"You can't just use a list of ticket buyers to all Broadway shows," Chodor said. "Since 'Movin' Out' is not only for the Broadway audience, but also for the rock and roll audience, it was unique in that regard. The target audience included people who bought tickets, so we know they spend money to see concerts."

The e-mail opens with: "130,000 new tickets go on sale this weekend - but you can get them today when you use your Visa card! Don't wait! Be the first to get the best seats! This exclusive internet presale period ends Saturday, December 7th, 2002, so act today."

Visa is a sponsor of the show.

The e-mail included a letter from Joel, which Chodor's firm developed with a copywriter.

A link to MovinOutOnBroadway.com was provided where music from the show plays as reviews flash across the screen. The e-mail has links to a "send this e-mail to a friend" option; MovinOutCastMusic.com, where songs can be accessed and played; WPLJ's web-site and Ticketmaster's web-site to buy tickets.

Chodor said he did not have details on response rates or other numbers from the campaign.

"We had tremendous success with a previous e-mail campaign that we did when the show first opened, and Ticketmaster knows how powerful that last effort was," he said. "They make a fee off each ticket they sell."

Chodor credited the e-mail effort's immediacy for its success.

"The show has been ongoing for quite awhile with good reviews," he said. "For this campaign they opened up a whole new batch of tickets and struck gold."

"Movin' Out" tickets are priced at $100, $70 and $40.

"Not only is the show a blockbuster, but what we're starting to find is that other Broadway shows are looking to do this," he said. "Broadway usually has done little marketing with just local ads and postcards. Now they are finding that the return on investment for something like this is huge."

Chodor noted that Broadway shows typically operate on lean margins.

"They opened up more seats, and to market that, the cost to do radio or TV is out of the realm," he said. "Also, 60 percent of all Broadway seats are purchased by tourists. This was a push for New Yorkers to buy theatre tickets. An immediate blast like this can't be done for a national audience since you couldn't get a spike in sales."

"I didn't even know Billy Joel was Jewish," says Aviva Weintraub, a member of the film selection committee.

The film climaxes in a confrontation between the Joels (Billy among them), and the Neckermanns, the Germans who took over the family business. It screens January 20th, 2003 at 3:30pm and 8:30pm, and January 21st, 2003 at 9pm.

"Billy is dating Anne Maxwell," said Claire Mercuri, Joel's rep at Columbia Records.

The pop balladeer met Maxwell backstage during a September concert, according to the Boston Herald.

Maxwell works at the tony Ritz-Carlton on Arlington Street in downtown Boston. Sources say she is between 28 years-old and "her early 30s." Joel is 53.

Reached yesterday at the Ritz-Carlton, Maxwell politely declined to talk about her relationship with Joel, saying, "I just don't feel comfortable commenting on my personal life."

Friends say Maxwell's obviously got a way about her - and that she's lifted Joel from his much-publicized doldrums.

"The flowers keep coming, the diamonds keep coming," one friend told the Herald's "Inside Track" column.

Joel has reportedly given impromptu concerts in the hotel's piano bar in recent months.

Mercuri denied reports in the Herald and the National Enquirer that Joel had spent time with Maxwell's parents during the holidays.

"The Joel Files" is presented as a multigenerational film, and Billy Joel and his younger half-brother, European orchestral conductor Alexander Joel, appear frequently.

For the elder brother, the film and the research leading up to it were a revelation. "My first reaction was, so that's what happened," Joel said. "Because I didn't really know my father well when I was growing up, and by the time I met him again, he really didn't want to talk about it."

As for the younger brother, it was his acquaintance with Thalberg, who produced a program about Alexander Joel for a Vienna TV station, that led to the "The Joel Files." "I wanted to show a picture of him as a child," Thalberg recalled by phone from Vienna. "So we went to his father, who lives here in Vienna, too, and asked for a photograph." Looking through a family album, Thalberg came across "a picture showing a factory, a courtyard of a factory in the '30s. And this picture took me away."

Though Howard Joel (Billy and Alexander's father) was at first reluctant to talk about the picture, he eventually told Thalberg the story of the Joel factory. She followed up with a year of research into German archives, with help from Alexander.

Thalberg also understood the value of the Billy Joel connection. "I knew if I would have done the story about 'Bloch' and 'Schultz,' maybe nobody would have given me the money to do it," she said. But she also saw it as emblematic of what happened to so many families: "Every Jewish family lost everything - if they could save their life."

The Joels - Karl, his wife, Meta, and his son Helmuth (later changed to Howard) - did save their lives, escaping to Switzerland, then eventually entering the United States through Cuba. But "The Joel Files" documents how the noose of Nazism tightened around the family, breaking the proud Karl, who sold his firm - the second-largest textile mail-order business in Germany - after Nazi laws required the "Aryanization" of all Jewish businesses.

It was the Joels' particular misfortune to live in Nuremberg, where their mansion stood just a block away from the site of Nazi rallies. "What is a child supposed to do about that?" Howard asks poignantly in "The Joel Files." "What is a grown-up to do about such things? Withdrawing was the only option." Still hopeful, the family moved to Berlin in 1934.

Estranged for years from Billy (he left the family when the singer was a child, eventually resettling in Austria), Howard is in obvious pain when he recalls his own bitter schoolboy days - a fact that was not lost on his son. "It did give me some understanding of the mystery of the man who is my father," Joel said. "I know my father has a dark area in his life that he doesn't discuss. And I think this has a lot to do with his personality."

Equally fascinating are the Neckermanns themselves. We see file film of old Josef Neckermann, his face a mask of bland self-satisfaction as he reminisces, "It had always been my dream to get involved in the mail-order business...." We see Josef's son, Johannes, telling us that his father was just a driven businessman and "never a Nazi by heart and by convictions." (An avid horseman and eventual Olympic equestrian champion, Josef Neckermann was drawn to the Nazis, one former secretary says, because he was able to ride his horse in Nazi parades.)

And we see the three Neckermann grandchildren - US-educated, attractive and almost totally ignorant of their family history - as they meet with the two Joel brothers in a Vienna cafe.

That meeting seems to have been inconclusive, at least for Billy Joel. "I came away with the sense that they didn't really try in any way," he said. "If I was in their position, I would have to think of a way to rationalize my position in life. If I knew that it was due to another man being taken advantage of, I would have to do a good deal of soul-searching. ...I sensed that a lot of this was new to them, and they didn't know how to deal with it."

The meeting was arranged and taped by Thalberg. But why had Markus, Lukas and Julia Neckermann agreed to see the Joel brothers at all - especially in front of a camera? It was partly for the chance to meet Billy Joel, Thalberg believes. It was the filmmaker who told them of Joel's connection to their own family history. "They said, 'What do you mean - the rock star Billy Joel?'" Lukas Neckermann, in fact, is a huge Billy Joel fan who hosted a radio show devoted to the singer while in college.

If the meeting was something of a disappointment to Billy Joel, the movie wasn't. In fact, he sees in it a series of historical ironies, with the Joels ultimately faring well. After all, if Josef Neckermann hadn't "at least made the pretense of buying my grandfather's business," wouldn't the Nazis have simply expropriated it in the end and sent Karl, Meta and Howard to their deaths?

"In a strange way," mused Billy Joel, "I might owe Neckermann my existence."

"I've learned that the more questions you've answered, the more tabloid stories tend to come out. I made the mistake once of revealing a little about my personal life, and it turned into a tabloid story. It was horrible. That's the last time I'll ever do that. They turned it into a one-note samba, and I was horrified. It was The New York Times Magazine. I assumed they had some journalistic integrity, but I read this story, and it could have been in The Star. It was shocking, and I said, 'That's it. I don't trust anyone anymore.'"

Hmmm, he must trust Joan Jedell just a little bit. He's on her cover.

"That's the reward for it all. Watching that emotional response to the show every evening."

Twyla Tharp's talking, which means you listen.

This brisk, bright 61 year-old woman has been one of the most respected and successful choreographers in the world of modern dance for more than 30 years. Her musical theatre efforts, however, were less triumphant, consisting only of the 1979 Milos Forman film Hair ("It just didn't work") and the flop 1985 stage version of the movie classic Singin' In The Rain ("They told me the script was carved in stone. Well, the show sank like one.")

It's no wonder that when she came up with the idea that the songs of Billy Joel would be the basis for a Broadway show told in dance, she felt a bit nervous.

"A bit? I spent two years staying awake at night thinking that people were going to stay away in droves. What do I know about commercial? I just know what I feel."

And what she felt was that Joel's songs held the key to unlock something that she had needed to say for a long time.

"I wanted to talk about betrayal on a grand scale, the betrayal of a whole nation. You remember how Homer's Iliad begins? 'Sing to me, goddess, of the rage of Achilles.' Well, I wanted to say `Sing to me, goddess, of the rage of the generation that lived through Vietnam.'"

We're sitting on the West Side, in an Italian restaurant, but there's no "bottle of white, bottle of red" on the table. Just a litre of mineral water and a plate of pasta that Tharp seems to inhale, rather than simply eat.

Her conversation only ventures into the past when she's dragged there, and when I mention something she said in her 1992 autobiography, "Push Comes To Shove," she lowers her fork long enough to give me a no-nonsense look."Forget that," she commands, her dark eyes blazing, "I change every 10 years."

And so the woman who grew up in a stern Quaker family who taught her "storytelling was lying," finally learned "to go past that. I knew that I needed a narrative to communicate my vision."

But it all began with Joel's songs. "I sat down one weekend and listened to them again, everything he ever wrote." She lights up with a realization. "You know what his songs are like? They're like shards of pottery. You see, from a shard you can reconstruct the pot, from the pot, you can reconstruct the culture. And that's what I did.

She crafted a tale about three friends who serve in Vietnam and come home, their lives changed. While it's not the fun, "Mamma Mia!" sort of nostalgia ride some people might have been expecting, Tharp is unrepentant.

"Look, I'm all in favour of people being joyous about things, but real art offers you new perception, not just redundant entertainment."

She took her vision to Joel. "He said 'Go for it,'" she remembers, with one of her rare smiles.

"It's all about bringing these guys home. Many of them felt when they came back that they weren't really welcome. Sure, go on a journey, learn on a journey, suffer on a journey, but for God's sake, bring them home!"

The intensity she displays makes it easy to understand where the passion in the second part of the show comes from. But getting there proved to be a problem, as she discovered when it opened last summer in Chicago to confused audiences and negative reviews.

"Just before the first preview, I finally sat back, looked and said 'Oh shit, we don't have it!'"

The fatigue of that period resurfaces in her face. She slams down her fork angrily. "I knew I'd need time to fix the show, but in order for my producers to get the revenue from all those performances in Chicago, I had to endure the criticism of trying out in a highly public place. I told them I wanted to go to Reykjavik, but they wanted Chicago. "So I fixed it," she says, jaw tight. I had all these little bells and whistles. I took them out. Stay with the story, Twyla, that's what will make it work."

She did just that, and when the show finally opened on October 24th, 2002, the critics cheered, the audiences lined up to buy tickets and Billy Joel drops by to see it almost every Friday night.

But Tharp knows there's no such thing as a totally happy ending, and she pushes away her plate.

"I'm worried about this whole business going on right now with Iraq. Some people are taking our show as an allegory about the evil that war does and how we have to keep out of it at all costs. How fucking hard is it to pull yourself up and out again? Do we really have to go through this one more time? Haven't we learned anything?"

The waiter brings the cheque. "Scenes From An Italian Restaurant." Curtain.

"It's really the artist," said Jill Weninger, director of marketing at the Bi-Lo Center in Greenville. "A lot of them do that. They do fan club sales, where they can purchase tickets early."

Weninger said some regular concert-goers are offered the opportunity to buy tickets in the days before the event's announcement.

"That's fairly typical of most arenas," she said.

So, are Elton John and Billy Joel coming or not?

"Well," said Paquette, pausing for a moment, "you know that a show's scheduled."

"Piano Men" Elton John and Billy Joel bring their "Face 2 Face" tour back to the area at 7:30pm May 2nd, 2003 at The Palace of Auburn Hills.

Last year's "Face 2 Face" Tour grossed $65.5 million, good for fourth on Pollstar magazine's list of top-grossing tours, behind Paul McCartney, the Rolling Stones and Cher.

Tickets will sell for $47.50, $87.50 and $197.50. They go on sale at 10am Saturday, January 18th, 2003, at the box office, Ticketmaster outlets, online, and by phone.

Buyers will be limited to eight tickets apiece.

"We're elated at the opportunity to bring two of the biggest names in rock and roll history together again in Indianapolis," says Andy Wilson, publicist for concert promoter Clear Channel Entertainment.

Joel is known for hits such as "It's Still Rock and Roll To Me," "Uptown Girl" and "Just The Way You Are." John has topped the charts with "Candle In The Wind," "Crocodile Rock" and "Philadelphia Freedom."

On their occasional "Face 2 Face" Tours, which began in 1994, the stars sing some selections as duets, as well as cover each other's tunes.

With the $197 price attached to the best seats, Joel and John fall just shy of being the fifth concert to hit the $200 mark in Conseco Fieldhouse's four-year history.

In relation to other stops on the "Face 2 Face" Winter Tour, Indianapolis tickets are comparable to prices set in one of America's largest cities and a bit higher than the going rate in others.

In Houston, tickets range from $196.35 to $46.35. In Dallas, Pittsburgh and Birmingham, AL, the peak price is $175.

"An artist makes all the final decisions on the aspects of a tour, including ticket prices in each individual market," says Pam Fallon, national public relations director for Clear Channel. "The history of the artist in the market - things such as record sales and radio play - is one determining factor."

Joel performed a solo date at Conseco Fieldhouse in December 1999.

All tickets were $49.50. Attendance was a near-sellout at 15,900.

John's most recent local appearance was an April 2000 show at Conseco Fieldhouse. Tickets ranged from $65 to $35. Attendance was 14,500.

"Billy's in love with a gorgeous blonde he met in Boston," a gal pal told the Enquirer. "She really has mended Billy's broken heart and he's talking marriage."

The Enquirer reported last summer that Billy was devastated when his former lover; TV news star Trish Bergin, spurned him to marry another man. Reeling from his loss, Billy began drinking heavily.

On the day pregnant Trish married, Billy checked himself into alcohol rehab at Silver Hill Hospital in New Canaan, Connecticut, and stayed 10 days. After he left rehab, Billy admitted he was lonely and told a reporter he wanted to move to Manhattan to meet women.

But he never made the move - because when he met Anne in Boston, he knew he'd found the woman he was searching for; friends say.

"Billy had to do a make-up concert in Boston in September, performing with Elton John at the FleetCenter," said the pal. "Anne went to the show and a friend took her backstage and introduced her to Billy.

"It was love at first sight."

Soon Billy, 53, was dating Anne, 28 - who works in sales for the posh Ritz-Carlton hotel - and bombarding her with flowers and love notes, the pal said. He bought her a gorgeous pair of diamond earrings," said the pal. "And when Anne flew back to New York for Thanksgiving with her parents, she invited Billy to meet them. Billy was nervous but they liked him and invited him back for a family Christmas.

"Now Billy says Anne has given him a reason to live again."

Buoyed by love, Billy is rebuilding his life, those close to him say.

A friend of Billy told the Enquirer: "We've all been praying for Billy. And now he's in love, and everyone is hoping for a formal engagement and then a spring wedding.

"Billy's daughter Alexa knew her dad was lonely when he suddenly fell for Anne, she saw his spirits change almost overnight. She loves him very much and wants to see him happy - and now her wish may finally have come true."

Alexa, 17, is the product of of Billy's nine-year marriage to Christie Brinkley.

"We were but one family out of countless others whose lives were decimated during these times," Billy Joel wrote in a statement last year about the film. The songwriter describes the making of the "The Joel Files" as a "search for closure." Talking to his long-estranged father, Howard, a US army veteran and former manager with General Motors, about his childhood experience "brought his life into a new perspective for me," Joel wrote.

In fact, Joel reunited with his father in the 1970s and only then learned he had a brother in Vienna. Neither he nor Alexander knew much about their family’s fateful odyssey, until Thalberg started asking questions.

In 1998, she was working on a portrait of Alexander Joel, then 26 and a rising star in Vienna, for her regular television show, "Treffpunkt Kultur" ("Culture Meeting Point"). While looking through photograph albums at Alexander’s parents’ house, Thalberg came across images from the 1930s that showed the courtyard of a factory.

"I saw those photos and I said, 'Hey! What’s this?'" Thalberg told The Jewish Week during a recent trip to New York. "I knew there was something going on, but I couldn’t know, I didn’t know what," she said between sips of a large latte at an Upper West Side restaurant.

A native of East Berlin with family roots in Poland, the filmmaker said that among her generation, "everybody grew up with a little silence, or a big silence. It’s the same whether you’re the grandchild of a Nazi or a Jew. They don’t talk: the parents don’t and the children don’t."

So, during subsequent conversations with Alexander and Howard, Thalberg began gently to probe. "I didn’t want to force it," she said. I would say, 'Hey, tell me about this company.' And one day, at the Joel house, Howard told me more."

The story that emerged is both extraordinary and typical of the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany.

In 1938, Karl Joel, then 49, was running a successful business and living in a fashionable section of Berlin with his wife Meta and 15 year-old son Helmuth (now Howard). A few years earlier, the family had been driven from their hometown of Nuremberg by a smear campaign launched by Julius Streicher, the infamous editor of the virulently anti-Semitic newspaper Der Stuermer.

Boycotts of Jewish businesses were forcing many Jews to sell out at undervalued prices. In 1937, Joel’s business was still profitable, but soon "Aryan suppliers" cut off their shipments and Joel’s goods were marked with a "J" for "Jewish goods." In the summer of 1938, Joel was forced to sell, and through the Aryan lawyer he was required to hire, negotiated a price of 2.3 million Reichmarks for his life’s work. (His lawyers would later estimate the company’s value at six times that amount.)

The purchaser was Josef Neckermann, a 25 year-old Wuerzberg native and Nazi-party member who earlier had bought out the Jewish department store king, Siegmund Ruschkewitz. Without realizing the significance of his actions, Neckermann reportedly wrote in his memoirs, "I just carefully stirred my cup of coffee...and thus became an aryaniser."

Fearing for their lives, the Joels fled to Switzerland. Then, after being swindled by a Berlin city official who had promised to help them get more money from Neckermann, they left for England, then Cuba, and finally New York. There, Karl Joel opened a small store, but his life remained a constant economic struggle.

In Germany, Neckermann maximized on Joel’s successful business, turning production over to the Nazi war effort and even using labor from the Lodz ghetto. After the war, Neckermann served time for having illegally appropriated property during the Nazi reign. Once freed, however, he made his company a household name. Hailed as a postwar industrial leader, Neckermann also won six Olympic medals for horseback riding.

In 1949, Joel successfully sued Neckermann for compensation in a Nuremberg court. After eight years, the parties settled and the files were closed. Only days later, and without legal recourse, Joel discovered a letter proving that Neckermann had cheated him a second time.

(Karl Joel died in the early 1980s at age 92. Josef Neckermann died in 1992, shortly before his 80th birthday.)

Half a century later, Alexander Joel went to the municipal archives in Ansbach, near Nuremberg and uncovered the files that determined his grandfather’s destiny.

The younger Joel bears a strong resemblance to his older sibling, but speaks with a British lilt instead of a Long Island accent, the product of a European upbringing. "The important thing is to not be bitter about what happened," he says in the film. People of his generation, "have to be even more aware of what happened."

But, of course, some people remain passively ignorant.

For Thalberg, one of the most difficult aspects of "The Joel Files" was the meeting in Vienna between Billy and Alexander Joel and the Neckermann grandchildren, Lukas, Markus and Julia.

"They didn’t get it," Thalberg said of the Neckermanns.

Raised in the United States and now living in Germany, they had read their grandfather’s autobiography and knew of the Joel family. They were eve