All Tharp Pacific Northwest Ballet
Through Oct 5.

Twyla Tharp was once a daring choreo- grapher. Four decades ago, she structurally reorganized the dance world by bringing low-falutin' movement to high-falutin' stages. The paradigmatic example: Deuce Coupe, a 1973 commission for the Joffrey Ballet set to the Beach Boys, with graffiti artists painting upstage during the performance. It was the world's first ballet with a pop soundtrack.

But both of her world-premiere ballets that opened at PNB last weekend—Opus 111 (set to Brahms) and Afternoon Ball (set to minimalist Vladimir Martynov)—seem like burlesques of Tharp's old glory. In the first dance, Tharp trots out samples from her myriad influences, presenting a Tharpean pupu platter: Broadway skips, jazzy jumps, playful gymnastics, cross-armed kicks redolent of Hungarian czardas, syncopated steps borrowed from tap dancing, and florid ballet. Opus 111 is an airy, insubstantial thing that slides right off the retinas, barely leaving an impression.

Afternoon Ball is more striking, a maudlin tragedy that casts a double gloss—one jaundiced, the other piteous—on youth culture. Three youngsters tweak out in what seems to be an alleyway. (Black walls on the stage give the piece a claustrophobic feeling.) One is a punk/metal hybrid in cutoff cargo pants, one a grunge boy in flannel. The lone girl wears fishnets and Daisy Dukes—a New York punk circa 1985. These are afflicted children: They throw punches, slip and fall, beat their heads on the floor, worm along the ground, and lapse into mindless, mechanical movements.

A fancy couple in black formal wear occasionally dances upstage, oblivious to the small apocalypse below. The lights dim, the punk/metal kid shivers and—spoiler alert!—freezes to death. (Or something.) In Tharp's world, the kids used to be all right. Not anymore. Afternoon Ball critiques its aloof elites, but also condescends to its shivering, cartoonish urchins. (The evening's third piece, Nine Sinatra Songs, is a series of ballroom vignettes from 1982. It is easy-listening dance. People love it.)

How crotchety. Time was, Twyla Tharp was an artist doing double duty as a radical critic, bringing Promethean fire to cold, sterile stages. But her new work feels remote and cynical—she has forgotten how to burn. BRENDAN KILEY

Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
Book-It Repertory Theatre
Through Oct 12.

When it was published in 1976, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues was a breakthrough in pop feminism. But in the 21st century, the novel reads more like the grating wisdom of a know-it-all who exploits the "liberation" as leverage to get into ladies' pants. Book-It's production of Cowgirls has the benefit of being adapted and performed almost entirely by women, which cleanses Tom Robbins's smarmy authorial tone. The play turns out to be a good time.

The most charming aspect of Cowgirls is its main character, Sissy Hankshaw, who was born with absurdly large thumbs and becomes the world's greatest hitchhiker. Kate Czajkowski is a stellar Sissy; she captures a peculiar combination of naiveté and sexual adventurousness and makes it look easy. Jo Miller, as a musical narrator, performs interstitial snippets of country and classic rock songs, and the adaptation wouldn't work without her. The rest of the cast—especially Hillary Pickles as a rebellious cowgirl-with-a-cause—is excellent, but when Czajkowski sweeps her prosthetic thumb across the stage as Miller strums a Led Zeppelin song, it may as well be a two-woman show.

Cowgirls wanders far and wide, touching on a colony of whooping cranes, a gay man called the Countess who is waging a one-man war against vaginal odor ("Like a tuna fish's retirement party!" he wails), and a hippie- dippie wise man called the Chink. The second act lags as Sissy hitchhikes back and forth across the country, but there's more than enough excitement—including a couple of daring nude scenes that sent some conservative audience members out in a huff—to make this adaptation a pleasant surprise. PAUL CONSTANT

Jails, Hospitals & Hiphop
House of Epicureanism at Balagan Theatre
Through Oct 12.

It's amazing how far America hasn't come in the past 10 years. New Yorker Danny Hoch wrote Jails, Hospitals & Hiphop in 1997, but its loose constellation of monologues—about inmates and prison guards, crack babies and wannabe rap stars—could've been written last week.

There's Andy, the veteran/junkie who prefers living in jail to working outside for minimum wage: "Plus, at least in here I get medical attention for my fuckin' AIDS. You think McDonald's is gonna pay for it?"

There's Bronx, the ex-con who was thrown back in prison for hawking T-shirts on the street without a license: "But you know if I was that little girl that they show on TV in that commercial selling lemonade in front of her house, you think the cop gonna arrest her? Nah-ah! Nah-ah! But see, if you think about it, the little girl, she's an entrepreneur, just like me."

And there's Flip, the white kid who fantasizes about being a rap superstar on Jay Leno: "I got this rare skin disorder where I look white, but I'm really black... even though I live in Puyallup, I still got the ghetto in my heart."

Recent Cornish graduates Charles Norris and Noah Benezra trade the seven monologues tag-team style. They're energetic, if still a little green—they could stand to relax into the material—but the script is the main attraction. Occasionally facile but never cheap, Jails, Hospitals & Hiphop is an empathetic and comical text-message from across the tracks. BRENDAN KILEY