Sinatra on Stage: Come Fly With Twyla Tharp

When Twyla Tharp was 8 years old, her family moved from rural Indiana to a small town near San Bernardino, Calif., and opened a drive-in movie theater. Tharp's mother, an accomplished pianist, had put her precocious daughter through the usual cultural paces--lessons in ballet and tap as well as several musical instruments--but the family movie palace is where Tharp got her first real feel for an audience. She'd work at the snack bar and sit in a junked car way up front to watch the movies--westerns, musicals, horror-film fright fests on Friday the 13th. Whenever a plot started to drag, Tharp would have to hurry back to the concession stand. "I learned about pacing," she says. "Suddenly the movie gets a little boring--you knew there was gonna be a rush on the popcorn."

That prairie populism never left her, even as Tharp, a couple of decades later, became a darling of the avant-garde dance world. She shocked traditionalists with Deuce Coupe, her 1973 dance piece that wedded classical-ballet moves to Beach Boys songs. She worked with Mikhail Baryshnikov and David Byrne (and had romantic flings with both), shuttled between the American Ballet Theatre and Hollywood and then, in 2002, rocked Broadway with Movin' Out, her dance musical set to Billy Joel's greatest hits. Ballet choreographers like Jerome Robbins had done musicals before, but Tharp broke new ground, building a hit show almost entirely out of dance--and redefining what a Broadway musical could be.(See eight great Broadway shows.)

Now she's about to open a new Broadway show, Come Fly Away, set to the songs of Frank Sinatra. Ol' Blue Eyes has been an obsession of hers for years--this is the fourth dance piece she's created for his music--and she's ready for the critics to complain that she's repeating herself. Yet this high-low priestess explains her new approach--the show is set in a nightclub and follows the relationships of four couples--by citing writers like Tolstoy and Balzac (she's been devouring both lately) as well as the Ernest Borgnine movie Marty (which provides the model for one of the couples). Ordinary theatergoers are likely to catch little of this. But they'll see a show that uses dance to make the best case possible for Sinatra's artistry--and delivers the purest jolt of pleasure to be found on a Broadway stage.

Dance, if you haven't noticed, is hot. It's not the high-art sensation it was in the '70s, when Robbins and George Balanchine were working, companies such as the Joffrey Ballet and Alvin Ailey were drawing hip new audiences, and stars like Baryshnikov were celeb-magazine fodder. Instead, it has glided into the mass-audience mainstream. Broadway shows like Billy Elliot and Fela! (the Afrobeat musical choreographed by Bill T. Jones) put dance front and center. The ballet-like triple axels of Olympic figure skaters drew huge ratings at the Winter Games. And TV hits like Dancing with the Stars and So You Think You Can Dance have given ballroom dancing a cachet it hasn't had since Fred Astaire hung up his tux.

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