There was something tonally amiss about the June 6 opening night of the gorgeous new outdoor amphitheater at Little Island NYC, a lush new $260 million public park that stands on slender cement columns above the remnants of Pier 55 near Manhattan’s Meatpacking District. The 680-seat venue itself is stunning, nestled into an artificial hill and facing the Hudson River with wooden benches that blessedly include ergonomically angled backs, the better to enjoy evening performances without the obligation to work your core. And Twyla Tharp’s brand-new dance piece, How Long Blues, featured some characteristically spirited choreography set to a (mostly) live jazz band that played a bit like a montage of greatest hits from the 82-year-old genre-bending legend. Heck, there’s even a version of Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” that calls back to one of her signature early works.
But as the sun began to set, and lead project developer Barry Diller took the stage to welcome an audience that included A-listers such as Andy Cohen, Annie Leibovitz, Joel Grey, Jason Blum, Fran Lebowitz and Diane von Furstenberg, things started to take a bizarre turn. While describing the long birth of Little Island, a project cooked up after Hurricane Sandy decimated Pier 55 back in 2012, the 82-year-old media mogul twice name-checked the disgraced Hollywood/Broadway producer Scott Rudin (who voluntarily “stepped back” from the industry in 2021 following multiple allegations of physical, verbal and emotional misconduct).
Diller bizarrely gave more credit to Rudin — a man who once sent an assistant to the ER after smashing a computer monitor onto the staffer’s hand — than to other creative consultants such as directors Stephen Daldry, George C. Wolfe, and the late Mike Nichols. It was a jarring gaffe for the ordinarily politically savvy mogul, who rightly deserves praise for launching a new performing arts space dedicated to commissioning new works.
The premiere production, a new one-hour dance montage by Tharp, seems like a natural selection for the space. But like Diller, Tharp is another octogenarian who seems to be out of step with the current moment in several glaring ways.
There’s nothing wrong with Tharp cribbing from her previous work, and How Long Blues unfolds in a rapid-fire series of globe-trotting vignettes that recall her previous blends of ballet and modern dance tropes. The 12-member dance corps plays a variety of mostly urban characters, initially tricked out in stylish ’40s-ish costumes (by Santo Loquasto). We also meet a couple of older, dashingly suited gentlemen: Michael Cerveris sports a pipe and a copy of Le Figaro and wears a headset mic though he does not break out into song until two-thirds of the way through the show, while John Selya (a Tharp veteran who starred in her 2002 Tony-winning Billy Joel concert-ballet Movin’ Out) repeatedly lights cigarettes and makes the moves on a series of much-younger women. As if that set-up weren’t cringey enough, we see one of his younger dance partners apparently jump to her death from a rooftop early on — an event that apparently haunts him and leads to a courtroom trial (with Cerveris character now as the judge).
According to a recent interview Tharp gave with the New York Times, the work was inspired by the life of French novelist Albert Camus — though that reference is not at all clear from the downloadable program or the show itself. (Neither Selya nor Cerveris are identified as anything but “performer.”) The story, such as it is, does not make much sense.
The splashy courtroom drama is followed by a series of travelogue jumps that suggest a Twarpified version of Disneyland’s “It’s a Small World After All.” We travel to Turkey for a scene of whirling dervishes spinning in long white skirts (beautifully lit with patterned effects by Justin Townsend); to some remote jungle where a stereotypically primitive character dressed in a full-body costume akin to one of Nick Cave’s soundsuits provokes in Selya hallucinatory nightmares of regret; to a Caribbean island where the natives sway to a reggae-ish beat in colorfully patterned garb. Again and again, we get visual clichés that reek of either willful cultural appropriation or lazy old-fashionedness.
Selya is a terrific performer, whether jitterbugging or engaged in a romantic pas de deux. And Cerveris, when he eventually activates that mic, delivers a plaintive rendition of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” — which would be moving if the song hasn’t become such a sonic cliché or if we understood how it fits into this particular grab-bag of disparate scenes. The dance ensemble is a limber, hard-working group — and many individual performers get moments to make a genuine impression.
But there’s no escaping how dated this show feels — and how disconcertingly out of touch. How do you mount a show called How Long Blues, featuring multiple blues and jazz standards (arranged by T Bone Burnett and David Mansfield) as well as numbers that seem to be set on a Caribbean island, and have only one Black performer on stage? That performer, the talented jazz singer Andromeda Turre, is blessed with a crystalline voice that soars beautifully over the amphitheater from a perch on an elevated riser on the left hand side of the stage. But the seven-piece band is all white, as are Selya and Cerveris, and the 12-member dance corps includes just two nonwhite performers (one a native of Mexico and one a Canadian of Filipino descent; according to the program, the three understudies include one Black man). That’s a shocking imbalance for the premiere show of a venue in a diverse American city in 2024, let alone a project that leans so heavily on musical and thematic traditions inescapably rooted in the Black experience. (You can’t even blame the Eurocentricity of Tharp’s stated inspiration: Camus, born in Algeria the son of French colonists, foregrounded ideas of race and privilege in works like The Stranger in profound ways that never surface on the Little Island stage.)
Twyla Tharp remains a vital force in dance, and it was a delight to see her spryly taking her bows at the curtain call. But this new production is a serious misstep.
culturesauce.com 
I thought the piece was a sendup of old white guys losing their grip and showed their postwar cultural appropriations slipping away from them, as a parade of their cartoonish carnivals and cliches reverted to indigenous reappropriations by the youthful and energetic dancers embodying ritualized spirit figures, from the whirling dervishes to the African masquerade spirit figure who kept leaving the old white guys in the dust and fog, to the Wild chapitoulas Mardi Gras Indians, and then the one real black blues singer, a woman, on high, finally singing How Long Blues. So actually this piece is much more complicated than this review portrays, ending, in a way, with the jitterbug and soccer, as inclusive global hybrids. Twyla is our most American choreographer and is steeped in American dance idioms and influences like no one else, and should not be counted out as an out-of-touch has-been.