# Bless the Coal-black Hearts of the Broadway Critics

An episode of [Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1484511465), 20 May 2022, 34 min.

Audio: https://podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/pdrl.fm/18db03/tracking.swap.fm/track/SxlTEPDY7xDg35RXkASs/traffic.omny.fm/d/clips/e73c998e-6e60-432f-8610-ae210140c5b1/c0ae8c6e-22f0-4e9b-ac1c-ae390037ac53/7ff2904f-050b-4a68-a828-ae9900c56139/audio.mp3?utm_source=Podcast&in_playlist=7f5a4714-6b10-4ccf-a424-ae390037ac70

When Billy Joel agreed to let dance legend Twyla Tharp turn his songs into a Broadway musical it seemed like a surefire hit. But in previews, Movin’ Out was panned by the critics. It was soon headed for Broadway and was set to be an expensive and embarrassing failure.So how could Twyla turn things around and avert disaster before opening night? For a full list of sources go to timharford.com If you’d like to keep up with the most recent news from this and other Pushkin podcasts be sure to sign up for our email list at Pushkin.fm. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

## Transcript

[0:15] Speaker 1: Pushkin Friday, the nineteenth of July two thousand and two
[0:27] Speaker 1: the Shubert Theater in Chicago. The curtain was about to
[0:31] Speaker 1: go up on the world premiere of a new show
[0:35] Speaker 1: trumpeted as the new Broadway Musical. Yes, I know it
[0:39] Speaker 1: wasn't on Broadway yet, but it was headed there. It
[0:43] Speaker 1: wasn't really a musical either. Creatively, the show broke down
[0:47] Speaker 1: barriers between art forms. It was innovative, a crossover between
[0:52] Speaker 1: a concert, a musical, and a ballet. The band was
[0:55] Speaker 1: on stage playing and singing while the cast danced and
[0:59] Speaker 1: didn't utter a word. But despite its boundary blurring nature,
[1:04] Speaker 1: its creators had high hopes that it would be a
[1:06] Speaker 1: commercial as well as critical success. Big name investors had
[1:10] Speaker 1: poured more than eight million dollars into the show. Stuart Malina,
[1:17] Speaker 1: a classical pianist and conductor who was on the show's
[1:20] Speaker 1: creative team, was giddy with excitement. Sometimes I have to
[1:25] Speaker 1: pinch myself well. Indeed, Melina was orchestrating the music of
[1:30] Speaker 1: a man who sold more records than Frank Sinatra or
[1:33] Speaker 1: the Beegs or the Red Hot Chili Peppers. In fact,
[1:38] Speaker 1: he sold more records than all three of them put
[1:40] Speaker 1: together Billy Joel. But while Billy Joel was a huge star,
[1:47] Speaker 1: Joel was in no doubt as to who was in charge.
[1:50] Speaker 1: If you stand in Twiler's way, you die, he said.
[1:54] Speaker 1: Twiler Twiler Tharp, a giant of American choreography, a force
[2:00] Speaker 1: of nature in the nineteen seventies, should choreograph dances for
[2:05] Speaker 1: the Great Ballet principal Mikhail Barishnikov. In the nineteen eight is,
[2:09] Speaker 1: she'd worked with John Curry, the World and Olympic figure
[2:12] Speaker 1: skating champion, and on Amadeus, the Mozart movie that won
[2:17] Speaker 1: Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Director, and five other Oscars.
[2:21] Speaker 1: But now she wanted to put her sophisticated choreography right
[2:26] Speaker 1: at the heart of a blockbuster show. Her aim, she said,
[2:30] Speaker 1: was something that would finally make dancing pay for the dancers.
[2:36] Speaker 1: It had all started two years before, when Twiler decided
[2:39] Speaker 1: that she wanted to make a show out of Joel's music.
[2:43] Speaker 1: She didn't know him, but she got his phone number
[2:45] Speaker 1: and she called him when pitching the idea to him.
[2:49] Speaker 1: She made a twenty minute film of her choreography set
[2:52] Speaker 1: to his music. Then she invited him over to her
[2:55] Speaker 1: home on the Upper West side of Manhattan to play
[2:58] Speaker 1: him the video. I didn't know my stuff could look
[3:03] Speaker 1: so good, he said, And then she made the pitch.
[3:06] Speaker 1: I want to do a show using your song to
[3:09] Speaker 1: tell a story. I don't know what it is yet,
[3:11] Speaker 1: but first I need your permission. Okay, he said, you
[3:15] Speaker 1: have it. I'm also going to need access to your
[3:18] Speaker 1: entire song catalog. Fine, they shook hands. Twiler had the
[3:24] Speaker 1: creative freedom she wanted, but was it freedom to crown
[3:27] Speaker 1: her glorious career or freedom to wreck it. I'm Tim Harford,
[3:34] Speaker 1: you're listening to cautionary tales. A mere two years had
[3:59] Speaker 1: passed between Twiler Tharpe's Call to Billy Joel and that
[4:03] Speaker 1: summer evening at Chicago's Schubert Theater. It wasn't Broadway yet,
[4:08] Speaker 1: but it was a big moment. As preview audiences waited
[4:12] Speaker 1: for their first glimpse of moving out the new Broadway musical.
[4:19] Speaker 1: The lights went up right in the middle of the stage,
[4:22] Speaker 1: the musicians started to play. Thanks to some spectacular hydraulics,
[4:31] Speaker 1: the entire band was then lifted back and up to
[4:35] Speaker 1: a balcony at the rear of the stage. As the
[4:38] Speaker 1: dance has emerged and burst into motion to the tune
[4:41] Speaker 1: of scenes from an Italian restaurant. There was just one problem.
[4:50] Speaker 1: The critics, stupefyingly cliche and almost embarrassingly naive, leaves half
[4:56] Speaker 1: the audience asking the other half what just happened. They
[5:00] Speaker 1: were not impressed. Even the sympathetic ones thought the show
[5:04] Speaker 1: was flawed. Moving Out is a glorious mess. If the
[5:09] Speaker 1: theatrical jury acquits, so be it. If not, let it
[5:13] Speaker 1: live in memory as a magnificent failure. And for most
[5:18] Speaker 1: the word failure loomed much larger than the word magnificent.
[5:24] Speaker 1: They did not like it condens's history to the point
[5:27] Speaker 1: of meaninglessness. They did not like it at all. If
[5:31] Speaker 1: Oliver Stone did a Broadway dance musical, and truly that's
[5:34] Speaker 1: not a suggestion, it might come out like the more
[5:37] Speaker 1: risible passages of Moving Out. Moving Out came with the
[5:41] Speaker 1: highest of hopes, the most talented of casts and the
[5:45] Speaker 1: most celebrated of celebrity creators, at least as silly as
[5:49] Speaker 1: anything in Reefer Madness, pile driving, and ill conceived. The
[5:54] Speaker 1: curtain came down on that opening night of the Chicago previews.
[5:59] Speaker 1: The audience and the critics alike were confused. What exactly
[6:04] Speaker 1: was this show trying to do? It wasn't clear. In
[6:08] Speaker 1: watching nearly two hours, a feeling of exhausting relentlessness sets in.
[6:13] Speaker 1: For those in search of a heart wrenching story. You
[6:16] Speaker 1: had better be moving on. One thing was clear, though,
[6:22] Speaker 1: in the opinion of the critics, the show just wasn't
[6:26] Speaker 1: good enough. You must realize by now that I'm fascinated
[6:31] Speaker 1: by failure. That's why cautionary tales exists. In fact, I've
[6:36] Speaker 1: been fascinated by failure for a long time. Back in
[6:40] Speaker 1: two thousand and eleven, I published a book titled adapt
[6:44] Speaker 1: Why Success Always Starts with Failure. I spoke about the
[6:49] Speaker 1: importance of learning through experimentation, using trial and error to
[6:53] Speaker 1: solve complex problems and produce great creative works. I argued
[6:58] Speaker 1: that each failure was a step on the road to success.
[7:02] Speaker 1: But ever since that book was published, I've had this
[7:05] Speaker 1: nagging sense of guilt because while there's no shortage of
[7:09] Speaker 1: people who'll sing the praises of learning from your mistakes,
[7:13] Speaker 1: the truth is failure hurts. It isn't as easy to
[7:17] Speaker 1: learn from failure as you might think. Twila Thorpe knows
[7:21] Speaker 1: that very well. If you read her book The Creative Habit,
[7:26] Speaker 1: and you should you quickly learn that Twila Thorpe is
[7:29] Speaker 1: as interested in failure as I am. I don't mean
[7:33] Speaker 1: to romanticize failure. Believe me, success is preferable to failure.
[7:38] Speaker 1: But while we all want success not failure, we don't
[7:42] Speaker 1: always get what we want. If we're doing something new,
[7:45] Speaker 1: doing something hard, then sometimes we will fail. And Twila
[7:49] Speaker 1: Thorpe knows it. Changing the work and how we work
[7:53] Speaker 1: is the unpleasant task of dealing with that which we
[7:56] Speaker 1: have been denying. It is probably the biggest test in
[7:59] Speaker 1: the creative process, demanding not only an admission that you've
[8:02] Speaker 1: made a mistake, but that you know how to fix it.
[8:06] Speaker 1: When we romanticize failure, it says that proverbial learning experience
[8:12] Speaker 1: a necessary step on the road to glory. But Tharp
[8:16] Speaker 1: just described two big obstacles on that road. The first
[8:20] Speaker 1: is denial. It's hard even to admit that there's a problem.
[8:24] Speaker 1: The second is that even once you have admitted there's
[8:27] Speaker 1: a problem, you still have to figure out the solution.
[8:32] Speaker 1: Let's talk about denial first. You may remember an earlier
[8:36] Speaker 1: episode of Cautionary Tales, one in which we heard a
[8:39] Speaker 1: UFO cult predict that at midnight a few days before
[8:43] Speaker 1: Christmas nineteen fifty four, aliens would descend to rescue the
[8:47] Speaker 1: faithful and destroy the world. When the aliens didn't come
[8:52] Speaker 1: and the world was not destroyed, the cult took it
[8:55] Speaker 1: as evidence that their faith had been rewarded with salvation
[8:58] Speaker 1: for all. They even started issuing press releases spreading the
[9:02] Speaker 1: good news. We humans have an extraordinary capacity to deny
[9:08] Speaker 1: the obvious. For Tharp, it would have been much better
[9:12] Speaker 1: if she'd faced up to the show's problems early, early
[9:16] Speaker 1: problems for the easiest to fix. The best failures are
[9:19] Speaker 1: the private ones you committed the confines of your room,
[9:22] Speaker 1: alone with no strangers watching. Private failures are great. I
[9:27] Speaker 1: encourage you to fail as much as you want in private.
[9:30] Speaker 1: Private failures are the first drafts that get tossed in
[9:33] Speaker 1: the waste basket, the sketches crumple up on the floor,
[9:37] Speaker 1: the manuscripts that stay in the drawer. Good advice. But
[9:41] Speaker 1: it was hard to imagine a less private failure than
[9:45] Speaker 1: the reviews of Moving Out the New Broadway musical. How
[9:51] Speaker 1: had that public failure happened? Tharp reflected with hindsight that
[9:57] Speaker 1: the fundraising for the show had been too easy. With Twiler,
[10:01] Speaker 1: Tharpe and Billy Joel at the wheel, investors scrambled to
[10:05] Speaker 1: fund the show. Things moved from concept to stripped down
[10:09] Speaker 1: version to fully funded Broadway bound production so quickly that
[10:14] Speaker 1: there was barely time to think. It went so smoothly.
[10:18] Speaker 1: I had to pinch myself too smoothly. She ruefully admitted
[10:22] Speaker 1: there were seeds of doubt already present about some aspects
[10:26] Speaker 1: of the show, and the logic of the schedule kept
[10:28] Speaker 1: us from looking at a few basic problems. In a word, denial,
[10:35] Speaker 1: It's understandable. Billy Joel had given Twiler his unconditional backing
[10:40] Speaker 1: and total freedom before stepping back. Investors had thrown money
[10:44] Speaker 1: at her. The show was hurtling towards Broadway. Didn't feel
[10:48] Speaker 1: like quite the moment to pay attention to those seeds
[10:51] Speaker 1: of doubt. It must have seemed better to ride the
[10:54] Speaker 1: wave and hope for the best. But every wave breaks eventually.
[11:00] Speaker 1: Tharp was losing her opportunity to do something. She was
[11:04] Speaker 1: ignoring her own advice. The more you fail in private,
[11:08] Speaker 1: the less will fail in public. If you forget this,
[11:11] Speaker 1: if you let down your guard or lower your standards
[11:14] Speaker 1: or compromised too quickly, or leaven something that should be rejected.
[11:18] Speaker 1: You'll have to deal with the other, more painful kind
[11:20] Speaker 1: of failure, the public kind. After the Chicago previews opened
[11:26] Speaker 1: and the blistering reviews came in, the painful kind of
[11:30] Speaker 1: failure had just happened. Now she'd have to deal with it.
[11:52] Speaker 1: It seemed that everyone in Chicago was talking about the
[11:55] Speaker 1: problems with moving out the New Broadway musical. Twiler described
[12:00] Speaker 1: hanging out in a restaurant across the street from the
[12:03] Speaker 1: Schubert Theater during intermission, hearing one patron complaining about the
[12:07] Speaker 1: show to her waiter. Don't worry, the waiter replied, The
[12:11] Speaker 1: second act is much better. The second act is better.
[12:15] Speaker 1: That's good. On the other hand, if even the waiters
[12:18] Speaker 1: know that your first act stinks, you have a problem.
[12:22] Speaker 1: And it wasn't just the waiters in Chicago, Twiler's troubles
[12:26] Speaker 1: were about to get much bigger. Traditionally, the New York
[12:31] Speaker 1: media don't comment on the regional previews. They wait until
[12:35] Speaker 1: the show arrives in Manhattan. What happens in Chicago stays
[12:38] Speaker 1: in Chicago. That's the tradition. But not this time. Perhaps
[12:43] Speaker 1: it was because Billy Joel was so famous. Perhaps it
[12:46] Speaker 1: was because he was a local boy from Long Island,
[12:49] Speaker 1: New York. Perhaps the show was simply too terrible to ignore.
[12:54] Speaker 1: Whatever the reason, Long Island's newspaper, Newsday, broke with long
[12:59] Speaker 1: standing custom, Newsday reprinted one of the Chicago reviews, where
[13:03] Speaker 1: it would be widely read in New York City. It
[13:06] Speaker 1: was an act that triggered a storm of debate among
[13:09] Speaker 1: theater producers and journalists. Not cool a show is in
[13:13] Speaker 1: such a vulnerable situation when it opens out of town.
[13:17] Speaker 1: But that debate didn't help Twila Thorpe. In fact, the
[13:21] Speaker 1: controversy just made for more column inches and more awareness
[13:25] Speaker 1: of her show's problems. The fact was that now everyone
[13:29] Speaker 1: with any interest in New York musical theater knew that
[13:33] Speaker 1: Twila Thorpe had unveiled a colossal turkey in Chicago and
[13:38] Speaker 1: it was about to flap its way down to Broadway.
[13:41] Speaker 1: This might just be deliciously bad. Twila Thorpe's oldest collaborator
[13:52] Speaker 1: was Jennifer Tipton, a lighting designer. Jennifer had flown in
[13:56] Speaker 1: from New York to watch the opening night in Chicago.
[14:00] Speaker 1: The next morning, the two old friends had met for
[14:03] Speaker 1: breakfast together to read the reviews. I can just imagine
[14:06] Speaker 1: the scene an ice hotel, Chris white tablecloth, coffee, orange juice,
[14:12] Speaker 1: Clisson and the newspapers embarrassingly naive, ill conceived magnificent failure.
[14:20] Speaker 1: And then Twiler had looked up at her old friend Jennifer,
[14:24] Speaker 1: and Jennifer had looked back at her. You know they're right.
[14:30] Speaker 1: And this was the pivotal moment. By her own admission,
[14:34] Speaker 1: Twyla Tharp had been in denial about the problems with
[14:37] Speaker 1: her show, now which she doubled down like a member
[14:41] Speaker 1: of the UFO cult, insisting that she knew best and
[14:44] Speaker 1: that the more sophisticated critics in New York would perceive
[14:48] Speaker 1: the show's brilliance or would she moved from denial to acceptance.
[14:55] Speaker 1: You know they're right, Jennifer had said, and Twyla Tharp
[14:59] Speaker 1: had nodded, Yes, I know. With the help of an
[15:03] Speaker 1: honest friend, Tharp had finally accepted that she had a problem.
[15:08] Speaker 1: The show urgently needed to change, but time was running out.
[15:19] Speaker 1: Twila Tharp has thought a lot about failure, but thinking
[15:24] Speaker 1: and doing and never quite the same thing. And as
[15:27] Speaker 1: I've pondered the challenge facing Tharp, I find myself thinking
[15:31] Speaker 1: about another bold innovator who's truly mastered the art of
[15:35] Speaker 1: good mistakes. His name was Paul McCready, and while Twila
[15:40] Speaker 1: Tharpe's goal was to produce a hit that would finally
[15:43] Speaker 1: make dancing pay for the dancers, Paul McCready's goal was
[15:47] Speaker 1: to win the Kramer Prize. The Cramer Prize was a
[15:51] Speaker 1: large cash award for the first human powered aircraft capable
[15:55] Speaker 1: of taking off without aid and flying a one mile
[15:59] Speaker 1: figure eight course with a ten foot hurdle at the
[16:01] Speaker 1: start and finish. Doesn't sound so hard, but it is.
[16:07] Speaker 1: The Power for such a player could come from, say
[16:10] Speaker 1: a professional cyclist whirring legs spinning a propeller. But even
[16:15] Speaker 1: a cycling bro can only produce just over half a
[16:18] Speaker 1: horsepower for a sustained burst. That's not a lot if
[16:22] Speaker 1: you want to fly a plane. The Wright Brothers put
[16:25] Speaker 1: twenty times that power into their plane. A modern light
[16:29] Speaker 1: aircraft is at least three hundred times more powerful than
[16:33] Speaker 1: a cyclist. That may be why the Cramer Prize, first
[16:37] Speaker 1: offered in nineteen fifty nine by the Royal Aeronautical Society
[16:40] Speaker 1: in London, lay unclaimed In nineteen seventy three, the Society
[16:46] Speaker 1: increased the prize to attempting fifty thousand pounds in today's
[16:51] Speaker 1: money more than half a million dollars. That sparked a
[16:55] Speaker 1: new surgeon interest, but still nobody came close to building
[16:59] Speaker 1: a working plane. The early attempts were just too heavy
[17:04] Speaker 1: for the furiously cycling pilot. Even a minute of flight
[17:08] Speaker 1: was exhausting. But the competitors for the prize were also
[17:11] Speaker 1: doomed in a much more subtle way, and will come
[17:15] Speaker 1: to that subtle floor in a moment. Fix it and
[17:18] Speaker 1: you could win the Cramer Prize. It was in nineteen
[17:23] Speaker 1: seventy six that Paul McCready took an interest. Mccreedy was
[17:27] Speaker 1: an aeronautical engineer and a glider pilot. He was also
[17:31] Speaker 1: in financial trouble, having guaranteed a loan for a friend's
[17:34] Speaker 1: failed business venture. Suddenly the Cramer prize seemed rather attractive.
[17:41] Speaker 1: Mccredy's knowledge of hand gliders suggested that a super light
[17:44] Speaker 1: plane might work. If you tripled a hand glider wingspan
[17:48] Speaker 1: to almost a hundred feet, you could get the power
[17:51] Speaker 1: required down below half a horse power. Months of experimentation ensued,
[17:58] Speaker 1: first with Paul's teenage son Tyler, as a pilot and
[18:02] Speaker 1: later with pro cyclists. But to get it right, there
[18:06] Speaker 1: was so much to learn, so many miss stakes to make.
[18:10] Speaker 1: And here is where that subtle floor that I mentioned
[18:13] Speaker 1: comes in, the one that kept dooming McCready's rivals. Every
[18:18] Speaker 1: time they crashed, their planes were destroying. The pilots were fine.
[18:23] Speaker 1: These were crashes from a height of ten feet at
[18:26] Speaker 1: a speed of ten miles an hour, but the planes
[18:29] Speaker 1: were wrecks. The crashes of McCready's planes seemed just as spectacular,
[18:36] Speaker 1: with aluminum poles shearing off the struts, splintering, a tough
[18:41] Speaker 1: transparent film that makes the wing surfaces crumpling. Start peddling,
[18:47] Speaker 1: start peddling. Pull out the pilot. Greg Miller is being
[18:55] Speaker 1: pulled out of the wreckage of the slow motion crash.
[18:58] Speaker 1: That wasn't your fault. You did everything right. He's fine,
[19:02] Speaker 1: just shaken and frustrated, as though had fallen off his bike.
[19:06] Speaker 1: Mccreedy is calm. He's already explaining to Miller and the
[19:09] Speaker 1: team what happened. The right wing was going down a bit.
[19:13] Speaker 1: There wasn't enough left control. It just wouldn't goal left.
[19:16] Speaker 1: I had it pulled left. Yeah, I know you had
[19:19] Speaker 1: it pulled left. The plane looks shattered emotionally speaking, so
[19:24] Speaker 1: does poor Greg Miller. What a day. McCready, though, is
[19:28] Speaker 1: as cool as a cucumber. He knows that he and
[19:32] Speaker 1: his little team can fix the plane in just twenty
[19:35] Speaker 1: four hours. The plane is called the Gossamer Condor. It's
[19:41] Speaker 1: simple design makes the Condor easy to repair and easy
[19:44] Speaker 1: to take apart and reassemble. This particular crash, for example,
[19:49] Speaker 1: teaches McCready how to solve a problem that's been bothering
[19:52] Speaker 1: him how to get such a vast, lightweight, slow moving
[19:56] Speaker 1: plane to turn. The crash happened when the plane turns
[20:01] Speaker 1: sharply to the right that was caused by a small
[20:04] Speaker 1: twist in the right wing tip. All McCready has to
[20:07] Speaker 1: do is figure out how to twist or untwist the
[20:10] Speaker 1: tips on command. After previous crashes, he's made tiny alterations,
[20:16] Speaker 1: such as taping a Manila folder to the propeller to
[20:19] Speaker 1: increase its size or cutting an air vent to keep
[20:22] Speaker 1: the pilot cool. But he's also rebuilt the plane from
[20:26] Speaker 1: scratch to a new design. Even when nothing works, McCready's
[20:30] Speaker 1: learning flightwise, we didn't do any better than we did
[20:34] Speaker 1: two weeks ago. The fact that we made changes in
[20:36] Speaker 1: between times has let us see that those changes didn't help.
[20:41] Speaker 1: By August nineteen seventy seven, they're ready for another attempt
[20:45] Speaker 1: on the record, and the Gossamer Condor has been evolving
[20:48] Speaker 1: at furious speed for a year. It's already flown about
[20:52] Speaker 1: four hundred test flights. The wingtip twist system is working.
[20:57] Speaker 1: Glider pilot and pro cyclist Brian Allen is both pilot
[21:01] Speaker 1: and engine for this attempt. Plane lifts gracefully, turns more
[21:08] Speaker 1: stead and then a gust of wind tears a wire
[21:14] Speaker 1: free a plane goes down half. Brian Allen lies motionless
[21:21] Speaker 1: on the runway, but after a moment he starts moving again.
[21:26] Speaker 1: He's fine, just winded and McCready. McCready is under pressure.
[21:32] Speaker 1: He's heard that another team over in Japan is close
[21:36] Speaker 1: to winning the prize. Nevertheless, he decides to take advantage
[21:40] Speaker 1: of the crash to rebuild the plane again from scratch,
[21:44] Speaker 1: shaving off a little extra weight wherever he can. It
[21:49] Speaker 1: takes just two weeks, and on August the twenty third,
[21:53] Speaker 1: nineteen seventy seven, Brian Allen climbs into the latest incarnation
[21:58] Speaker 1: of the gossamer Condor pedals furiously down the airstrip, and
[22:03] Speaker 1: after two long sweeping turns, six minutes and more than
[22:08] Speaker 1: a mile flight, he clears the final hurdle on the
[22:12] Speaker 1: course and gently touches down. The Cramer Prize is won
[22:18] Speaker 1: not just by a brilliant team of inventive minds, but
[22:22] Speaker 1: by the ability to test, to crash, to learn, and
[22:27] Speaker 1: to adapt quickly and safely. Over a period of just
[22:31] Speaker 1: a few months, McCready was able to pick his pilot
[22:35] Speaker 1: and his plane off the runway and completely rebuild after
[22:39] Speaker 1: a demoralizing crash in a matter of days. Could Twila
[22:45] Speaker 1: Tharp do the same for moving out? Stay with Us?
[23:04] Speaker 1: Twila Tharp remember talked about the two difficulties of change.
[23:09] Speaker 1: It is probably the biggest test in the creative process,
[23:12] Speaker 1: demanding not only an admission that you've made a mistake,
[23:16] Speaker 1: but that you know how to fix it well. Should
[23:19] Speaker 1: pass the first test Over coffee and croisson with her
[23:21] Speaker 1: friend Jennifer Tipton, she had admitted the problem, but the
[23:26] Speaker 1: second test was even harder. How could she fix the
[23:29] Speaker 1: show so late in the day. Paul McCready's big insight
[23:34] Speaker 1: was that you could learn a lot if failures were
[23:36] Speaker 1: survivable and repairs were quick and cheap to make, and
[23:40] Speaker 1: the out of town previews gave Twilight Thape an opening
[23:44] Speaker 1: an opportunity to fix moving out before the New York
[23:47] Speaker 1: reviewers tore the show to shreds, She'd hesitated until almost
[23:53] Speaker 1: too late. It hadn't helped when one of the damning
[23:57] Speaker 1: Chicago reviews had been republished in New York. That ran
[24:00] Speaker 1: against the spirit of allowing the out of town show
[24:03] Speaker 1: to serve as a kind of prototype. Even without that problem,
[24:07] Speaker 1: the show needed much more than the trade tweaks before
[24:10] Speaker 1: hitting Broadway. The low cost opportunities to radically reshape the show,
[24:16] Speaker 1: or the time for that had been in workshops and rehearsals.
[24:18] Speaker 1: They were long passed. It was perilous to change the
[24:22] Speaker 1: show while the previews in Chicago were still running, but
[24:26] Speaker 1: Tharpe couldn't wait until the show moved to Broadway. There
[24:29] Speaker 1: were only three New York rehearsal days before the previews opened,
[24:34] Speaker 1: and Thorpe still didn't quite seem to know what she
[24:37] Speaker 1: wanted the show to be. In a publicity interview on TV,
[24:40] Speaker 1: she was challenged to explain, was it a pop ballet,
[24:44] Speaker 1: a musical, a dance cicle. I don't think of it
[24:48] Speaker 1: as any of those things. I think of it as
[24:50] Speaker 1: a thing, Okay. I mean one of the challenges with
[24:54] Speaker 1: this was to formulate the genre. It's not dance, it's
[24:58] Speaker 1: not up bra it's not straight drama. It's not poetry,
[25:01] Speaker 1: it's not recital, it's not of vaudeville, it's not a review.
[25:06] Speaker 1: You can see why the audience was confused. Even Twila
[25:10] Speaker 1: Tharpe was tying herself up in knots. But there was
[25:13] Speaker 1: a way forward. Just as Paul McCready had turned every
[25:17] Speaker 1: crash into a source of information, Twila Tharpe found her
[25:21] Speaker 1: own strategy for turning failure into success. There was, after all,
[25:27] Speaker 1: a convenient way to spot every floor with the show.
[25:31] Speaker 1: Bless their cold, black little hearts, The critics turned out
[25:34] Speaker 1: to be enormously useful. Of course, those reviews expressed vividly
[25:39] Speaker 1: and concisely everything that was wrong with Moving Out. The
[25:43] Speaker 1: only problem was I couldn't stomach reading the reviews too closely,
[25:47] Speaker 1: but that wasn't hard to solve. Jesse Hewitt, who was
[25:51] Speaker 1: both Twilitharpe's son and her business manager, took it upon
[25:54] Speaker 1: himself to closely read all the reviews, strip out the barbs,
[25:59] Speaker 1: and summarize the substance. What he did was to scientifically
[26:03] Speaker 1: apply every single review and make a grid. When we
[26:07] Speaker 1: saw more than two or three critics saying the same thing,
[26:10] Speaker 1: we said, let's look at this. The dancing and the
[26:14] Speaker 1: music had both been spectacular, said the critics, but the
[26:17] Speaker 1: show's first half had been visually confusing, emotionally shallow, and overcomplicated.
[26:22] Speaker 1: The second half had been simpler and much better for it.
[26:26] Speaker 1: As one friend a director had told her, you're doing
[26:29] Speaker 1: too much, trying too hard. Make each scene about one thing,
[26:34] Speaker 1: that three things. So she began to simplify as quickly
[26:39] Speaker 1: and as efficiently as she could. The audience were confused. Fine,
[26:43] Speaker 1: move the band out of the spotlight and find a
[26:46] Speaker 1: way to focus on the five principal dancers. These are
[26:50] Speaker 1: the folks you have to watch. The only thing you
[26:52] Speaker 1: have to do is bring these five people forward so
[26:55] Speaker 1: that by Italian restaurant you know who they are. Tharpe's
[26:58] Speaker 1: production designer realized that Tharp had once choreographed a dance
[27:02] Speaker 1: to a Chuck Berry song. Billy Joels deliberately retro hit
[27:07] Speaker 1: It's still rock and roll to me had the same
[27:09] Speaker 1: thumping four four beaters Chuck Berry perfect. Tharpe taught the
[27:14] Speaker 1: old dance to her five leading dancers in three hours,
[27:18] Speaker 1: and the show had a simple, crowd pleasing prolog that
[27:22] Speaker 1: told the audience who to pay attention to. It wasn't
[27:26] Speaker 1: the highest of concepts, but it was a fast, practical fix,
[27:31] Speaker 1: like Paul McCready taping a Manila folder onto a propeller,
[27:35] Speaker 1: and so she continued to look for the quickest, simplest improvements.
[27:39] Speaker 1: It didn't have to be high art, it just had
[27:42] Speaker 1: to be better. And just as Paul McCready occasionally had
[27:46] Speaker 1: to pick his pilots up off the runway and reassure
[27:49] Speaker 1: them that the disaster wasn't their fault, Twilight Tharpe had
[27:52] Speaker 1: to cope with the bruised, confused, and exhausted cast. The
[27:57] Speaker 1: band howled when she moved them out of the spotlight.
[28:00] Speaker 1: She cut prized solos for the dancers in an attempt
[28:03] Speaker 1: to simplify. That didn't go down well, and learning the
[28:08] Speaker 1: new version of the show while performing the old one
[28:11] Speaker 1: to perplexed audiences in Chicago was a grim experience. The
[28:15] Speaker 1: leading dancer Elizabeth Parkinson froze on stage one night. She
[28:20] Speaker 1: just got lost. She couldn't remember which was the old
[28:23] Speaker 1: and which was the new. But they persisted, and in
[28:27] Speaker 1: October two thousand and two, as the big opening night approached,
[28:32] Speaker 1: Billy Joel swept back in to lend his support and
[28:35] Speaker 1: his enthusiasm. I don't know what you call it, said
[28:38] Speaker 1: Billy Joel, but it's audacious, and it's different, and it's adventurous,
[28:41] Speaker 1: and it's risky, and let's do it. Was it a dancecole?
[28:47] Speaker 1: By the way, Billy Joel, with his rock and roll
[28:49] Speaker 1: gift for simplicity, realized, just didn't matter. It didn't need
[28:54] Speaker 1: to try to explain it. Just call it Moving Out
[28:57] Speaker 1: and stick Billy Joel's name up in lights, and if
[28:59] Speaker 1: it was any good, nobody would care about anything else.
[29:06] Speaker 1: And so in October two thousand and two, the show
[29:10] Speaker 1: formerly known as Moving Out the New Broadway Musical opened
[29:14] Speaker 1: on Broadway. Now the Marquis simply said Moving Out a simpler,
[29:20] Speaker 1: more direct title for a simpler, more direct show. But
[29:25] Speaker 1: would the critics be convinced Miss Tharpe and her vivid
[29:29] Speaker 1: team of dancers on Earth? The reasons certain cliches keep resonating,
[29:34] Speaker 1: and more important, makes them gleam as if they had
[29:38] Speaker 1: just been minted. This review, by the way, is from
[29:41] Speaker 1: the New York Times itself. Let's hear a bit more?
[29:45] Speaker 1: A shimmering portrait of an American generation. Oh that's good.
[29:51] Speaker 1: As a dance critic, I am perfectly willing to call
[29:55] Speaker 1: Moving Out a show, and a terrific one at debt.
[29:58] Speaker 1: Moving Out gives Broadway the jolt of genuine energy it
[30:03] Speaker 1: needed this season. In a word, the shows are blast.
[30:09] Speaker 1: The most striking was an article published back in Chicago
[30:12] Speaker 1: by the critic Michael Phillips. He was the one whose
[30:15] Speaker 1: review of the Chicago Preview had controversially been republished in
[30:20] Speaker 1: New York, and he was flown down to give his
[30:22] Speaker 1: opinion on the Broadway version of the show. He saw it,
[30:26] Speaker 1: and especially the dancers, in a new light. I don't
[30:29] Speaker 1: think I fully appreciated how good the five Principles really
[30:33] Speaker 1: were and are. In Chicago, you couldn't always find them
[30:37] Speaker 1: amid Thorpe's visual esthetic. Now on Broadway, each of the
[30:43] Speaker 1: five pops out with a kind of glorious confidence. It
[30:47] Speaker 1: wasn't perfect, he said, but it was much much better
[30:51] Speaker 1: than he could have imagined. Any director can learn a
[30:54] Speaker 1: lesson from how thoroughly Thorpe revisited the show, and he
[30:59] Speaker 1: asked an important question, how did this happen? That's a
[31:04] Speaker 1: question we should ask more often. It's easy to focus
[31:08] Speaker 1: obsessive either on failure or on success, without considering how
[31:13] Speaker 1: one becomes the other. For Twila Tharpe, she simply avoided
[31:18] Speaker 1: two of the big obstacles. After denying there was a
[31:22] Speaker 1: problem during rehearsals, she finally acknowledged the need to make
[31:26] Speaker 1: big changes. Then she didn't flounder about unsure what to do. Instead,
[31:32] Speaker 1: like Paul McCready, she focused intensely on learning quick lessons,
[31:37] Speaker 1: and she made the simplest, most practical fixes. Moving Out
[31:42] Speaker 1: ran for years, toured repeatedly, and earned a Tony Award
[31:46] Speaker 1: for Billy Joel and Stuart Malina, the classical conductor who
[31:49] Speaker 1: had been pinching himself at the start of the project.
[31:53] Speaker 1: It also earned a Tony nomination for Twiler Tharpe's direction,
[31:57] Speaker 1: and she won a Tony for her choreography. But perhaps
[32:01] Speaker 1: the awards should have been given instead for the most
[32:05] Speaker 1: adaptable leader of any team on Broadway. Of course, there
[32:10] Speaker 1: is no such award, but maybe there should be. For
[32:23] Speaker 1: a full list of our sources, please see the show
[32:25] Speaker 1: notes at Tim Harford dot com. Portionary Tales is written
[32:39] Speaker 1: by me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright. It's produced by
[32:43] Speaker 1: Ryan Dilley with support from Courtney Guarino and Emily Vaughan.
[32:48] Speaker 1: The sound design and original music is the work of
[32:51] Speaker 1: Pascal Wise. Julia Barton edited the scripts. It features the
[32:56] Speaker 1: voice talents of Ben Crowe, Melanie Gutridge, Mastella Harford, Cobner,
[33:01] Speaker 1: Holbrook Smith, Greg Lockett, mass Siam Munroe, and Rufus Wright.
[33:06] Speaker 1: The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work
[33:09] Speaker 1: of Mere LaBelle, Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fane, John Schnaz, Carlie Migliori,
[33:15] Speaker 1: Eric Sandler, Royston Berserv, Maggie Taylor, Nicole Morano, Daniellow, Lakhan,
[33:21] Speaker 1: and Maya Kanig. Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries.
[33:26] Speaker 1: If you like the show, please remember to share, rate
[33:29] Speaker 1: and review, and if you want to hear the show,
[33:32] Speaker 1: add free and listen to four exclusive Cautionary Tale shorts.
[33:37] Speaker 1: Then sign up for Pushkin Plus on the show page
[33:39] Speaker 1: in Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot FM, Slash Plus,

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