The Times They Are a-Changin' is a dance musical featuring the songs of Bob Dylan, conceived, directed and choreographed by Twyla Tharp. The show takes place in a setting described as "somewhere between awake and asleep," a dreamlike circus environment in which a coming-of-age conflict between a tyrannical circus master, Captain Ahrab, his idealistic son, Coyote, and a circus performer, Cleo, is told among a choreographed world of clowns, contortionists and Big Tops. Premiering in San Francisco in February 2006, the show eventually moved to Broadway, opening on October 26, 2006. The show received uniformly negative reviews, and closed on November 19, 2006 after 35 previews and 28 performances.
Background
In 2002, Twyla Tharp brought to Broadway a dance musical based on the songs of Billy Joel, Movin' Out, which was a commercial success and ran for more than three years. The idea for a dance musical based on Dylan's work was initiated by the artist himself, who contacted Tharp suggesting the collaboration; however, Dylan had no creative input on the eventual production. Tharp spent a year on research for the production, as well as another year-and-a-half on casting, rehearsing and workshopping. The show was described in its Broadway Playbill as "A tale of fathers and sons, of men and women, of leaders and followers, of immobility and change," which "uses prophecy, parable, metaphor, accusation and confession—like the Dylan songs which comprise it—to confront us with images and ideas of who we are, and who it is possible to be.” Despite the show's categorization as a "dance musical," Tharp did not consider it so: the show's website called it instead "an original action-adventure fable conceived by Ms. Tharp."
The show received uniformly negative reviews on Broadway, criticizing it generally for its "addled," "inscrutable," yet also "wearyingly familiar" setting and plot; its circus-inspired staging; and its "prosaic," "literal-minded" staging of Dylan's songs. Ben Brantley of the New York Times called the show the worst thus far of the decade's spate of jukebox musicals, writing that it gave Dylan's work a "systematic steamrolling" He criticized the show for taking the "metaphoric images" of Dylan's work, "which float miragelike when heard in song," and " down with literal visual equivalents" - and therefore, "even as the dancers seem to fly, Mr. Dylan's lyrics are hammered, one by one, into the ground." David Rooney of Variety wrote that "Tharp has no idea how to make the songs dynamic, either planting the singers in declamatory deadlock or having them stride about aimlessly while assorted clowns skip, tumble, flip and bounce on the trampoline surfaces of Santo Loquasto’s junkyard set," so that "even when the songs do summon some emotional intensity, all the awkward, hokey buffoonery going on in the background smothers it." He also criticized the show's "o-hum," "generic father-son plot." Frank Scheck of the Hollywood Reporter wrote that the show "plays like an overconceived concert, with Tharp's choreography, as vibrant and physical as it is here, lacking the variety of her earlier work"; Scott Brown of Entertainment Weekly called the production "utterly wrongheaded," with Tharp demonstrating that "she clearly has no choreographic bond with music"; Rob Sheffield of Rolling Stone wrote that "t’s hard to describe the show without making it sound like a stoned nightmare," and that "the Broadway belters have no feel for Dylan’s meter or melodies; they just ham up the songs with dumb touches like Ahrab grinding his hips as he sings, 'She makes love just like a woman!'"; Terry Teachout of The Wall Street Journal called the show "so bad that it makes you forget how good the songs are," with "prettified singing" that was "all wrong," and wrote that "if you went to see this show knowing nothing about , you'd go home assuming that she was a pretentious buffoon." The show closed on November 19, 2006 after 35 previews and 28 performances, and was a financial flop. Tharp later expressed regret that she "did not stick closely enough to her instincts in its creation"
