Dylan Show Like a Sinking Stone
Funny how things work. Billy Joel songs set to modern dance? A hit! Bob Dylan songs set to modern dance? Not so much.
The Times They Are A-Changin', the Broadway musical that belts out the Dylan songbook, will close Nov. 19, after only 28 regular performances, it was announced Wednesday.
The flop will cost investors their figurative shirts, either a mere $8.5 million per the optimistic New York Times, or $10 million per the New York Post.
The death of The Times They Are A-Changin' followed the classic Broadway script: It opened Oct. 26. It got bad reviews. It couldn't sell any tickets.
Last week, according to Variety, the show was playing to houses that were less than two-thirds full.
The Times They Are A-Changin' is billed as an "original action-adventure fable" conceived and directed by dance maven Twyla Tharp, who made an unlikely Broadway darling of Billy Joel a few years ago with Movin' Out.
Like Movin' Out, Times They A-Changin' relies on the hit songs of its famed pop benefactor. Where Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire" got the Great White Way treatment in his show, Dylan's "Highway 61," and two dozen other songs including the title track, gets the business in his show.
Critics dug the music, and even the moves, of Times They Are A-Changin'. It was the storyline--about a young man, his father, and the father's traveling circus--they weren't buying.
"Even as the dancer seem to fly, Mr. Dylan's lyrics are hammered, one by one, into the ground," Ben Brantley wrote in the Times.
The Post's Clive Barnes advised audiences to "wait for the cast album."
Discounting the fact that he wrote "Masters of War," et. al, Dylan's involvement in the show was limited to helping with the orchestrations.
By the time it closes, Times They Are A-Changin' will have played slightly more total performances than the John Lennon-tuned Lennon, and slightly less performances than the Paul Simon-penned Capeman, to cite two other Broadway bombs associated with Rock and Roll Hall of Famers.
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