The piano man meets the choreographer

Billy Joel had received the call before, plenty of times, from major Hollywood producers and respected television writers and a few anonymous wannabes.

Usually the pitch went something like this: " `Piano Man!' The show! It's about the guy in the piano bar and the characters that hang around him!" Or: " `Uptown Girl!' The show! It's about a high-class girl who loves a downtown man!"

The answer was always no.

Then Twyla Tharp called.

"I said, `You don't know me, but my little touring company has taken a few of our rehearsal hours and made a videotape of some material built on your music,' " recalls Tharp. "I invited him over and showed him the tape. He liked it very much. He said, `Well, what do you want to do?' I said, `I want to do a full evening with your music.' And he said, `What do you need from me?' And I said, `All of your songs.'

"He said, `You got it,' and we shook hands and he left."

So began -- and ended -- the collaboration between the modern choreographer and the pop tunesmith on "Movin' Out," the Tony Award-winning musical that plays at the Colonial Theatre from Tuesday through April 10.

Says Joel: "When she told me she wanted to produce a show based on my music with no narrative and no dialogue and a real rock 'n' roll band and people throwing themselves around the stage, I decided the best thing to do was get out of her way."

The day after their meeting, in 2000, Joel sent all of his CDs to Tharp, who spent the weekend listening to them in chronological order. She called him Monday to say that she had the curve of a story. But she had one more question. Were Brenda and Eddie (last seen filing for divorce in 1975 in the final verse of "Scenes From an Italian Restaurant") still on speaking terms? Joel said he didn't know, but he'd like to. Tharp said she was going to see if she could figure it out.

It's hard to imagine a more counterintuitive pairing than Tharp, a revered presence on the cutting edge of dance, and Joel, whose accessible tunes have placed him squarely in the mainstream. Joel admits to having some reservations of his own.

"I did think that this had all the makings of a complete nightmare disaster," he says by phone from his New York office. "It was oxymoronic. But that completely appealed to me. I didn't want to go to Broadway with your typical song-and-dance show."

Over the next year, armed with 24 Billy Joel compositions, Tharp set out to create an eclectic, kinetic portrait of an American generation told exclusively through lyrics and movement. The production follows the lives of five friends developed from characters in Joel's songs -- Brenda and Eddie, Tony ("Movin' Out [Anthony's Song]"), James ("James"), and Judy ("Why Judy Why") -- from a Long Island prom in the 1960s through the Vietnam War and its aftermath back home.

"It was like archeology," says Tharp, looking relaxed in a baggy sweater, dark trousers, and cowboy boots on the sofa in her hotel suite. "I treated the songs as shards, pieces of pots that had been pulled out of the ground, and I had to reconstruct the whole pot. My other concept was something called living newspapers. It was a short-lived form of American theater -- Orson Welles, among others, practiced it. They took subject matter like electricity, water, labor, and bulked dramatic evenings out of these concepts, and I had the feeling that I would do this with the conflict of war."

Tharp immersed herself in classic films about Vietnam as well as every documentary she could get her hands on. She revisited newscasts and radio broadcasts of the day for a refresher course on "what the public was fed" and researched cultural markers from fashion to drug use.

Two Joel songs became signposts for Tharp during the creative process: "Goodnight, Saigon" and "Angry Young Man." The latter was written about a Vietnam vet whom Joel hired as a roadie.

"Billy will get details for his characters, and by the time that song is over you will believe you know these people," says Tharp, who used to "bop around" to Joel's music in her rehearsal studio back in the '70s. "They're like short stories. Linguistically he's very sophisticated, and he also understands structure in music. The songs are visceral, and I pretty much leave it at that because it doesn't really translate well into language. You feel it and it makes you move."

"Movin' Out" opened on Broadway in October 2002 to enthusiastic reviews after a traumatic July tryout in Chicago, where audiences left confused and critics savaged the show. Joel saw the finished product for the first time in Chicago, as well. ("There were problems in the first act," he says.) Tharp, tireless and exacting, single-handedly orchestrated a major overhaul to ready the work for its New York opening.

"The thing about failure is it's necessary," Tharp says. "[Jerome] Robbins was a good friend of mine, and he once said to me, `You won't have your best successes until you have your worst failures.' That's when you're really ready to try something, because A) you've got nothing to lose, and B) you've learned something. It was terrible, but I was lucky in Chicago. I still had two weeks to fix it."

Joel was reduced to tears at the show's Broadway opening -- not just to witness the revamped and much-heralded production but because he felt, he says, as if he was seeing his children all grown up.

"I said, `Of course. That's what happened to them. They left Long Island and went off to Vietnam and got screwed up,' " he says. "Twyla captured all the counterpoint that hadn't been noticed before in my music. All these deep emotions that I wasn't supposed to have as a pop songwriter. I wrote from my guts, but the whole art was trying to make it sound simple. I was really, really moved."

So much so that Joel is considering the possibility of writing his own musical. He's been composing fragments and themes, he says, for the last couple of years. And he's got a Big Idea.

"Let's just say that what Mel Brooks did for theater in `The Producers,' and what the film `Network' did for television, I'd like to do for the music industry," he says.

Tharp, for her part, is focusing on the recent release of her new book, "The Creative Habit," which is both practical guide and inspiring thesis.

"I don't talk about the future," she says, "because it's going to change a thousand times. I just put one foot in front of the next and hope for the best."