Fabulous invalid Twyla Tharp and Billy Joel heal America through dance BY IRIS FANGER
	Movin’ Out Conceived, directed, and choreographed by Twyla Tharp. Music and lyrics by Billy Joel. Set by Santo Loquasto. Costumes by Suzy Benzinger. Lighting by Donald Holder. Sound by Brian Ruggles and Peter J. Fitzgerald. Additional musical arrangements and orchestrations and musical supervision by Stuart Malina. With Holly Cruikshank, Matthew Dibble, David Gomez, Julieta Gros, Laurie Kanyok, Brendan King, Corbin Popp, Ron Todorowski, Darren Holden, and Matt Wilson. At the Colonial Theatre through April 10.

Choreographer/director Twyla Tharp, composer/lyricist/performer Billy Joel, 16 supercharged dancers, a singer banging at the piano, and nine more musicians suspended over the stage made for an incandescent Boston opening of the national touring company of Movin’ Out, the hit 2002 dance musical that continues to draw crowds on Broadway. Tharp and Joel won’t necessarily be present for future performances at the Colonial Theatre, but on press night last Thursday, the diminutive Tharp took a bow with the dancers at curtain call, and Joel came up from the audience to the second-story piano to belt out two songs and delight a packed house. He’d been met at the Colonial’s front door by the glare of camera lights and reporters, and when he came down the aisle of the theater, just before the start of the show, most of the audience rose and cheered.

Tharp’s theatrical spectacle–cum–rock concert threads 26 numbers from the Piano Man’s songbook into a musical score as it melds the show-biz smarts of Broadway with the dynamics and fizz of the rock-concert genre while latching onto the passion, pain, and loss of the Vietnam era. We all know about the high-school kids who were sent off to fight a senseless war and did not return or came back psychically scarred. But experiencing on a kinesthetic level a gut sucked in from fear or the protective closing of the body around wounded limbs is much more searing than listening to sermons, harangues, and the litany of regrets by the men in power who made it happen. And don’t think it’s only the past that resonates. It’s hard to watch Movin’ Out now without thinking of the soldiers on duty in Iraq and Afghanistan.

True, the plot line sounds like a 1960s Dick-and-Jane primer. Eddie, Brenda, Tony, James, and Judy are buddies at a blue-collar suburban school. Eddie and Brenda break up, Tony takes up with Brenda, James and Judy get married. Then the guys go off to war. Eddie and Tony come back; James’s body is left on the battlefield. Act two recounts the brutal changes for all of them, until a final scene in which maturity brings reconciliation. But never mind. Tharp is a dancemaker, not a playwright, and she’s fashioned characters by means of every sort of dance style, from ballet to disco, from tango to modern dance, with a number of twitches, stumbles, and goofy banana-peel falls as a reminder of the everyday klutziness of us mortals. And under her boot-camp-like insistence, this road cast has been groomed into a first-class, fully engaged ensemble.

When Holly Cruikshank last graced a Boston stage, she was poured into a yellow dress and heading the Wang cast of contact. This time out, as Brenda, she hits the Colonial in a series of teeny-bopper outfits highlighted by a flippy red dress dreamed up by costume designer Suzy Benzinger, who mirrors the turbulent times in her now-period costumes. Cruikshank has a body that turns itself upside down — no problem — and a pair of legs that stretch to the Milky Way. In demeanor, she’s as fearless as a prizefighter, alternating between aggressive and defensive. A tumbling, turning marvel named Ron Todorowski as Eddie is all the more appealing when he strikes the pose of a ballet prince after shooting out some popping and grooving appropriated from the breakdance vocabulary. There’s another cast of principals that alternates with this one because Tharpdance is demonic in its punishment of dancers’ limbs and bodies, but this one rocked. Kudos also to the moody David Gomez as Tony; Julieta Gros as the mourning widow, Judy, dancing on pointe; and the poignant Brit, Matthew Dibble, as James.