"I was a reader," says the semi-retired pop and rock hit-maker. "I read high school history textbooks. That's how I got my education, actually, not from school."

When he finally got his own TV, his show of choice was the New York area's late-night "Million Dollar Movie." Every Fourth of July they reran his favorite film, "Yankee Doodle Dandy," with Jimmy Cagney playing the "king of Broadway," George M. Cohan.

"I loved this movie!" Joel blurts, speaking on the phone in his unreformed Bronx/Long Island accent. Cohan, he marvels, "was a performer, a writer, a singer. He played the piano. He did it all. I loved that idea." He launches into a brief Cagney impersonation, crooning, "I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy."

"I thought about going into Broadway," Joel says. "But then I fell in love with rock and roll, and that was the end of that."

The end, that is, until the eminent choreographer Twyla Tharp persuaded Joel to let her score a new dance musical with his songs.

"Movin' Out," featuring the title song and other Joel signatures ("Just The Way You Are," "Scenes From An Italian Restaurant"), as well as a few of his recent classical compositions used as interludes, has been a Tony Award-winning sensation on Cohan's Broadway. Now on the touring circuit, the show arrives Tuesday at San Francisco's Golden Gate Theatre as part of the Best of Broadway series, through August 29th, 2004.

The average age of the dancers in the touring company, Joel reports, is "five to ten years younger than the Broadway show, so they've got a whole other energy. They're more like rock and roll than Broadway people. There's some improvisation, some spontaneity going on.

"They throw themselves all over the place. Bodies are twirled, heads miss the stage by micro-inches."

The dancing, he says, is one of the big reasons for the show's success. "It's so intense. It's dangerous, scary. I'm waiting for an ankle or a neck to be broken." A rambunctious performer himself, he acknowledges that he has gotten hurt multiple times onstage.

"Are you kidding? I've broken more ankles, fingers, had a broken nose, black eyes.... I've fallen off stages, then you limp back on. It makes for good showbiz. Sometimes I cut myself, and I'm bleeding on the (piano) keys. The camera closes in - 'Look, he's bleeding!'"

Tharp's choreography for "Movin' Out" is a chaotic mix of styles. "It's actually ballet mixed with jazz, modern dance, Broadway, rock, the 'Three Stooges'," Joel says. "Twyla is a genius. She found all these rhythms in my music that I knew, and musicians knew, were there, but they had never been recognized. Counter-rhythms, syncopation, cross-rhythms, all kinds of movement she found to choreograph that was inherent in the song. She's bringing that to a visual level."

Tharp told Joel that she could always extract his classical piano tendencies from his pop and rock songs. "You could take 'Uptown Girl' and deconstruct it," Joel says, "and it could be a Haydn piece without lyrics." Ever animated in conversation, he scat-sings the melody as chamber music - "Dee dee dee, deedlyadoopadoopa dee dee dee."

He admits he was initially skeptical with the choreographer's idea for the show. Too many times he'd fended off requests to use his songs theatrically. The requests were always for the same songs - "Uptown Girl," "We Didn't Start The Fire."

"'Piano Man' - I've heard that so many times," he says with a groan. "Good God, that's a nightmare."

But Tharp, a longtime fan, saw the narrative possibilities in many of Joel's lesser-known songs as well. "Twyla showed me a list of the songs she wanted to use, and I said, 'Well, that's fantastic. Most people don't even know those songs.'"

Joel, who has toured in recent years with fellow piano-pounder Elton John, says he has a continuing argument with Sir Elton.

"He'll say, 'Why don't you put out some more new albums?' " (Joel's last album of pop songs was 1993's "River of Dreams," which concludes with the telling title "Famous Last Words.")

"And I'll say, 'Why don't you put out some less albums? There are generations of people who don't even know (Elton's) 'Madman Across The Water' or 'Tumbleweed Connection,' and they'd love it."

Some New York-area radio stations have begun playing Joel's old album tracks - "Summer, Highland Falls," "I've Loved These Days" - because they're in the show. "People think they're new songs," he says. "It's incredible."

Some observers have noted that the show, with its Vietnam backdrop, is pointing out the ways in which the singer, never a particular critical favorite, could be considered a voice of his generation. That's a mantle he'd just as soon avoid.

"I never was anything other than a literal lyricist. I'm too damn literal for my liking.

"I liked Hendrix, Dylan, Lennon - guys who were writing about '4,000 holes in Blackburn, Lancashire,' or 'the pump don't work 'cause the vandals took the handle.'"

Like Bruce Springsteen, he says, he has always written about what he knows. He improvises a gruff, comical Springsteenian lyric: "I get up in the mornin' and wash my face/Go downstairs to the usual place/Have mah eggs and mah bacon too/There's my baby and I love you."

"Bruce writes about what goes on in Bruce's day," he says. "Does that make you a voice of a generation? I don't know. I do know he's looked on by his fans as a prophet. I would not want to have to live up to that."

Youthful ambition, energy and arrogance are just that, he says - for the youthful. For Joel, songs came more freely when he was more willing to bleed for them.

"For me, writing is painful. I liken it metaphorically to giving birth. I don't know physically what it's actually like to go into labor," he says, "but I have had kidney stones."

That's why he's getting such satisfaction from the success of "Movin' Out." "Look, it's a miracle to me that I was able to write these things in the first place. If somebody finds another purpose for them, another meaning for them, that's miraculous, too.

"I'm not the end-all, be-all," he says. "I just wrote the thing."

And he's enjoying himself so much, he's toying with the idea of writing his own stage musical. Just as he felt way back when he was a long-haired scrapper. Broadway, rock and roll, classical - "It's all essentially the same thing," he says. "You go up on the stage, and you kick butt."

"I've always been very perverse," says the feisty 63 year-old director-choreographer. "I think anything goes. Don't you? If it works and it's fun, then that's good."

Indeed, if you study her work, you'll see Tharp has always had a taste for breaking the rules, blending pop and classical, high and low art. Since she started out in 1965, she has made more than 100 dances to music as diverse as Beethoven and the Beach Boys. That sense of populism has not always sat well with the dance snobs of the world.

"Yeah, look, a lot of the world of classical art, whether it's music, painting, photography, dance, can get rigid and stultified in its ways and become inbred," she says pointedly. "That's what happens. But in order for it to continue to evolve, it needs to have infusions from new kinds of worlds."

"Movin' Out" traces the lives of six friends through the chaos of two decades, from 1967 to 1987. We follow their trials and tribulations from high school through the Vietnam War and into the Reagan era. It's a cross between a story ballet and a musical, with a plot told only in dance and music. The score sweeps through more than two dozen vintage Joel tunes, from "Big Shot" to "Only The Good Die Young."

"It's not really musical theatre per se," says Michael Miller, interim executive producer of the American Musical Theatre of San Jose. "There's no book. There's no spoken word. But it is still an absolutely thrilling show."

The Seattle Times went so far as to call it "a work of stunningly gymnastic physical virtuosity and visceral passion."

Of course, not everyone has reacted with such enthusiasm.

"Tharp's steps and combinations are too often predictable, derivative and repetitive. Rather than inject her peculiar originality, she seems content to go where others (notably Jerome Robbins) have gone before," says the Rocky Mountain News. "A word of warning: Those who can't get into a Billy Joel state of mind are in for a long evening."

During her first few years out, Tharp eschewed all music in her pieces. Now, she's embracing some of the most familiar songs out there, melodies that have transcended their heavy AM radio rotation to become part of the pop culture vernacular.

"The audience comes in feeling as though they know Billy's songs, and they do, and in some instances I take advantage of that," she says, "but with other songs, I use them for a whole new purpose, and I told Billy if I use it this way, it might destroy the song, and he said OK. He's been terrific. He believes his music is strong and can sustain all blows."

This much is certain. Tharp has never paid much mind to those who don't get her work. She's more concerned with raising the bar for herself and turning new audiences onto the glories of dance than catering to the expectations of the critics. (For the record, it was her son who first suggested that if she really wanted to reach the masses, she should do a rock and roll piece.)

"Reaching a broader audience is something I have always been concerned about," she says. "Everybody is creative, and dance can be understood by everyone.... Dance does not have to be just for the elite."

"Movin' Out" takes these familiar lyrical faces and puts them into one jam-packed story about failed American idealism, yet with a hopeful ending. It's what you get when you take Billy Joel's greatest hits and attempt to meld them together to make one cohesive plot.

High school love fizzled out for Brenda (Holly Cruikshank) and Eddie (Ron Todorowski), yet high-school sweethearts Judy and James (Julieta Gros and Matthew Dibble) from the songs "Why Judy Why" and "James" find marital bliss, personifying white gloves and American pie.

Brenda leaves the neighborhood only to come back as the highfalutin "Uptown Girl," wowing the old neighborhood as a thoroughly modern woman. She disses her old flame Eddie for a fling with his best friend, Tony (David Gomez).

"Ouch," thinks Eddie, but not for long, as he and the boys are sent to fight in the Vietnam War. Emotional struggles ensue for all the characters as they deal with Vietnam and its terrible aftermath.

Straying away from musical production mainstays such as a singing cast and an orchestra pit, "Movin' Out" is a creative endeavor.

Led by lead vocalist Darren Holden, the "orchestra" plays from a second-story stage. Holden is the production's sole narrator, essentially a ventriloquist for the dancers below, using only Joel's lyrics to push the story along.

Meanwhile, the dancers play out the scenes from Joel's songs on the main stage, which unfortunately splits the production into what feels like two separate shows: a concert and a dance.

A very choppy plot and a show completely devoid of character development is the unintended result.

Choreographed by Tony award winner Twyla Tharp, the dancing in this show is masterful and thoughtful, attentive to the strength and elegance of the human form.

Dazzling dance numbers, such as "Goodnight Saigon," Joel's emotional ode to the Vietnam War, best articulate the strengths and weaknesses of "Movin' Out."

It is an extraordinary display of dance and choreography, but nothing more. The charisma Joel's characters find in his songs fails to materialize in their stage personas.

The only unity between the songs and dance is the choreography, which doesn't make the show terrible, just one-dimensional.

The struggles these characters endure in Joel's lyrics simply do not pack the same emotional punch on stage.

Brenda and Eddie can really only pantomime to us their struggle with drugs or post-traumatic stress syndrome, to the beat of some really great Joel songs.

The songs came first and the plot came second, which equates to turning points in the storyline that tend to not make sense or feel rushed.

Eddie, a fallen veteran, goes from being a heroin addict who frolics with strippers to a Puma-wearing, Marina-jogging young professional all in the span of three songs.

The ensemble, while incredibly talented, is a nothing more than a flashy accessory so that the production can make its way through what feels like a greatest hits CD.

It is definitely enjoyable and fun, but it does not break down the musical theatrical barriers it wishes it could.

"There hasn't been a group like Blind Faith in years," he said.

"There's a reason for that," Sting replied.

There was no mention of Asia, The Traveling Wilburys or the current supergroup Velvet Revolver. Billy hummed the old Sam & Dave hit "You Got Me Humming," while Sting tried on shirts for the show.

We offered to leave, but he said, "Don't go, really. I don't like to be alone. I was left alone a lot as a child."

It's in his book, you know.

He entertained an old tour driver, whom he was very happy to see again.

"I was afraid to come backstage before tonight," said the driver.

"Never be afraid," said Sting. "You're family."

By then Sting was wearing a tapered black silk shirt with large white cuffs. He has the lanky body of a 19 year-old boy, which is very depressing if you're wearing Gap polo shirts and thinking about getting a Carvel softie before the show starts.

He also has a head of very thick, full, blonde hair with no sign of a forming bald spot (although there is some receding temple stuff going on, always nice to see). It turns out that the recipe for fine living is yoga, sex, and a little red wine, plus the love of a good woman and six children to keep in line.

Sting will be on tour through next June 2005. When he told me this, I blurted out, "Huh? Why?"

He replied, "That's my job. Why do you write?"

The answer, of course, is to pay the bills. By now Sting has enough money to never record or tour again. He has a massive apartment in New York, a beach house in Malibu, a castle in England and a villa in Florence.

The royalties from P. Diddy's remake of "Every Breath You Take" ("I'll Be Missing You") alone could keep him in white cuffs forever. But that's the deal, you see - he likes to work.

Billy, who hasn't released an album in 11 years, told us he's working on "sketches" of songs.

"Sketches?" Sting said with a raised eyebrow.

He's released an album every two years since breaking up the Police in 1982. He has three Oscar nominations for best song. He wrote songs for the failed Disney cartoon, "The Emperor's New Groove." Sketches?

Around then, Billy suggested that he play something in Sting's show. They decided he could commandeer the B3 organ during "Every Breath You Take." The crowd would go crazy seeing their local Long Island hero.

Right before the show started, Sting drank a cup of hot tea in the wings. Any special reason?

"No," he said, with a smirk.

He just likes tea. Where's the mythology when you really need it? He made some alien bird calls to loosen up his voice. That was it. No big deal.

Dry ice suddenly billowed up from the stage and the house lights went down.

"It's time," he said, and wandered out to his starting position like a man opening a kiosk or a shoe store for a day's work.

Over the course of two hours, Sting's extraordinary energy level never flagged. He sang most of his hits - "Roxanne," "If I Ever Lose My Faith In You," "Fields of Gold" - and performed a hot duet with Lennox on "We'll Be Together." The crowd roared for "Englishman In New York."

I remembered how back in 1978, programmers at our local New York rock radio station - where rock lived but was dying; refused to play "Roxanne" because they couldn't pigeonhole it. Now it's like "God Bless America."

And Billy? He had such a good time that when "Every Breath You Take" came to its extended conclusion, Sting had to drag him off the stage by the lapel. He may even have gotten an autograph.

"Movin' Out" is a brilliantly upbeat and exciting musical that weaves the upbeat, soulful and gritty musical style of one of America's current pop music legends, Billy Joel, into a scintillating tapestry of modern dance formulated by preeminent dance stylist/choreographer, Twyla Tharp. What is truly unique about this musical is that it contains no spoken dialogue other than the words of the songs, sung by a piano playing song stylist and accompanied by a full rock band on a loft above the dance performers, who act out the words of the songs on the stage below.

When this show opened on Broadway in 2003, audiences and critics alike found a difficult time categorizing the show, as this was something new in musical theatre - new territory, new expression and a new experience. Like the working class people in "West Side Story," the characters in "Movin' Out" represent the music, lifestyle, trials and travails of blue-collar working class society.

The story evolves around young people just graduating high school, breaking into work ethic in the local auto garage, or factory or five and dime when the Vietnam War begins. Brenda and Eddie, former king and queen of the prom, are currently past tense, a doomed relationship, and they are joined on stage by sweethearts, James and Judy, who are making plans for marriage. Their friend Tony is looking for love, and through the breakup of Brenda and Eddie, he finds great potential and future hope in the newly liberated Brenda.

War takes the men away and when it is over, some of them return, some do not. Those who return are not the same as those who left, and neither are the relationships. The nightmares persist and love must be re-discovered, and through it all the songs of Billy Joel artfully guide us through these changing times, bringing the characters to life.

I have long enjoyed Joel's gutsy, edgy and romantic music. This musical incorporates 28 songs including such favorites as "Just the Way You Are," "The Longest Time," "Uptown Girl," "She's Got A Way," "Big Shot," "Captain Jack," "An Innocent Man" and "Only The Good Die Young."

Tharp interviewed thousands of dancers before she narrowed it down to the 32 who provide the current principals, ensemble and swings. There is one principal cast (three main characters) for Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday evenings and a separate cast who perform Friday evenings and Thursday, Saturday and Sunday matinees. The cast we experienced included Ron Todorowski as Eddie, Holly Cruikshank as Brenda, David Gomez as Tony, Julieta Gros as Judy, Mathew Dibble as James and Jason DePinto as Sergeant O'Leary and the drill sergeant.

These dancers are in every sense actors and they deliver the feelings and visual experience that make this one of the most fantastic productions I have ever seen, certainly of this type. While all of these people are truly beautiful, Julieta Gros and Holly Cruikshank are not only pluperfect dancers and entertainers, they are gorgeous women as well. In the same category, the male leads are equally good looking and talented performers. Darren Holden is the piano man vocalist in the cast we saw and he is almost a dead-ringer, in sound and performance, of the real Billy Joel. I was completely thrilled by this spectacular production.

"Fosse" Tony Award nominee Desmond Richardson will join the troupe of Broadway's "Movin' Out," August 21st, 2004 while original cast member Keith Roberts recuperates from an injury sustained last month, according to a production spokesperson.Understudy Ian Carney has performed the role of Tony which earned Roberts a 2003 Tony Award nomination.

Richardson was Tony-nominated for his Broadway debut in the 1999 musical Fosse. A principal dancer with American Ballet Theatre, Alvin Ailey and the Frankfurt Ballet, he has also appeared on Broadway in The Look of Love and on film in "Chicago." The dancer is also co-director of the dance company Complexions.

The current cast includes original cast members John Selya, Ashley Tuttle, Scott Wise and Michael Cavanaugh as well as Nancy Lemenager ("Never Gonna Dance") in the role of Brenda and Kurt Froman as James. The ensemble also includes Michael Balderrama, Ted Banfalvi, Aliane Baquerot, Timothy W Bish, Christopher Body, Alexander Brady, Stuart Capps, Ron DeJesus, Carolyn Doherty, Melissa Downey, Pascale Faye, Lisa Gajda, Philip Gardner, Philip Gardner, Lorin Latarro, Brian Letendre, Matt Loehr, Tiger Martina, Mabel Modrono, Jill Nicklaus, Rika Okamoto, Eric Otto, Meg Paul, Justin Peck, Karine Plantadit-Bageot and Lawrence Rabson.

The band features Wade Preston, Henry Haid, Tommy Byrnes, Kevin Osborne, Dennis Delgaudio, Greg Smith, Chuck Bürgi, John Scarpulla, Scott Kreitzer and Barry Danielian.

The design team for "Movin' Out" includes Santo Loquasto (scenic), Suzy Benzinger (costume), Donald Holder (lighting) with Brian Ruggles and Peter Fitzgerald (sound). Stuart Malina handles musical continuity and supervision.

"Movin' Out" creators Billy Joel and Twyla Tharp won Tony Awards for orchestrations (with Stuart Malina) and choreography, respectively. The show, opened October 24th, 2002 on Broadway, launched its National Tour from Detroit's Fisher Theatre, January 27th, 2004. James L Nederlander, Hal Luftig, Scott E Nederlander, Terry Allen Kramer, Clear Channel Entertainment and Emanuel Azenberg produce.

The bookless show, currently residing at Broadway's Richard Rodgers Theatre, uses Joel's song lyrics and Tharp's choreography to tell the story of six friends and lovers across three decades through love, war and loss. There is no dialogue and all songs are performed by the pianist-singer, who sings non-stop and heads an on-stage band during the show.