Broadway-bound for the fall.
James L. Nederlander, Terry Allen Kramer, Debra Black and Hal Luftig will present the work which has yet to announce a theatre or dates.
"I'm pleased to be at The Old Globe, where I will continue to work with this amazingly talented company to prepare for the show's Broadway debut this fall," stated Tharp in a release. "The San Diego audiences have been great and they will play an invaluable part in the continued development of the show.?
Movin' Out creator Tharp directs and choreographs the new project set to the music of the legendary singer-songwriter Dylan. The Times They Are A-Changin' began previews at the Old Globe Theatre Jan. 25. The run, originally slated to end March 5, has already extended twice through March 19.
The Times They Are A-Changin' is "set within a low-rent traveling circus run by Capt. Arab (Sesma), whose wagon hasn't moved from its location in some time ? though not by lack of effort from his ragtag band of clowns and performers," according to production notes. "One such performer is the animal trainer Cleo (Colella), a young woman exploited by Capt. Arab and loved by his son, Coyote (Arden). Coyote longs for a world outside the confines of the family business, and as the circus show plays out, he must decide whether to flee or stay, and if he does stay, how to inspire change within the troupe."
Michael Arden, Jenn Colella and Thom Sesma currently star in the work. They are joined in the ensemble by Justin Bohon, Joshua Dean, Albert Guerzon, Charlie Hodges, Doug Kreeger, Marty Lawson, Tamara Levinson, Jason McDole, Jonathan Nosan, Joseph Putignano, Sean Stewart and Jackie Seiden.
Arden last appeared on Broadway as Tom Sawyer in the Roundabout Theatre Company's presentation of the Deaf West Theatre sign language production of Big River. Other credits include Swimming in the Shallows, Bare, Harold & Maude and It抯 Only Life Off-Broadway.
Colella scooted her boots in the Broadway musical version of Urban Cowboy. She also appeared in The Great American Trailer Park Musical at NYMF and Slut.
Thom Sesma ? who last appeared at the Globe in 1992's The Winter抯 Tale? has appeared on Broadway in Man of La Mancha, Search and Destroy, Chu Chem, Nick & Nora, La Cage Aux Folles and the national tours of Miss Saigon and Titanic.
The design team for The Times They Are A-Changin' features Santo Loquasto (scenic and costume) and Donald Holder (lighting). Musical direction, orchestrations and arrangements are handled by Michael Dansicker. Artie Gaffin serves as production stage manager:
- posted on 11/05/2006
再转一篇纽约时报的戏评吧:
Tharp and Dylan, A-Knockin’ on the Circus Door
By BEN BRANTLEY
Published: October 27, 2006
And now for the latest heart-rending episode in Broadway’s own reality soap opera, “When Bad Shows Happen to Great Songwriters.”
If you happen to be among the masochists who make a habit of attending the entertainments called jukebox musicals, in which pop hits are beaten up by singing robots, you may think you’ve seen it all: the neutering of Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys in “Good Vibrations,” the canonizing (and shrinking) of John Lennon as a misunderstood angel-child in “Lennon,” and the forcible transformation of Johnny Cash from Man in Black to Sunshine Cowboy in “Ring of Fire.”
But even these spectacles of torture with a smile, frightening though they may be, are but bagatelles compared with the systematic steamrolling of Bob Dylan that occurs in “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” which opened last night at the Brooks Atkinson Theater.
Mr. Dylan’s songs have been entrusted to the great choreographer Twyla Tharp, the woman who gloriously redeemed the jukebox genre with “Movin’ Out,” a narrative ballet set to songs by Billy Joel. Ms. Tharp is one of the bona fide, boundary-stretching geniuses of modern dance. And when a genius goes down in flames, everybody feels the burn.
Using little more than the bodies of her dancers to tell a decade-spanning story of an American working-class generation, Ms. Tharp found unexpected depths in Mr. Joel’s music. Using a whole lot more scenery, props and special effects to create a circus-themed allegory of fathers and sons, Ms. Tharp single-handedly drags Mr. Dylan into the shallows.
Among epochal popular music artists of the last 50 years, no one has matched Mr. Dylan in combining a distinctive, easily identified style with an evasiveness that defies pigeonholes. Folkie, protest singer, rock’n’roller, gospel spiritualist, symbolist poet: Mr. Dylan has invited and rejected each of these labels, wriggling out of them with Houdini-like slipperiness to reinvent himself anew.
His very style of singing — casual, almost throwaway, yet achingly intense — provides a remarkably complete defense system against those who would parse his lyrics into one core of meaning or belief. Divorce his words from his melodies, and pretension and preciousness rear their self-conscious heads. Most of Mr. Dylan’s best songs, even his full-throttle anthems of rebellion and hedonism, tingle with ambivalence, mystery and a knowing sense of the surrealism of so-called reality.
A surrealist approach would certainly seem to have been Ms. Tharp’s idea for “The Times,” first staged at the Old Globe Theater in San Diego last winter and extensively revised since. This songbook-driven tale of Oedipal conflict is set in a traveling circus, the sinister, down-at-heel American variety portrayed in films from the 1930’s and 40’s like “Freaks” and “Nightmare Alley.” But with her top-drawer design team, led by Santo Loquasto (sets and costumes) and Donald Holder (lighting), Ms. Tharp pushes the atmosphere into the phantasmagorical luridness of Fellini, with a splash of Bergmanesque darkness for shivery spice.
Sounds tantalizing, huh? The program indicates that the setting is “Sometime between awake and asleep,” and if Ms. Tharp had seen fit simply to keep us wandering through a shifting dreamscape, set to Mr. Dylan’s music, “The Times” might have passed muster as a really cool head trip for unregenerate hippies in search of natural highs. This would also have allowed each Dylan fan to bring his or her own interpretation to the murky goings-on, no doubt inspiring heated postperformance debates. (“No, man, don’t you see, what the little dog stands for is purity!”)
But Ms. Tharp is a precisionist in all things, and she brings to her storytelling the same exacting discipline that informs her choreography. Metaphoric images, which float miragelike when heard in song, are nailed down with literal visual equivalents. And highlights of the Dylan repertory (from “Mr. Tambourine Man” to “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door”) take the place of plot-propelling dialogue.
In a show like “Mamma Mia!” (the Abba musical) this device can be kind of a hoot. But as you might expect of Ms. Tharp, this lady’s not for hooting.
The story — or fable, as Ms. Tharp prefers to call it — is about a creepy tyrant named Captain Ahrab (Thom Sesma, who does indeed suggest Melville by way of Tim Burton) who rules over his traveling circus with a bullwhip. His employees include a whole passel of clowns, a lovely female runaway named Cleo (Lisa Brescia) and Ahrab’s son, Coyote (Michael Arden), who has the clean-scrubbed look of a sensitive high school sports star.
Will the idealistic Coyote take up his father’s whip to exploit the leadership-hungry clowns? Will he steal Cleo from Dad? Will he create a more benign world order? Hint: The show begins with Coyote looking soulfully into the audience to intone, with ominousness and dewy hope, “The Times They Are A-Changin’.”
The three principals share most of the major singing, through which we learn of both father’s and son’s feelings for Cleo (via a duet version of “Just Like a Woman”) and of Cleo’s lonely wistfulness (“Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right”).
Ahrab’s cynical huckster’s world view is conveyed by his growling through numbers like “Desolation Row” and “Highway 61 Revisited.”
In contrast, Coyote wonders “how many roads must a man walk down, before you call him a man,” and Cleo senses a kindred spirit in the lad. Coyote is soon shyly proposing to Cleo that she “lay, lady, lay, lay across my big brass bed.” (That I stifled a groan at this point should be honored as an act of heroic restraint.) In the meantime, the clowns are growing restless and rebel against their cruel master, who is destined to find himself “knock, knock, knockin’ on heaven’s door.”
Are you still with me, brave reader? Ms. Tharp turns lyrics’ metaphors not only into flesh but also into flashlights, jump-ropes, stuffed animals and new brooms that sweep clean. (If there was a kitchen sink onstage, I missed it, which isn’t to say it wasn’t there.) Props rule in this magic kingdom, along with charadelike annotations of images.
Just mention, say, Cinderella in “Desolation Row,” and there she is, center stage. When the same song refers to Dr. Filth, there he is performing surgery (on a truly amazing contortionist who provides the show with its single most disturbing image).
When Ahrab breaks his son’s jeweled Cubist guitar, which he has been playing so spiritedly for “Like a Rolling Stone,” the mournful Cleo freezes the moment by singing “Everything Is Broken.” And as hedonism acquires mortal shadows in “Mr. Tambourine Man,” who should show up but a group of black-hooded dancers straight out of Ingmar Bergman’s “Seventh Seal.”
Of the three soloists, Mr. Arden comes closest to finding a compromise between Dylanesque twang and hearty melodiousness. But all the leading players suffer from being stranded between character and allegory. (I kept thinking of the woman in Christopher Durang’s parody of Sam Shepard who looked proudly at her son and said, “I gave birth to a symbol — and me with no college education.”)
Perversely, the songs seem to become more abstract — and more fixed in their metaphysical meanings — from being linked with individual characters. The orchestrations (by Michael Dansicker and Mr. Dylan) are often evocative of the original Dylan recordings, but I will say that this is the first time that it ever occurred to me that “Rainy Day Women No. 12 and 35” could sound, in an instrumental bridge, like “The Trolley Song.”
The corps de clowns includes the extraordinary John Selya, who dazzled in “Movin’ Out,” as the circus strongman and leader of the clown rebellion. But while Mr. Selya looks as buff and agile as ever, he doesn’t get much chance to strut his kinetic stuff. There are a few glorious passages of Ms. Tharp’s signature, tight-muscled choreography, in which angular body tension becomes its own philosophical statement, an expression of raw existential frustration.
Mostly, though, Ms. Tharp concentrates on stylish variations on circus stunts — including stilt walking, tumbling and tightrope walking — some of them truly jaw-dropping. A trampolinelike surface has been built into the stage, allowing the dancers to appear to levitate.
But if the choreography at times defies gravity, the show itself may be the most earthbound work Ms. Tharp has produced. Even as the dancers seem to fly, Mr. Dylan’s lyrics are hammered, one by one, into the ground.
THE TIMES THEY ARE A-CHANGIN’
Conceived by Twyla Tharp; music and lyrics by Bob Dylan; directed and choreographed by Ms. Tharp; music arranged, adapted and supervised by Michael Dansicker; sets and costumes by Santo Loquasto; lighting by Donald Holder; sound by Peter Hylenski; orchestrations by Mr. Dansicker and Mr. Dylan; music director, Henry Aronson; music coordinator, Howard Joines; technical supervisor, Smitty; production stage manager, Arthur Gaffin; associate producers, Jesse Huot, Ginger Montel and Rhoda Mayerson; general manager, the Charlotte Wilcox Company. Presented by James L. Nederlander; Hal Luftig and Warren Trepp; Debra Black; East of Doheny; Rick Steiner/Mayerson Bell Staton Group; Terry Allen Kramer; Patrick Catullo; and Jon B. Platt and Roland Sturm. At the Brooks Atkinson Theater, 256 West 47th Street; (212) 307-4100. Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes.
WITH: Michael Arden (Coyote), Thom Sesma (Captain Ahrab), Lisa Brescia (Cleo) and Lisa Gajda, Neil Haskell, Jason McDole, Charlie Neshyba-Hodges, Jonathan Nosan, John Selya and Ron Todorowski (the Ensemble).
http://theater2.nytimes.com/2006/10/27/theater/reviews/27chan.html
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今天买了Dylan的Modern time,再听再评。
玛雅好象评过的。
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