"Movin' Out," just your typical tour de force for a rock and roll band and dance troupe, officially opened Thursday at the Fisher Theatre. Considering how much physical, emotional and even intellectual heat they generate on and above the stage it's a wonder the ice outside hasn't melted away.

The dancers are the ones on the stage, although they spend brief, glorious moments above it. Permanently ensconced on a platform high above are singer-pianist Darren Holden and a full-throttle rock band doing a splendid simulacrum (not an imitation) of a Billy Joel performance.

Using more than two-dozen songs by Joel, director/choreographer Twyla Tharp created "Movin' Out," a fluid, eloquent dance narrative about a group of friends - and by extension, America - before, during and after the Vietnam War. The men go off to war, and even the ones who make it back don't make it all the way back. At least not initially.

Powerful, uplifting, heartbreaking, sometimes all at once, "Movin' Out" opened on Broadway in October 2002 and is still running. The national tour is beginning its life in Detroit. At least the equal of its older Broadway brother, the touring production has several principal dancers from the New York show. As on Broadway, six dancers alternate in the lead roles of Brenda, Eddie, and Tony.

Ron Todorowski, who played Eddie on opening night is simply astonishing: agile, expressive, acrobatic, indefatigable. Similarly, Holly Cruikshank as Brenda, and David Gomez as Tony, bring more than the requisite dancers' tools to their roles.

More than impressive, too, is the seamless coordination between the band and the dancers - all the more amazing because, as Billy Joel says, most of the sound goes out to the audience; the dancers may as well be listening to the speaker on a TV set. Still, there are transcendent times when everything is so in sync that movements appear to be propelled by notes, not nerves, muscles and sinews.

There are other times, slinky times, when dancers seem to become invertebrates. Don't be misled, "Movin' Out" has plenty of backbone. Here in Detroit, and as "Movin' Out" moves out across the country, audiences will come away with a fresh appreciation for Joel's songs and a deeper understanding of the Joel songs they thought they knew. For theatregoers unfamiliar with the supercharged imagination of Twyla Tharp, it could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

"I'll be my dad's fiancée's maid of honor," said the soft-spoken teen, who's obviously nonplussed by the gaping age difference between her 54 year-old dad and his 22 year-old intended.

It's probably better that she keeps it to herself: It's his life, after all.

"Kate and I have a lot of things we're doing this year, so I wouldn't expect the wedding soon," Joel said yesterday in Bryant Park, where he attended Oscar de la Renta's much-anticipated collection - his first fashion show ever - with the two women in his life.

"We're just here because my fiancée wanted to come," Joel said, offering the same explanation he did this summer when he turned up at the polo matches in Bridgehampton and onlookers said, "Billy Joel, horse guy?"

"I may buy her something," Joel said, adding that the scene in Bryant Park was "nuts."

Joel, 54, and Lee, 22, were engaged last month on St. Bart's. "We're taking it slowly," Lee said from her front row seat in the tents.

Though the couple played their romance close to the vest, Alexa Ray, 18, hinted she had her own motives for keeping an eye on Oscar de la Renta's dresses.

"We may end up wearing Oscar at the wedding," she said. "Kate and I are both girly-girls, so we talk about fashion sometimes."

And she left little doubt about where the wedding would take place.

"Well, my dad's 'Mr. Long Island,' so I'm sure they'll do it there."

"I was rolling my 'R's and sounding very Irish," he mugged with the exaggerated 'R's. "So Tommy Burns, Billy Joel's guitarist and musical director of the show, made me hang out for three nights in a row with the Long Island guys in the band. I also had to watch a video of 'The Sopranos,' which I kept replaying, pausing, replaying. I became addicted to the show - if you know what I mean," Holden said in a distinct tough-guy voice before bursting out laughing.

Drinking plenty of tea and honey, Holden will sing 26 Joel songs during the show. He's packing his warm scarves to wrap around his throat for his Hartford visit. By the way, Holden has appeared at the Bushnell in the Irish Specactulars. And yes, Joel did jump up on stage during one of his surprise visits and sat next to Holden. "You take it from here," said Holden, who was in awe of his long-time idol. Without missing a beat, he moved over and let the Grammy-winning artist perform his own kind of magic.

"Billy Joel does like to make surprise visits at different cities during the tour. I wouldn't be surprised if he turned up at one of the Hartford shows," Holden said.

Todorowski, a principal dancer in the show, also comes directly from the Broadway cast. He was also in "Footloose" on Broadway and in "Cats" on tour. He considers the show a great moment for dance. "It's physically demanding, but the actors tell the story through dance so it's challenging as an actor as well," Todorowski said.

All in all, the show sounds like a super hit in the works. Just don't say I didn't tell you so.

"For some people it takes the first two numbers to get adjusted," said "Movin' Out's" dance supervisor, Kim Craven. "In musical theatre you normally hear a song and then you hear speaking. In this show you hear the rock and roll band and then you notice that the lyrics are being performed on the stage below.

"I have been sitting in the house watching the show for months, and it's funny listening to people's reactions. It's like, "Wait, this isn't what I was expecting, but, boy, is it wonderful.'"

"Movin' Out" began taking shape in summer 2000, when Tharp had the idea to create a two-hour show based on Joel's music. When she approached Joel about it, she asked him whatever happened to Brenda and Eddie, the "...popular steadies..." from his 1977 hit "Scenes From An Italian Restaurant?"

Joel hadn't given much thought to the high school sweethearts after penning the song, he admitted. But after he watched a videotape of choreography Tharp had prepared to some of his music, he gave her his blessing to tell their story - and gave her access to his entire song catalog.

From it, Tharp developed a narrative about the intersecting lives of six Long Island friends before, during and after the Vietnam War.

Originally referred to as the "Thoel Project," "Movin' Out" premiered in Chicago to mostly unfavorable reviews. "(Critics) used words that had never been attached to my work before, words like 'mess' and 'risible,'" Tharp wrote in her book "The Creative Habit." "The show was in trouble."

So back to the studio she went. Tharp's revisions included cutting secondary characters, pulling songs - there are 24 in its present incarnation - and focusing the central conflict.

When "Movin' Out" opened on Broadway, critics were praising it, and audiences were flocking to it.

"Anything can work well as long as it's done by extreme professionals," Dibble said of the show's success. "That's what Twyla has brought together. She has brought together the best band and some of the best dancers in the world. And of course, you have one of the best choreographers in the world.

"When all the right ingredients are in the cake, something good should come out. It doesn't always, but I believe it has with this."

Like many of "Movin' Out's" cast members, Dibble comes to musical theatre from the ranks of classical ballet. In 1998, he and four other male dancers at London's Royal Ballet made headlines in the British press when they tendered their resignations moments before curtain call.

"It was a very shaky time at the (Royal) Opera House," he said, explaining his decision to leave. "We weren't sure whether it was going to close down. As you know, careers are very short in dance, so you have to take all the opportunities you can get."

That opportunity led Dibble to Japan, where he became a founding member of K Ballet. Three years later, opportunity knocked again - or rather, rang.

Twyla Tharp was on the phone. Would he like to join her concert troupe? She asked. Dibble had worked with her years before, when she set "Westerly Round," her sunny homage to American square dance, on the Royal Ballet.

"I literally packed my suitcase and off I came - that quick," he recalled. His reaction sums up a commonly held sentiment in the dance world: When you have a chance to work with the diva of American modern dance, you'd be a fool to refuse.

After Dibble performed with Twyla Tharp Dance for nearly a year, she invited him to join the touring cast of "Movin' Out," which arrives at Shea's after a three-week run in Detroit. He plays the role of James, from Joel's song of the same name.

At rehearsals, Tharp set up a lending library of movies about the Vietnam War. She required each dancer to read a book about the conflict. To make sure the men correctly conveyed military movement she invited a Marine sergeant to drill them.

"Twyla felt that they had to be accurate and really know what they were doing, especially for the Vietnam veterans watching the show," said dance supervisor Craven, who also understudies all the female dance roles. "She wanted the gravity of the situation to be on stage."

Craven has come to expect such intensity and attention to detail from Tharp, whom she describes as a perfectionist.

"She could spend a half-hour on a series of eight counts until she gets it how she wants it. On the other hand, she can pull back and have such a broad perspective. So it's just going back and forth. Her strengths just come at you from every direction."

Before Broadway beckoned, Craven was a dancer in the Pennsylvania Ballet. She quit in 1994, after the director told her that she would never dance the plum roles. At a crossroads, Craven decided to move to Los Angeles, where she studied tap, jazz and voice before returning back East and landing her first Broadway gigs in "Mamma Mia!" and "On The Town."

In so doing she joined a growing number of ballet dancers who have made the leap into the more commercial, and more lucrative, world of musical theatre.

"With 'Fosse,' with 'Chicago' and with the 'Swan Lake' that came to Broadway briefly, (musical theatre) is more credible and more legitimate in ballet dancers' minds," Craven said.

"It's a lateral move now, especially with for this show. Twyla's name in ballet companies is respected and revered, so there's credibility when you say you're leaving a company to work on her show.

"And it's so fun to be able to do ballet-based movements to rock and roll. Artistically it gives some freedom to ballet dancers who still love to dance and aren't ready to completely give up their pointe shoes.

When she looks back on the difficult decision she made a decade ago, Craven marvels at how far she's come.

"My transition was almost out of a dead-end position. And now, in retrospect, it's such a blessing. If I had stayed where I was, I don't think I would have been working at Twyla Tharp's side."

Now that's movin' up.

"Don't call it dance!" Tharp barks. "Just don't do it!"

Unfortunately, he's already done it. That's why Tharp's playfully clutching her chair's armrests and digging her cowboy boots into the carpet.

Let's see. "Movin' Out" won two Tony Awards last year. It combines Tharp's choreography with Billy Joel's music. So her visitor offers another possibility: It's a musical?

"No!" Tharp says. "Don't call it that either!"

Tharp is not now speaking as the production's director, which she is, but as its promoter. And she's got a problem.

Call it the dilemma of dance.

The art form is not something the widespread public often pays to see. And in this regard, Tharp says, dance has done itself a disservice. It has embraced its image as an elitist art, harking back to days when ballet was primarily performed in the courts of kings.

"Dance and dancers often want not to be understood," Tharp says. "They want to be the aristocracy. I want the technique of the aristocracy. I don't need their attitude."

That's just ballet. Mention modern dance to most folks, and you get a completely different response: "Huh?"

Few understand it. Fewer intentionally see it.

"People are intimidated because dance has sought to intimidate them," Tharp says.

Tharp, who has created hundreds of dances in a four-decade career, knows all about this - obtuse dance, movement as abstract art.

"I can go there as well as anybody," Tharp says, her voice rising, her hands waving. "Some of my early work is totally incomprehensible! I made it that way! I want it that way! It will stay that way!"

Tharp pauses.

"But I don't always want to be incomprehensible," she adds.

Now is one of those times for comprehension. "Movin' Out" is a big Broadway production. Denizens of dance aren't nearly numerous enough to support the multimillion-dollar show.

This is a job for the masses. But for people to apply, the job description must be masked, or at least cleverly marketed.

Saying the show is dance just won't do.

Tharp discusses how she dealt with this regarding "Movin' Out" in her new book, "The Creative Habit."

"The realities of the marketplace demanded that we call what we were presenting 'a musical,'" she writes. "When you're charging Broadway theater prices and trying to fill Broadway-sized houses, it makes the money people nervous to call what you're putting onstage 'dance,' or worse, 'full-length ballet,' even if you can work the word rock into the billing."

Whatever the public's problem with dance may be, Tharp offers a solution in "Movin' Out." It is a merger of music and movement, a new style of storytelling.

"Our goal is, Billy Joel lures them and we don't disappoint them," Tharp says.

Cold Call To Joel

A musical it ain't. "Movin' Out" is devoid of dialogue, though not of words.

Those are found in the lyrics of the production's 24 Joel songs, which are performed by a 10-member band and are connected by a 26-member cast of speechless characters who create narrative through the universal language of dance.

The idea developed one warm day in the summer of 2000. Tharp woke with a song in her head. It was Joel's "Scenes From An Italian Restaurant."

"...Brenda and Eddie were the popular steadies
And the king and the queen at the prom
Riding around with the car top down
And the radio on

Nobody looked any finer
Or was more of a hit at the 'Parkway Diner'
We never knew we could want more than that out of life
Surely Brenda and Eddie would always know how to survive..."

A question came to Tharp: Whatever happened to Brenda and Eddie?

The question consumed her. It was all she thought about. Tharp wanted an answer, and sought it from the source: Joel.

Tharp had never met the man, but had long listened to his music, which she considered quite danceable. Now she made a cold call to Joel. She had an idea, she told him. She wanted to show him.

But first, Tharp spent weeks researching Joel's music and choreographing dances to his songs. Then she offered him a 20-minute videotape of the result.

May I use your music for a Broadway production? Tharp asked. Yes, Joel said.

"Movin' Out" was born.

The 'Football Audience'

Now, two years into its life, it's moving around the country on National Tour.

So if dance doesn't draw the masses, why does "Movin' Out" manage?

"It communicates," Tharp says. "You know, it has a visceral connection to people who are not aficionados. Let's just call them the football audience."

Esoteric stuff won't sell. These people need narrative.

"Crash into stuff," Tharp says. "Get the ball across the line. They'll get it."

Supply a story. Make dance the means to an end.

You've got five main characters: Brenda and Eddie, Anthony, Judy, and James. These are all names that appear in Joel's songs, all of which tell stories about growing up on Long Island.

Tharp puts the characters together. In two acts, over two hours, with costumes and props, she makes the songs reflect their times.

She tells a story, from 1965 to 1984, about coming of age, graduating from high school, fighting in Vietnam and, in its aftermath, yearning for understanding, and a return to normalcy.

"I think most people are more comfortable with a deliberate story," Tharp says. "I think most people want to be able to identify themselves on stage."

That, in part, Tharp says, is the appeal of "Movin' Out." It's about us, Americans, living, loving and dying, and struggling in between.

"I asked Billy Joel, 'Do Brenda and Eddie speak to one another 20 years later?'" Tharp says. "He said, 'I don't know. But I'd be interested to find out.'"

Tharp decides they do speak to one another. However, she says, "after 20 years a lot has gone down."

Making Dance Pay

As director, Tharp established two overriding goals at the outset of the production: "tell a story" and "make dance pay."

One, as we mentioned, is more easily achieved than the other. Usually, Tharp says, her company performs "on a shoestring," even though she's at the pinnacle of dance.

Tharp has lectured and performed around the world, and choreographed for movies including Hair, Ragtime, Amadeus and White Knights. She won two Emmys for a TV special starring Mikhail Baryshnikov. Her professional dance career goes back 41 years.

Tharp's dance beginning came at age 4 in San Bernardino, California. Tharp's mother encouraged Twyla, the oldest of four children, to take dance clases: ballet, jazz, tap, and modern.

In 1960, Tharp moved to New York to attend Barnard College, where she worked with the trailblazing titans of modern dance, Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham. In 1963, she joined the Paul Taylor Dance Company, where she stayed two years before establishing her own company, for which she has created 130 dances.

"Movin' Out" is essentially a compilation of Tharp's best choreography.

"It's encyclopedic, really," Tharp says. "There are bits and pieces of this, that and the other thing in there.

"Why did I do that? Because I know these are pieces that work. They're like kitchen recipes you've already tried. They're in there."

Most people, however, haven't tried Tharp's recipes. The presentation was apparently the problem - dance as dance, not as musical or movement-driven story. Or whatever "Movin' Out" is.

"It's better marketing," Tharp says. "And it's a concept that can be marketed..."

"It's not setting out to challenge people's expectations about what dance is," Tharp says. "It's about creating an experience they'll find moving."

It's raw and rhythmic athleticism, Tharp says. And, she adds, it's something to which everyone can relate.

"People will come to me and say, 'Look, I know nothing about dance,'" Tharp says. "I'll say, 'Stop right there. You got out of bed this morning, and you walk.'"

"'You know all you need to know about dance."

"She goes, 'Listen, what ever happened to Brenda and Eddie in the Italian restaurant?'"

"And I said, 'I don't know.'"

"She goes, 'What happened to Anthony from the grocery store?'"

"I said, 'I don't know.'"

He knows now. Brenda, Eddie, Anthony, James, Judy - characters Joel invented in songs - live and breathe in "Movin' Out," the dance narrative that Tharp fashioned around more than two dozen songs, not necessarily related, that Joel wrote in the '70s, '80s and '90s. The show opened on Broadway in 2002, earned Tony Awards for Tharp and Joel and continues to run.

The National Tour, which will ultimately play more than 30 cities before "Movin' Out" to Asia, began Tuesday at Detroit's Fisher Theatre and continues through February 15th, 2004.

"Movin' Out's" focal point is the Vietnam War, and director-choreographer Twyla Tharp says she made the show for veterans.

"No group of warriors has ever been drafted and then treated when they came back as though they'd been mercenaries - whether it's Huns or Visigoths or Romans, I don't care who," she says. "That's a major betrayal, and I think it was very misguided and it was most unfortunate for that generation of men. It was a great tragedy."

Not many people invoke Huns and Visigoths while talking about a show that really rocks. But that's Tharp, who has created dances to be performed to music as disparate as that of Beethoven, the Beach Boys, Philip Glass, Brahms, stride pianist Willie "The Lion" Smith and art rocker David Byrne.

In conceiving "Movin' Out," Tharp found a key piece of inspiration in a 3,000 year-old work of literature. She and Joel met on a Thursday and, over the weekend that followed, she listened to all his CDs. "On Monday I called him. I said, 'I have it, here's how it goes.'"

Then she said she read him a line: "Sing to me, muse, of the rage of Achilles." It is the beginning of Homer's Iliad.

"And the muse," Tharp recalled telling Joel, "would be you, Billy, and the rage of Achilles would be a generation of American men, some of whom are from Long Island."

That's Joel's home turf.

"So then it was grounded," Tharp says, "and I knew where I had to take things."

Joel let her. "That," he says in a phone interview, "was the extent of my collaboration."

Directing dancers too young to remember much, if anything, about the war in Vietnam, Tharp had some teaching to do.

For both the Broadway and touring company she brought in researchers. She had Special Forces personnel do military drills and describe some of their experiences.

The dancers may have no words to speak, but "they're prepared just as an actor is," says Tharp. The movements are their text.

Tharp envisioned "Movin' Out" as a reconciliation, "as a sort of binding or at least acknowledging that that rift in our culture was over, that division between the demonstrators and the vets - that the time had come to acknowledge that we could take it out from under the rug."

It's not a lesson about the past but if, once they catch their collective breath, playgoers start talking about it, Tharp would be pleased.

"We have history for fact," she says. "We have theatre for emotion. I like that."

"Movin' Out" uses Billy Joel songs to tell the story of five American teenagers caught up in the Vietnam War and its aftermath. The story is told through the Joel tunes, the choreography and the dancers in a blend of ballet, hip-hop, jazz and modern dance.

Dancing in the show six times a week for more than a year means that Selya has a "carousel of injuries." He will stick with the show "as long as my body can do it," he said.

"I'm trying to learn to live a life," Joel says from his new $22 million brick manor home on Long Island. "I don't feel the emphasis needs to be my career anymore. Getting engaged (to 22 year-old PBS restaurant correspondent Kate Lee) has something to do with it. I worked hard and now I want some personal life. It's time now."

"It got to the point," the 54 year-old Joel says, "that even with all the success that I had I felt like Willie Loman in 'Death of A Salesman.' There I am in another hotel room staring up at another ceiling in another city knowing I'm going to get on another plane to another town to another concert. It wasn't fun.

"And the whole point in the beginning was not money, not fame. It was meeting girls and having fun and making this great music. I said, 'I don't want to live the rest of my life like this. I want another kind of life.' So that's where I'm at. It's where I've been for a while now. Trying to find the right relationship. The right person. We all want that happy ending."

Maybe Joel no longer feels quite so driven to validate his music's worth. He now is more than a big-selling singer, songwriter and member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He's an inspiration to other acclaimed artists - including "Movin' Out" creator Twyla Tharp, who saw in his lyrics a modern-day "Odyssey," reflecting the epic struggles of the baby-boom generation.

"Movin' Out" tells its story entirely through dance and 26 Joel songs, performed by a live rock band and sung, in the Boston production, by pianist Darren Holden. Personalities made famous in the songs - Brenda and Eddie from "Scenes From An Italian Restaurant," Anthony from "Movin' Out (Anthony's Song)," James from "James" - come together to tell a story set in Joel's home turf of Long Island, where his characters face the music after they find their lives and loves interrupted by the Vietnam War.

"People have been sending me scripts and stories based on my music for a long time," Joel says, "but they're always the expected. Way too literal. Stuff like the story of the 'Piano Man' with '...Davey in the Navy...' and '...John at the bar....' I'd say, 'Nah, nah, nah, I already did this.'"

Then Tharp sent him a video of a couple of songs she'd choreographed.

"They were beautiful," Joel recalls. "A couple of weeks later she wants me to come to town and see the dancers live in her studio. No sets, no costumes, no props, no lighting. It was fantastic. I actually choked-up. It was pretty cornball of me to react to my own material that way, but if I get that chokey thing, it's a good sign. It wasn't at all what we rock and rollers think of as dancers, guys flipping around in tutus. It had a rough edge. I was very moved. When she said, 'Can we use your songs? Can we have access to your entire catalog?' I said, 'Use anything you want.'"

Joel's involvement with "Movin' Out" did not end there. He monitored the show's band and sound system to make sure they rocked hard and did not sound, to use his word, "wimpy." He discovered the first production's surrogate-Joel "Piano Man," Michael Cavanaugh, "in Las Vegas, believe it or not, at a piano bar." In the end, he and Stuart Malina won a Tony award for Best Orchestration, while Tharp took choreography honors.

Still, Joel downplays his contribution.

"On Tony night I was sitting there," Joel says, "and thinking, 'What the hell am I doing being nominated for a Tony award?' I keep getting credit for this show, but really the extent of my collaboration was I said, 'OK.' Twyla Tharp had the vision. And the best thing you can do with a visionary is just get out of her way."

Or his way. Even as he steps back from his career pursuits, new music plays in Joel's head. He's just not sure when, where or how it will get heard.

"I'm writing all the time," Joel says. "I have a lot of fragments of themes. I may write some more classical stuff, but I'm not on a treadmill. I don't feel the need to follow up my classical album ("Fantasies & Delusions"), even though it sold 200,000 copies, which in the classical world is like going multi-platinum.

"Or maybe these themes could be turned into pop songs. Some could be Broadway music. Or movie score themes. In which direction should they go? I don't have a clue. In a way, I like that. I'm not tapped out of musical ideas, but I'm paying more attention to my personal life than I have in the past. Everyone deserves a life. Not just a career. A life."

"I said, 'You don't know me, but my little touring company has taken a few of our rehearsal hours and made a videotape of some material built on your music,'" recalls Tharp. "I invited him over and showed him the tape. He liked it very much. He said, 'Well, what do you want to do?' I said, 'I want to do a full evening with your music.' And he said, 'What do you need from me?' And I said, 'All of your songs.'"

"He said, 'You got it,' and we shook hands and he left."

So began - and ended - the collaboration between the modern choreographer and the pop tunesmith on "Movin' Out," the Tony Award-winning musical that plays at the Colonial Theatre from Tuesday through April 10th, 2004.

Says Joel: "When she told me she wanted to produce a show based on my music with no narrative and no dialogue and a real rock and roll band and people throwing themselves around the stage, I decided the best thing to do was get out of her way."

The day after their meeting, in 2000, Joel sent all of his CDs to Tharp, who spent the weekend listening to them in chronological order. She called him Monday to say that she had the curve of a story. But she had one more question. Were Brenda and Eddie (last seen filing for divorce in 1975 in the final verse of "Scenes From An Italian Restaurant") still on speaking terms? Joel said he didn't know, but he'd like to. Tharp said she was going to see if she could figure it out.

It's hard to imagine a more counterintuitive pairing than Tharp, a revered presence on the cutting edge of dance, and Joel, whose accessible tunes have placed him squarely in the mainstream. Joel admits to having some reservations of his own.

"I did think that this had all the makings of a complete nightmare disaster," he says by phone from his New York office. "It was oxymoronic. But that completely appealed to me. I didn't want to go to Broadway with your typical song-and-dance show."

Over the next year, armed with 24 Billy Joel compositions, Tharp set out to create an eclectic, kinetic portrait of an American generation told exclusively through lyrics and movement. The production follows the lives of five friends developed from characters in Joel's songs - Brenda and Eddie, Tony ("Movin' Out (Anthony's Song)"), James ("James"), and Judy ("Why Judy Why") - from a Long Island prom in the 1960s through the Vietnam War and its aftermath back home.

"It was like archeology," says Tharp, looking relaxed in a baggy sweater, dark trousers, and cowboy boots on the sofa in her hotel suite. "I treated the songs as shards, pieces of pots that had been pulled out of the ground, and I had to reconstruct the whole pot. My other concept was something called living newspapers. It was a short-lived form of American theatre - Orson Welles, among others, practiced it. They took subject matter like electricity, water, labor, and bulked dramatic evenings out of these concepts, and I had the feeling that I would do this with the conflict of war."

Tharp immersed herself in classic films about Vietnam as well as every documentary she could get her hands on. She revisited newscasts and radio broadcasts of the day for a refresher course on "what the public was fed" and researched cultural markers from fashion to drug use.

Two Joel songs became signposts for Tharp during the creative process: "Goodnight, Saigon" and "Prelude/Angry Young Man." The latter was written about a Vietnam vet whom Joel hired as a roadie.

"Billy will get details for his characters, and by the time that song is over you will believe you know these people," says Tharp, who used to "bop around" to Joel's music in her rehearsal studio back in the '70s. "They're like short stories. Linguistically he's very sophisticated, and he also understands structure in music. The songs are visceral, and I pretty much leave it at that because it doesn't really translate well into language. You feel it and it makes you move."

"Movin' Out" opened on Broadway in October 2002 to enthusiastic reviews after a traumatic July tryout in Chicago, where audiences left confused and critics savaged the show. Joel saw the finished product for the first time in Chicago, as well. ("There were problems in the first act," he says.) Tharp, tireless and exacting, single-handedly orchestrated a major overhaul to ready the work for its New York opening.

"The thing about failure is it's necessary," Tharp says. "[Jerome] Robbins was a good friend of mine, and he once said to me, 'You won't have your best successes until you have your worst failures.' That's when you're really ready to try something, because A) you've got nothing to lose, and B) you've learned something. It was terrible, but I was lucky in Chicago. I still had two weeks to fix it."

Joel was reduced to tears at the show's Broadway opening - not just to witness the revamped and much-heralded production but because he felt, he says, as if he was seeing his children all grown up.

"I said, 'Of course. That's what happened to them. They left Long Island and went off to Vietnam and got screwed up,'" he says. "Twyla captured all the counterpoint that hadn't been noticed before in my music. All these deep emotions that I wasn't supposed to have as a pop songwriter. I wrote from my guts, but the whole art was trying to make it sound simple. I was really, really moved."

So much so that Joel is considering the possibility of writing his own musical. He's been composing fragments and themes, he says, for the last couple of years. And he's got a Big Idea.

"Let's just say that what Mel Brooks did for theatre in 'The Producers,' and what the film 'Network' did for television, I'd like to do for the music industry," he says.

Tharp, for her part, is focusing on the recent release of her new book, "The Creative Habit," which is both practical guide and inspiring thesis.

"I don't talk about the future," she says, "because it's going to change a thousand times. I just put one foot in front of the next and hope for the best."