The Brooklyn Rail

A street busker in a dark hoodie crouches against the wall, squeezing out something mournful on saxophone. The sun has just set over the Hudson, blurring the New Jersey skyline with a soft orange haze. Enter stage right, a tweedish Michael Cerveris, professorial, smoking a pipe. From stage left, dancer John Selya cuts a Gene Kelly-like figure in tailored suit, raincoat draped over his shoulders like a cape. A couple engages in a silent swing dance center stage. All of this seems a straightforward way to introduce characters in a play—until a flock of white-shirted waiters bursts through with serving trays raised above their heads. They knock Selya’s character off center as they whisk past and disappear. It happens so fast it could be a hallucination. Is it a gust of wind he feels? A shiver of premonition? He shrugs it off.

Frenetic, absurd, often cartoonish, Twyla Tharp’s new How Long Blues opened the Little Island performance series (that will also feature dance work by Pam Tanowitz and Ebony Williams) with a three-week run in June. With gorgeous production value, athletic dance, live jazz, and a storied outdoor setting, it was the uplifting summer event NYC didn’t know it had been waiting for.

How Long Blues shares the hybrid music and dance-theater structure of Tharp’s long-running Broadway hit, Movin’ Out, that was inspired by the music of Billy Joel and performed with a live band onstage. Yet this new show is entirely its own animal. Tharp leaves us on our own to make what we will of the work, but she told the New York Times she found her inspiration in the life and writing of Albert Camus, the French novelist and philosopher often associated with absurdism. Composers T Bone Burnett and David Mansfield help realize her vision with original jazz and arrangements of recognizable favorites including: Frank Sinatra’s “My Way,” Billie Holiday’s “I’ll Be Seeing You” sung by Andromeda Turre, and Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” sung by Michael Cerveris. The title itself refers to a Leroy Carr piece—for the show we hear Count Basie’s version.

Tharp compresses a dizzying collage of scenes into a single hour. I counted at least seven significant costume changes (the designs are by Santo Loquasto, who is also responsible for the set), several that cycle back throughout the show. Opening with 1940s swing-dance styling, the dancers variously become fierce black-clad beat poets/modern dancers, soccer players, tuxedo and sequin-gowned party goers, graduates in choir robes, white-skirted whirling Sufis, and people dressed in loud tropical prints dancing the samba. The swirl of action onstage comes at rapid-fire speed, with scene shifts that interrupt each other mid-sentence. It’s like watching those one-moment-a-day video reels that capture a lightning round of images in less than a minute. Tharp claims this work is about resilience, yet she also delivers a pitch perfect reflection of our highly distractible digital selves.

A longtime Tharp performer, Selya has a throughline character role at the center of the action. When he and Cerveris sit down together at a café table, we see them as men of consequence, perhaps discussing a show they will produce. The series of disjointed encounters that transpire onstage could be a visual transcription of their conversation. Or, a vivid COVID dream—the disrupted narrative of How Long Blues is flecked with pandemic lifestyle notes. One of the more obvious is when, during a nightclub scene, a woman (dancer Daisy Jacobson) suffers coughing spells and staggers, visibly unwell, through a dance with Selya’s character until he shows her out. Later five men carry her like a slender coffin above their heads. Those conversant with the writing of Camus might hear an echo in this of his depiction of a 1940s Algerian plague, but the show doesn’t rely on such knowledge.

Tharp’s dancers are both muscle-bound and loose-limbed. They make the choreographer’s jazzy style look like a toss-off. I could see sports and exercise motifs (a set of jumping jacks, a gymnast’s pike) that pepper the movement vocabulary. Colin Heininger and Frances Lorraine Samson hook elbows in a fierce tug of war; Reed Tankersley cranks his energy to the max whenever he appears. When a soccer ball rolls onto the stage and Selya stops it with his dress-shoed foot, it’s a tip of the hat to Camus, who was a devotee. The soccer ball later transforms into a bundle of rags that could be a landmine. Selya balances it on his shoulder like the proverbial chip. Or, maybe it’s the coronavirus.

In one scene the entire ensemble becomes two rows of rats, squealing, snarling, and posturing aggressively. They stand flat to the audience, sticking out their necks and lunging to the diagonal in a syncopated pattern. Each wonderfully unique, together they are an animated cubist painting. Then, in a quick shift in tone, they don choir robes and become graduating students. Inexplicably, several big-headed cartoon characters appear and hang around a bar, reminding me of bobble-headed dashboard figures.

The most visually spectacular moment of the show is when the dancers wear long white skirts and spin in the manner of Sufi whirling dervishes under a lighting effect (by Justin Townsend) that renders them in hypnotic zebra stripes. It goes on for quite some time, while Turre delivers a stunning vocalization of yipping and keening wild animals. Tharp’s unapologetic mash-up of cultural references—the surprising appearance of a tribal shaman covered in straw and string might raise certain eyebrows—seems consistent with the non-sequitur nature of dreams.

The musicians and dance artists all bring their top game to this gutsy experiment. Is How Long Blues a significant addition to the extensive Tharp portfolio? Perhaps not. And yet the energy and spectacle seem exactly the antidote for the divisiveness and general anxiety of our present cultural moment. For one clear and temperate June night, we don’t have to take ourselves too seriously.