Pop Art

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