Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford - Bless the Coal-black Hearts of the Broadway Critics

Episode Date: May 20, 2022

When Billy Joel agreed to let dance legend Twyla Tharp turn his songs into a Broadway musical it seemed like a surefire hit. But in previews, Movin’ Out was panned by the critics. It was soon headed for Broadway and was set to be an expensive and embarrassing failure.So how could Twyla turn things around and avert disaster before opening night? For a full list of sources go to timharford.com If you’d like to keep up with the most recent news from this and other Pushkin podcasts be sure to sign up for our email list at Pushkin.fm.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin Friday, 19 July 2002, the Schubert Theatre in Chicago. The curtain was about to go up on the world premiere of a new show, trumpeted as the new Broadway musical. Yes, I know it wasn't on Broadway yet, but it was headed there. It wasn't really a musical either. Creatively the show broke down barriers between art forms. It was innovative. A crossover between a concert, a musical, and a ballet, the band was on stage, playing and singing,

while the cast danced and didn't utter a word. But despite its boundary-blurring nature, its creators had high hopes that it would be a commercial as well as critical success. Big name investors had poured more than $8 million into the show. Stuart Malina, a classical pianist and conductor who was on the show's creative team, was giddy with excitement.

Sometimes I have to pinch myself. But indeed, Malina was orchestrating the music of a man who sold more records than Frank Sonatra or the Bee Gees, or the Red Hot Chili Peppers. In fact, he sold more records than all three of them put together. Billy Joel But while Billy Joel was a huge star, Joel was in no doubt as to who was in charge. If you stand in Twiler's way, you die," he said.

Twiler. Twiler Tharp. A giant of American choreography, a force of nature. In the 1970s, should choreograph dances for the great ballet principal Mikhail Burishnikov. In the 1980s, should work with John Curry, the world and Olympic figure skating champion. And on Amadeus, the Mozart movie that won best picture, best actor, best director, and five other Oscars. But now, she wanted to put her sophisticated choreography right at the heart of a blockbuster show. Her aim, she said, was something that would finally make dancing pay for the dancers. It had all started two years before when Twiler decided that she wanted to make a show out of Joel's music. She didn't know him, but she got his phone number and she called

him. When pitching the idea to him, she made a 20 minute film of her choreography set to his music. Then she invited him over to her home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan to play in the video. I didn't know my stuff could look so good, he said. And then she made the pitch. I want to do a show using your songs to tell a story. I don't know what it is yet, but first, I need your permission. Okay, he said, you have it.

I'm also going to need access to your entire song catalog. Fine, this your cans. Twyler had the creative freedom she wanted. But was it freedom to crown her glorious career? Or freedom to wreck it? I'm Tim Harford. You're listening to cautionary tales. The mere two years had passed between Twiler Tharps called to Billy Joel and that summer evening at Chicago's Schubert Theatre.

It wasn't Broadway yet, but it was a big moment, as preview audience has waited for their first glimpse of moving out the new Broadway musical. The lights went up. Right in the middle of the stage, the musicians started to play. Thanks to some spectacular hydraulics, the entire band was then lifted back and up to a balcony at the rear of the stage, as the dance has emerged and burst into motion to the tune of scenes from an Italian restaurant. It was just one problem.

The critics. Stupor-fying-only cliched an almost embarrassingly naive. Leaves half the audience asking the other half, huh? What just happened? They were not impressed. Even the sympathetic ones thought the show was flawed. Moving out is a glorious mess. If the theatrical jury acquits, so be it.

If not, let it live in memory as a magnificent failure. And for most, the word failure loomed much larger than the word magnificent. They did not like it. Condenses history to the point of meaninglessness. They did not like it at all. If Oliver Stone did a Broadway dance musical musical and truly that's not a suggestion, it might come out like the more visible passages of moving out. Moving out came with the highest of hopes,

the most talented of casts and the most celebrated of celebrity creators, at least as silly as anything in refer madness, pile-driving and ill-conceived. The curtain came down on that opening night of the Chicago Previews. The audience and the critics alike were confused. What exactly was this show trying to do? It wasn't clear.

In watching for nearly two hours, a feeling of exhausting relentlessness sets in. For those in search of a heart-wrenching story, you had better be moving on. One thing was clear though, in the opinion of the critics, the show just wasn't good enough. You must realize by now that I'm fascinated by failure. That's why cautionary tales exists. In fact, I've been fascinated by failure for a long time. Back in 2011, I published a book titled Adapt,

Why Success Always Starts With Failure. I spoke about the importance of learning through experimentation, using trial and error to solve complex problems and produce great creative works. I argued that each failure was a step on the road to success. But ever since that book was published, I've had this nagging sense of guilt. Because while there's no shortage of people who'll sing the praises of learning from your mistakes, The truth is, failure hurts. It isn't as easy to learn from failure as you might think.

Twiler Tharp knows that very well. If you read her book, The Creative Habit, and you should, you quickly learn that Twiler Tharp is as interested in failure, as I am. I don't mean to romanticize failure. Believe me, success is preferable in failure, as I am. I don't mean to romanticize failure. Believe me, success is preferable to failure. But while we all want success, not failure, we don't always get what we want. If we're doing something new, doing something hard,

then sometimes we will fail, and Twyla Tharp knows it. Changing the work and how we work is the unpleasant task of dealing with that, which we have been denying. It is probably the biggest test in the creative process, demanding not only an admission that you've made a mistake, but that you know how to fix it. When we romanticize failure,

it's as that proverbial learning experience, a necessary step on the road to glory. But Tharp just described two big obstacles on that road. The first is denial. It's hard even to admit that there's a problem. The second is that even once you have admitted there's a problem, you still have to figure out the solution. Let's talk about denial first. You may remember an earlier episode of cautionary tales, one

in which we heard a UFO cult predict that at midnight, a few days before Christmas 1954, aliens would descend to rescue the faithful and destroy the world. When the aliens didn't come and the world was not destroyed, the cult took at his evidence that their faith had been rewarded with salvation for all. They even started issuing press releases spreading the good news. We humans have an extraordinary capacity to deny the obvious. For Tharp, it would have been much better if she'd faced up to the show's problems early. Early problems are the easiest to fix. The best failures are the private ones.

You commit in the confines of your room alone, with no strangers watching. Private failures are great. I encourage you to fail as much as you want in private. Private failures are the first drafts that get tossed in the waste basket. The sketches crumpled up on the floor, the manuscripts that stay in the drawer. Good advice, but it was hard to imagine a less private failure than the reviews of moving out the new Broadway musical. How had that public failure happened? musical. How had that public failure happened? Tharp reflected with hindsight that the fundraising for the show had been too easy. With Twiler Tharp and Billy Joel at the wheel, investors

scrambled to fund the show. Things moved from concept to stripped down version to fully funded Broadway band production so quickly that there was barely time to think. It went so smoothly, I had to pinch myself. Too smoothly, she rufly admitted. There were scenes of doubt already present about some aspects of the show, and the logic of the schedule kept us from looking at a few basic problems. In a word? Denial.

It's understandable. Billy Joel had given Twyla his unconditional backing and total freedom before stepping back. Investors had thrown money at her. The show was hurtling towards Broadway. It didn't feel like quite the moment to pay attention to those seeds of doubt. It must have seemed better to ride the wave and hope for the best. But every wave breaks, eventually. Tharp was losing her opportunity to do something. She was ignoring her own advice. The more you fail in private, the less you will fail in public. If you forget this, if you let down your guard or lower your standards or compromise too quickly, or leave in something that should be rejected, you'll have to deal with the other more painful kind of failure. The public kind. After the Chicago Previews opened, and the blistering reviews came in, the painful kind of failure had just happened. Now, should have to deal with it.

It seemed that everyone in Chicago was talking about the problems with moving out to the new Broadway musical. Twiler described hanging out in a restaurant across the street from the Schubert Theatre during intermission, hearing one patron complaining about the show to her waiter. Don't worry, the waiter replied. The second act is much better. The second act is better, that's good. On the other hand, if even the waiters know that your first act stinks, you have a problem. And it wasn't just the waiters in Chicago.

Twiless troubles were about to get much bigger. Traditionally, the New York media don't comment on the regional previews. They wait until the show arrives in Manhattan. What happens in Chicago stays in Chicago. That's the tradition. But not this time. Perhaps it was because Billy Joel was so famous. Perhaps it was because he was a local boy from Long Island, New York.

Perhaps the show was simply too terrible to ignore. Whatever the reason, Long Island's newspaper, Newsday, broke with long-standing custom. Newsday reprinted one of the Chicago reviews where it would be widely read in New York City. It was an act that triggered a storm of debate among theatre producers and journalists. Not cool! A show is in such a vulnerable situation when it opens out of town. But that debate didn't help Twiler Tharp. In fact, the controversy just made for more column inches and more awareness of her show's problems. The fact was that now everyone with any interest in New York musical theatre knew that Twila Tharp had unveiled a colossal turkey in Chicago and it was about to flap its way down to Broadway. This might

just be deliciously bad. Twila Tharp's oldest collaborator was Jennifer Tipton, a lighting designer. Jennifer had flown in from New York to watch the opening night in Chicago. The next morning, the two old friends had met for breakfast together to read the reviews. I can just imagine the scene, an ice hotel, crisp white tablecloth, coffee, orange juice, classong, and the newspapers. Embarrassingly naive. Ilconceived. Magnificent failure.

And then, Tyler had looked up at her old friend Jennifer. And Jennifer had looked back at her. You know, they're right. And this was the pivotal moment. By her own admission, Tyler Thar had been in denial about the problems with her show. Now, which she doubled down, like a member of the UFO cult, insisting that she knew best and that the more sophisticated critics in New York would perceive the show's brilliance, or which she moved from denial to acceptance.

You know they're right. Jennifer had said, and Twila Tharp had nodded. Yes, I know. With the help of an honest friend, Tharp had finally accepted that she had a problem, the show urgently needed to change, but time was running out. Twyla Tharp has thought a lot about failure, but thinking and doing, and never quite the same thing. And as I've pondered the challenge facing Tharp, I find myself thinking about another bold innovator who's truly mastered

the art of good mistakes. His name was Paul McCready, and while Twyla Tharp's goal was to produce a hit that would finally make dancing pay for the dancers, Paul McCready's goal was to win the Kramer Prize. The Kramer Prize was a large cash award for the first human-powered aircraft capable of taking off without aid and flying a one-mile, figure-eight course with a 10-foot hurdle at the start and finish. It doesn't sound so hard, but it is. The power for such a plane could come from, say, a professional cyclist, wearing legs spinning a propeller, but even a cycling bro

can only produce just over half a horse power for a sustained burst. That's not a lot if you want to fly a plane. The Wright brothers put 20 times that power into their plane. A modern light aircraft is at least 300 times more powerful than a cyclist. That may be why the Kramer Prize, first offered in 1959 by the Royal Aeronautical Society in London, lay unclaimed. In 1973, the society increased the prize to attempting £50,000 in today's money

more than half a million dollars. That sparked a new surge in interest, but still, nobody came close to building a working plane. The early attempts were just too heavy, for the furiously cycling pilot even a minute of flight was exhausting, but the competitors for the prize were also doomed in a much more subtle way. And we'll come to that subtle floor in a moment, fix it, and you could win the Kramer prize. It was in 1976 that Paul McCready took an interest.

McCready was an aeronautical engineer and a glider pilot. He was also in financial trouble, having guaranteed a loan for a friend's failed business venture. Suddenly, the Kramer Prize seemed rather attractive. Recreedy's knowledge of hangliders suggested that a super light plane might work. If you triple the hanglider wingspan to almost a hundred feet, you could get the power required down below half a horse power. Months of experimentation ensued, first with Paul's teenage son Tyler as a pilot, and later with pro cyclists. But to get it right, there was so much to learn, so many mistakes to make, and here is where

that subtle floor that I mentioned comes in. The one that kept dooming McCreedy's rivals, every time they crashed, their planes were destroyed. The pilots were fine, these were crashes from a height of 10 feet at a speed of 10 miles an hour, but the planes were wrecks. The crashes of McCreedy's planes seemed just as spectacular, with aluminium poles shearing off, the struts splintering, the tough transparent film that makes the wing surfaces crumpling. Stop peddling! Stop peddling! Pull out!

The pilot, Greg Miller, is being pulled out of the wreckage of the slow motion crash. That wasn't your fault. You did everything right. He's fine, just shaken and frustrated as they would fall off his bike. But Credius calm. He's already explaining to Miller and the team what happened. The right wing was going down a bit. There wasn't

enough left control. It just wouldn't go left, I had it pulled left. Yeah, I know. You had it pulled left. The plane looks shattered. Emotionally speaking, so does Paul Gregg Miller. What a day. McReady though is as cool as a cucumber. He knows that he and his little team can fix the plane in just 24 hours. The plane is called the Gossamer Condor. Its simple design makes the condor easy to repair and easy to take apart and reassemble. This particular crash, for example, teaches McCready how to solve a problem that's been bothering him, how to get such a vast, lightweight, slow-moving plane to turn. The crash happened when the plane turns sharply to the right.

That was caused by a small twist in the right wing tip. Or McCreedy has to do, his figure out how to twist or untwist the tips on command. After previous crashes, he's made tiny alterations, such as taping a Minilla folder to the propeller to increase its size, or cutting an event to keep the pilot cool. But he's also rebuilt the plane from scratch to a new design.

Even when nothing works, McCreedy's learning. Flight-wise, we didn't do any better than we did two weeks ago. The fact that we made changes in between times has led us to see that those changes didn't help. By August 1977, they're ready for another attempt on the record, and the Gossamer Condor has been evolving at furious speed for a year. It's already flown about 400 test flights. The wingtip

twist system is working. Glider pilot and pro cyclist Brian Allen is both pilot and engine for this attempt. the plane goes down hard. Brian Allen lies motionless on the runway. But after a moment, he starts moving again. He's fine, just winded. And McCready, McCready is under pressure. He's heard that another team over in Japan is close to winning the prize.

Nevertheless, he decides to take advantage of the crash to rebuild the plane again from scratch, shaving off a little extra weight wherever he can. It takes just two weeks. And on August the 23rd, 1977, Brian Allen climbs into the latest incarnation of the Gossamer Condor, peddles furiously down the airstrip, and after two long sweeping turns, six minutes and more than a mile of flight, he clears the final hurdle on the course and gently touches down.

The Kramer Prize is won, not just by a brilliant team of inventive minds, but by the ability to test, to crash, to learn, and to adapt quickly and safely over a period of just a few months. McCready was able to pick his pilot and his plane off the runway and completely rebuild after a demoralising crash in a matter of days. Could Twyla Tharp do the same for moving out? Stay with us. Twyler Tharp, remember, talked about the two difficulties of change.

It is probably the biggest test in the creative process, demanding not only an admission that you've made a mistake, but that you know how to fix it. Well, she'd passed the first test, over coffee and croissant with her friend Jennifer Tipton, she had admitted the problem. But the second test was even harder. How could she fix the show so late in the day. Paul McCreedy's big insight was that you could learn a lot if failures were survivable and repairs were quick and cheap to make. And the out-of-town previews gave Twiler Tharp an opening, an opportunity to fix, moving out before the New York reviewers tore the show to shreds. She'd hesitated until almost too late. It hadn't helped when one of the damning Chicago reviews had been republished in New

York. That ran against the spirit of allowing the out-of-town show to serve as a kind of prototype. Even without that problem, the show needed much more than the traditional tweaks before hitting Broadway. The low-cost opportunities to radically reshape the show, well the time for that had been in workshops and rehearsals they were long past. It was perilous to change the show

while the previews in Chicago were still running, but Tharp couldn't wait until the show moved to Broadway. There were only three New York rehearsal days before the previews opened. And Tharp still didn't quite seem to know what she wanted the show to be. In a publicity interview on TV, she was challenged to explain, was it a pop ballet, a musical, a danceicle? I don't think of it as any of those things. I think of it as a thing.

Okay. I mean, one of the challenges with this was to formulate the genre. It's not dance, it's not opera, it's not straight drama, it's not poetry, it's not recital, it's not waterville, it's not a review. You can see why the audience was confused. Even Twyla Tharp was tying herself up in knots, but there was a way forward. Just as Paul McCready had turned every crash into a source of information, Twyla Tharp found her own strategy for turning failure into success.

There was, after all, a convenient way to spot every flaw with the show. Bless their cold black little hearts, the critics turned out to be enormously useful. Of course, those reviews expressed vividly and concisely everything that was wrong with moving out. The only problem was... I couldn't stomach reading the reviews too closely. But that wasn't hard to solve. Jesse Hewitt, who was both Twight-A-Tharp's son and her business manager, took it upon

himself to closely read all the reviews, strip out the barbs, and summarize the substance. What he did was to scientifically apply every single review and make a grid. When we saw more than two or three critics saying the same thing, we said, let's look at this. The dancing and the music had both been spectacular, said the critics. But the show's first half had been visually confusing, emotionally shallow and overcomplicated. The second half had been simpler, and much better for it. As one friend, a director, had told her, too much, trying too hard. Make each scene about one thing not three things. So, she began to simplify as quickly and as efficiently as she could. The audience

were confused, fine, move the band out of the spotlight and find a way to focus on the five principal dancers. These are the folks you have to watch. The only thing you have to do is bring these five people forward so that by Italian restaurant, you know who they are. Farp's production designer realized that Farp had once choreographed a dance to a Chuck Berry song. Billy Joel's deliberately retro hit, It's Still Rock and Roll to Me, had the same thumping 4-4-beters Chuck Berry. Perfect, Thark taught the old dance to her five leading dancers in three hours. And the show had a simple crowd-pleasing prologue that told the audience who to pay attention to.

It wasn't the highest of concepts, but it was a fast, practical fix, like Paul McCready taping a manila folder onto a propeller, and so she continued to look for the quickest, simplest improvements. It didn't have to be high-art, it just had to be better. And just as Paul McCready occasionally had to pick his pilots up off the runway, and reassure them that the disaster wasn't their fault, Twyla Tharp had to cope with the bruised, confused and exhausted cast. The band howled when she moved them out of the spotlight.

She cut prized solos for the dancers in an attempt to simplify. That didn't go down well. In learning the new version of the show while performing the old one to perplexed audiences in Chicago, was a grim experience. The leading dancer Elizabeth Parkinson froze on stage one night. She just got lost. She couldn't remember which was the old and which was the new. But they persisted. And in October 2002, as the big opening night approached, Billy Joel swept back in to lend his support and enthusiasm. I don't know what you call it, but it's audacious and different and adventurous and risky and

let's do it! Was it a danceical by the way? Billy Joel, with his rock and roll gift for simplicity, realised it didn't matter. It didn't need to try to explain it, just call it moving out, and stick Billy Joel's name up in lights, and if it was any good, nobody would care about anything else. And so, in October 2002, the show formerly known as Out, the new Broadway musical, opened on Broadway. Now the marquee simply said, Moving Out. A simpler, more direct title for a simpler, more direct show. But would the critics be convinced?

Moustarpe and her vivid team of dancers unearth the reasons certainly shades keep resonating, and more important make them gleam as if they had just been minted. This review by the way is from the New York Times itself. Let's hear a bit more. A shimmering portrait of an American generation. Well, that's good. As a dance critic, I am perfectly willing to call Movin' Out a show and a terrific one at that.

Movin' Out gives Broadway the jolt of genuine energy it needed this season. In a word, the shows are blast! But the most striking was an article published back in Chicago by the critic, Michael Phillips. He was the one whose review of the Chicago Preview had controversially been republished in New York, and he was flown down to give his opinion on the Broadway version of the show. He saw it, and especially the dancers, in a new light. I don't think I fully appreciated how good the five principles really were and are. In Chicago, you couldn't always find them, I mean Tharp's visual aesthetic.

Now, on Broadway, each of the five pops out with a kind of glorious confidence. It wasn't perfect, he said. But it was much, much better than he could have imagined. Any director can learn a lesson from how thoroughly Thorpe revisited the show. And he asked an important question. How did this happen? That's a question we should ask more often. It's easy to focus obsessively either on failure or on success, without considering how

one becomes the other. For Twyla Tharp, she simply avoided two of the big obstacles. After denying there was a problem during rehearsals, she finally acknowledged the need to make big changes. Then she didn't flound her about unsure what to do, instead, like Paul McCready, she focused intensely on learning quick lessons, and she made the simplest, most practical fixes. Moving out around for years, toured repeatedly and earned a Tony award for Billy Joel and Stuart Molina, the classical conductor who'd been pinching himself at the start of the

project. It also earned a Tony nomination for Twiler Tharpe's direction, and she won a Tony for her choreography. But perhaps the award should have been given instead for the most adaptable leader of any team on Broadway. Of course, there is no such award. But maybe there should be. For a full list of our sources, please see the show notes at timhalford.com. Corsinary Tales is written by me, Tim Haafard, with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Ryan Dilly, with support from Courtney Garino and Emily Vaughn. The sound design and original music is the work of Pascal Weiss, Julia Barton, edited

the scripts. It features the voice talents of Ben Crow, Melanie Gutridge, Stella Haafard, Copna Holbrook-Smith, Greg Lockett, Micellem and Roe and Rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Miele Bell, Jacob Weissburg, Heather Fane, John Schnars, Carly Miliori, Eric Sandler, Royston Besserv, Maggie Taylor, Nicole Marano, Daniela LeCarn, and Maya Canig. Corsinary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate, and review.

And if you want to hear the show add free and listen to four exclusive cautionary tale shorts, then sign up for Pushkin Plus on the show page in Apple podcasts or at pushkin.fm slash plus. you