"A waiter immediately arrived with a glass of champagne," says a mutual friend. "Then, a bottle. Billy sent the bottle back. And he left. The next thing he knows he's drowning his sorrows in the papers. It's ridiculous."

You know, it is ridiculous. I'm trying to decide why Billy Joel - friendly, affable, never rude, always polite, incredibly talented - has become a celebrity target. I am told he returned to Nello's yesterday and complained about being used for publicity. Right on, Billy.

Joel may not know this, and Nello's patrons may have forgotten as well, but Balan's business partner is a more interesting story than anything to do with Billy Joel. The man in question is Dennis Kozlowski, the wildly self-indulgent, free-spending ex-head of Tyco. When Balan opened his SoHo restaurant last year, Kozlowski was right at his side, living it up and boasting to one and all about his investment. I'll bet the Tyco investors who lost their shirts will now queue up for a free meal and maybe one of those free bottles of champagne that Billy Joel turned down.

As for Billy, he's working on songs that may become a new album. John David Kalodner, the production whiz who restored Aerosmith's glow, has been assigned to the project at Columbia Records. And Joel is feeling more and more confident about "Movin' Out," the Broadway show featuring his songs and choreographed by Twyla Tharp. After a shaky start in Chicago, "Movin' Out" is said to be movin' up to the proper quality level and will surprise everyone on opening night.

"I've always liked Billy's music," says Ms. Tharp, in a telephone interview from New York.

"I listened to all of Billy's songs and CDs over one weekend. I immediately saw I could read his songs, put them into a context, and make them into an epic."

So she wrote a scenario - weaving in hits like "Uptown Girl," "Just The Way You Are," and "Scenes From An Italian Restaurant" - that paralleled both Joel's rise to prominence and the transformation of American society from 1967 to 1987.

This was a period that Tharp believes started "when things were happier, when things were broken and we could fix them," she says. "Then came the Vietnam War, and I think the culture realized that we're broken and we're not going to fix it so easily."

The plot focuses on three young men and the women they love. When the men go off to fight in Vietnam, the relationships change. At final curtain, "we survived for better or worse; we sloughed our way through it," says Tharp.

The modern-dance choreographer was determined to tell the story without the use of dialogue. "What were we doing before language evolved? We were communicating by movement," says Tharp, "so when you can link into a subject where you get substance you're speaking to people in a much more deeply emotional way."

The cast was picked by raiding the ballet and modern dance troupes: Keith Roberts, John Selya, and Ashley Tuttle from American Ballet theatre; Elizabeth Parkinson of the Joffrey Ballet, and Ron De Jesus of Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, among others. She also found Michael Cavanaugh, a charismatic young singer-pianist who sounds enough like Joel to be his double. Mr. Cavanaugh sings more than two dozen of Joel's songs while suspended on a balcony above the stage, with a nine-piece orchestra backing him. The lyrics suggest the action but do not form a specific narration.

"Movin' Out" opened in Chicago for a 10-week tryout period last summer, following the path of previous Broadway musicals, notably "The Producers," which proved an instant hit, and "Sweet Smell of Success," which did not. Cavanaugh won rave reviews, even though the critics reception of "Movin' Out" was mixed. He is sure to please Joel fans who throng to see the pop composer's work in the context of a theatrical production. No doubt dance fans will swoon over the caliber of the dance performances.

"What has been unfortunate is that I've been reviewed along the way [to New York], on my first draft. Hello! Nobody said that it was ready to be seen. It never should have been full ticket price and never had an opening night," Tharp says in response to the tepid reviews. But she also notes proudly that each of the 77 performances in Chicago drew a standing ovation.

Working hard in traditional tryout manner, where the cast rehearses a new version during the day but performs the existing material at night, Tharp revised the narrative thrust of the first act - which had caused most of the confusion - by the close of the Chicago run. She says she'll make a few more changes before the October 24th, 2002 New York opening, but "on the hoof" (meaning the cast won't need rehearsal time in the studio to insert the additions).

Does Tharp think she set herself too difficult a challenge? "No, I wouldn't have a writer if I did it over again," says Tharp. "The word 'choreography' means to write with movement."

"I'd be proud to represent Long Island, absolutely," Joel said. "I've maintained that I am a Long Islander, first and foremost."

Even though Joel said he has "mixed feelings about asking more people to come out to the Hamptons for the summer," he understands how important tourism is to the economy. "They do need the business, as well as the rest of Long Island right now, especially in this economy. I don't mind helping out at all."

He said he is hoping people will discover all of Long Island, though not necessarily the same way he is. "I take a motorcycle ride and I try to get myself as lost as I can," he said. "I don't take a map, I just go and I just follow a road...I can spend a day doing that. Of course, I don't have a regular job like most people."

Hollander said the spots will air starting in March on stations as far afield as Florida, California, Canada, Texas, Ohio and Pennsylvania - and maybe even in New York City, where Joel sees a need, too. "It amazes me how many people there are in New York City who don't know anything about Long Island," he said.

"Who is that guy?" they buzz. "He sounds just like Billy Joel!"

Chicago critics called the 29 year-old Midwesterner "phenomenal" - the show, currently in previews, opens here on October 24th, 2002 - but Cavanaugh doesn't like being called a sound-alike.

"That's fine if they think that," he says from rented digs in New Jersey, his voice raspy from the night before.

"But there's already a Billy Joel, and he's amazing - to try to be him is a losing battle."

Cavanaugh's always been a fan. Growing up in the Cleveland suburbs, he had his first piano lesson at 7½, after he was already picking out tunes.

"Play something," the teacher said, and Michael promptly pounded out 'It's Still Rock and Roll To Me' " - the first song, coincidentally, in "Movin' Out."

By 10, Cavanaugh had his own band. At 12 he was playing nightclubs, parents in tow so he could stay out past curfew.

A couple of years ago, he and his band were in Las Vegas covering Joel, Bon Jovi and Aerosmith tunes when Cavanaugh came face-to-face with "The Master."

"I found out about half an hour before we went on [that Joel was coming]," he says. "It completely freaked me out.

"I think the first thing I said to him was 'Mmmuerrere' " - an incoherent mumble.

Since signing on to do the show - a narrative-free ramble through the lives of Brenda and Eddie and their friends through the '60s and Vietnam - he's had the benefit of Joel's tutorial.

"I had a couple of lyrics I was singing wrong - I'd gotten them off the internet," he says.

"And Billy's like, 'Man, I hate to bring it up, but this lyric is different.'"

Since the show came to New York, Cavanaugh says, Joel stops by frequently - both at rehearsals and performances.

But Joel isn't worried about being rendered obsolete.

"The guy singing my material doesn't sing like me," he told The Post's Dan Aquilante.

"He's a lot younger than I am and he's attacking the material in his own way.... He's being true to himself."

Cavanaugh hopes to move on after "Movin' Out" - composing and performing his own songs. But he's not about to forget the man who inspired him.

"I'm a bigger fan than I've ever been. It's amazing," he says, recalling the time he and his wife camped out in the snow for tickets to a "River of Dreams" concert.

"And they weren't even good seats," he says. "I told Billy that and he said, 'You shoulda called me.'

He laughs. "It wasn't so easy back then."

"Like so many people in the world," Tharp recalls, "I thought, 'Huh - this guy can really write a melody.' Then I thought, 'This guy should be doing a show.' And then I thought, 'Well, I should be doing a show.' "

More than 25 years and many successful projects later, Tharp, with Joel's blessing and support, is about to see her dream realized on Broadway. "Movin' Out," a collection of interpretive dances inspired and accompanied by 28 of Joel's songs and compositions, began previews last week at the Richard Rodgers Theatre, where it opens October 24th, 2002.

Having had its world premiere at Chicago's Shubert Theatre in July, "Movin' Out" joins a fall theatre line-up dominated by splashy new musicals based on established works. But Tharp and Joel are reluctant to label their Broadway baby as such.

"I'm hesitant to use the word 'musical,' " Joel says backstage at the Richard Rodgers, sitting beside the woman who conceived, choreographed and directed Movin'. "Twyla had a very strong vision of what I think could be a new genre."

Tharp agrees. "It's not a traditional musical, in that we don't have book scenes or dialogue. ...Without Billy's language, we don't have the arc of the story or the character identification."

"Movin' Out" follows a group of friends, developed from characters in Joel's songs, as they encounter the kind of social and romantic turbulence that defined the baby-boom generation. Cuts and other changes have been made since Chicago, but the basic premise remains.

Michael Cavanaugh, a young singer and pianist whom Joel discovered performing in Las Vegas, and a live band deliver Joel's material from a platform above the stage as the hoofers flesh out a plot that Tharp extrapolated from tunes such as "Goodnight Saigon," "Prelude/Angry Young Man," "James," and "Scenes From An Italian Restaurant."

"When I met Billy, I said I had a simple question. I wanted to know if Brenda and Eddie talked to each other 20 years later," says Tharp, alluding to the ill-fated couple in Scenes. "He said, 'I don't know — let's see.' "A few days later, after listening to all of Joel's albums, Tharp had outlined a story that used his songs chronologically, involving three pals, a love triangle and the Vietnam War.

"The show begins with what I call post-World War II optimism," Tharp says. "Then (Vietnam) came, and with it, destruction and divisions in our culture that we could no longer mend. That essentially is what Act 1 is about, and I heard it very clearly in the string of Billy's music. He's writing about specific individuals in graphic detail, which is one of the things that makes him such a good storyteller. But there is a bigger context to his lyrics that he's not always given credit for."

When asked how Joel initially reacted to her take on his work, Tharp smiles. "Can I tell the truth?" she asks the rock-star, who nods.

"He wept. That was what I needed, because I wanted to convey emotion visually the way his songs do."

Joel adds that Tharp's choreography gave him new insights into those songs. "It was like seeing your kid get married. All of a sudden I was finding out different things about my children through action and movement. And I was very moved by it."

The progressive-dance icon and the pop hero from Long Island may in theory make an unlikely mutual-admiration society. But in person, Tharp, spry and hyper-animated at 61, and a nattily attired Joel, 53, reveal an easy rapport and a profound appreciation for each other's craft. "My mother was a concert pianist, and I was winning piano contests when I was 4 years-old," Tharp points out.

No Male Dancers 'Prancing Around'

Joel admits that his love of dance, particularly ballet, came later in life. "Like a lot of people, I had this picture in my head of a bunch of male dancers prancing around. But there's a lot of athleticism in this show. It's not pretty in the stereotypical sense of, say, Swan Lake. (Tharp) really picked up on things from my own experience, things most guys who grew up in New York or on Long Island can relate to. You see these three buddies hitting each other, playing these stupid games, just like we used to do."

Tharp chuckles. "Listen," she tells Joel, "I haven't gone to a gym for the last 15 years for nothing."

She wasn't the first person to approach him about a stage venture. "I've always loved theatre, and I've always been intrigued by doing a Broadway show," he says. "But people would send me scripts that were really cornball. I'd get stuff like the "Piano Man," with this clichéd story built around a guy in a piano bar.

"I was skeptical at first when Twyla said she wanted to show me some things, but she proved to me that my music can have a life beyond pop music."

Not that pop music has been Joel's primary focus lately anyway. His last studio album as a rock artist was 1993's "River of Dreams"; since then he has composed classical instrumental music, some of which is featured in "Movin' Out."

Last June, Joel's personal problems took the spotlight when a drinking binge landed him in Connecticut's Silver Hill Hospital for 10 days.

Whetting His Musical Appetite

Today, a sober and trimmed-down Joel is eager to reassure fans that his physical and creative health are sound. "I feel great. A lot of people may be under the assumption I'm not writing, but that's not true. I write all the time, even if I don't report it to everybody."

Having recently toured with Elton John, who provided music for the Broadway hits "The Lion King" and "Aida," Joel says he wouldn't rule out writing an original musical in the future. "I've been working on all sorts of fragments and themes and ideas that I could put to use for a project like that."

For now, though, Joel is channeling his musical energy into "Movin' Out." Several members of his touring family have joined him, including sound designer Brian Ruggles and guitarist Tommy Byrnes, who is leading the show's band, a posse of rock veterans.

"Not to denigrate Broadway musicians, but I wanted some road dogs - guys who had been out doing rock and roll for a long, long time," Joel says. "So none of the songs sound radically different. But I hope people won't come expecting to hear an exact replication of the way Billy Joel does songs, because it isn't that."

What "Movin' Out" is, Joel and Tharp hope, will defy preconceived notions about the disparities between their art and their audiences.

"I assume that anyone familiar with Twyla's work or my work has an open mind to begin with," Joel says. "We want to go beyond that, to reach people who may not be aficionados of what either of us do but simply want to see a good show.

"Let them figure out what it is - and let them enjoy it."

"It's Twyla's vision, and you really can't argue with someone else's vision, especially with someone like her, because she is so passionate," Joel says. "The best thing you can do is get out of the way. I saw it in New York at the first of the previews, and I loved it. But a part of me again was saying, 'How objective can you be, Bill, these [songs] are your kids, and they're not in your house any more, they're in somebody else's.' They're doing their thing, and they're independent from me."

Seeing his songs in this new setting has even made him appreciate them more. "I've thought 'Just The Way You Are' is clichéd," Joel says. "But the way the piece is presented, the way she saw the romance in that piece, I see it differently."

"Captain Jack" has grown in a similar way. "It could've been a cartoon if, say, she had the song re-enacted by the members of the Hicksville Marching Band or something," he says. "The way she's done it, it becomes something else entirely."

The whole experience has led Joel to consider doing a Broadway musical of his own.

"I've been developing a story in my head," he says, adding that he's interested to see how people react to "Movin' Out" before he makes his decision. "People have always asked me to write for movies or musicals, and I've stayed away because it was always somebody else's idea. It's always adding another layer to someone else's painting. I want it to be my painting. I'm developing a story. It could be for Broadway, because one thing I've learned from this is that my songs live very well in a theatre environment. It wouldn't be all that strange. Even the reviews that haven't liked the show have said good things about the music; they're sort of bulletproof."

"You go into a special realm when you do great dancing," she says. "Words are not spoken there."

So Brenda and Eddie, Anthony and James and the other Long Islanders she has plucked from 30 years of Billy Joel albums are played by powerhouse dancers - the "angels" who have been working with Tharp for years - rather than a cast of Broadway singer-dancer-actor types. The song lyrics are delivered by pianist Michael Cavanaugh, fronting an onstage rock band. It's not that Tharp underestimates the power of speech. "Talking is how you communicate with people," she says. "But it's also the easiest way to lie."

Dance is a language that doesn't lie, and for four decades, Tharp has been using it to carve out a unique place in American culture. As an upstart dancer-choreographer in the '60s, she cheerfully challenged even avant-garde conventions. In the '70s, she let pop-music - Fats Waller and the Beach Boys, among others - invade the sacred groves of modern dance. With the '80s, she dissolved her successful troupe to concentrate on working with ballet companies. Came the '90s she was choreographing in-depth explorations of the music of Brahms and Beethoven. And now, she's used the people and themes she found in Joel's music to construct a two-act, dialogue-free tale of love and war.

It isn't her first time trying to stretch the boundaries of the dance circuit. Tharp presented two of her works, "When We Were Very Young" and "The Catherine Wheel," at Broadway theatres. She embraced television, winning two Emmys. She choreographed movies, among them "Hair," "Amadeus" and "White Nights." And she directed and choreographed the 1985 Broadway production of the classic film musical "Singin' In The Rain." But this time, she wanted to do a Broadway show her way. "What I wanted to do was tell a story that would require being told in movement," she says. "In other words, violence and sex - this is where I can trump language."

Violence and sex may not be the first things that come to mind when surveying the Tharp career - she is best known for freewheeling romps, such as "Deuce Coupe" and "Push Comes To Shove," and brainy, complex constructions such as "The Beethoven Seventh." But she maintains that violence and sex - at least in subliminal form - are at the heart of everything she does, even if "it's not out-and-out kill and out-and-out fornication."

In "Movin' Out," which opens Thursday at the Richard Rodgers theatre, it is out-and-out kill - there's an extended battle sequence. And there are some intensely sexual duets that will probably surprise even the most knowledgeable of her fans. The biggest surprise for the dance audience, however, will be that "Movin' Out" has a story, just like most Broadway musicals. It follows three guys from Hicksville as they leave high school, get drafted and work out their relationships with two women left behind. And it also tracks American society as it struggles through the Vietnam War period and beyond.

Tharp sees the conflict in and over Vietnam as the culmination of America's can-do, post-World War II ethic: "If things were broken, we fixed it," she says. "That's how we were. That's the nation we were. And then the war came, and it divided this country." She could hear the change in the songs, which she listened to in chronological order. "In Billy's early music," she says, "there's a lot of sweetness. It has an innocence about it. And the war takes that away."

She was not the first person to suggest to Joel that his music could be the basis for a Broadway show. "A lot of times," he says, "I was sent books or scripts that seemed contrived, or cornball. I didn't think it was a good idea to cobble my songs together and try to create a forced scenario." But he wasn't averse to the possibility of bringing his creation to the stage in some way. He cites Broadway show tunes among his influences as a songwriter, and he was, he says, "kind of writing little musicals when I was writing albums. It's not that much of a stretch for me to perceive these pieces done as theatre."

When Tharp approached him with her idea of knitting the songs into a dance musical that would take his characters into the '70s, '80s and '90s, he was intrigued. They were, he says, based on real people, "and I never knew what happened to them after they left high school. I didn't stay in touch with Brenda and Eddie and Anthony and the others. So for me, this is sort of the end of the story." And he didn't mind leaving that ending up to Tharp: "The best thing to do with someone who has a vision," he says, "is get out of the way. The songs are like my kids, but they don't need to live in my house any more. They're living in Twyla's house. The music is all grown up and living its own life."

She tackled the songs, she says, as if she were an archaeologist using shards to reconstruct first a pot, then a village and finally a culture. "I made a point of learning nothing about Billy's life," she says. "This is not about getting a picture of his inner life." She looked instead to the "Iliad," with its detailed picture of men at war; she read Vietnam novels and looked at Vietnam movies and studied documentaries and contemporary footage from the period. "If you do your research well, you come out feeling people walked at a different speed," she says.

She knew she would have to have more than one protagonist, because one dancer couldn't carry a full-length show. She felt that one of the deepest currents in Joel's music was its depiction of the bond between friends. So in addition to sending Eddie and Tony off to war, she made them two points of a triangle. She makes no apologies for her timeworn solutions: "I am not a playwright," she says, "but it seems to me that there are, in essence, very few stories, and you have to recognize what your tale is."

But constructing a full-length dance show is not just a matter of figuring out which plot you're going to borrow. Tharp compares it to doing an acrostic puzzle. "Movin' Out" had to be paced to allow the dancers to catch their breath. She had to vary the structure to include solos, duets and ensemble passages. She needed the variety of big scenes and intimate ones. She had to integrate the songs, with their internal rhythms and lyrics, into the overall design. She had to decide just how much of the real, mundane world would intrude on the stage ("Ultimately, what we're doing here is dancing. We're not reconstructing a battle"). And within all those restrictions, she had to tell the story.

Once the acrostic was solved, she had to fit the company into it. She prepared the cast (led by John Selya, Keith Roberts, Elizabeth Parkinson and Ashley Tuttle) the way a stage or film director might, with research into the period and the characters. "We got all the Hicksville High School yearbooks and traced through where these characters would have been in what years," she says. "I brought in a Green Beret. We had an M-16 in the room, and the dancers learned to take it apart. They took instruction in night drills. Detail is all in acting. And in dancing."

When the show tried out in Chicago this past summer, critics and audiences made it clear to her that there were too many details. They were confused, and, looking back, Tharp thinks she knows why. "I love appendixes and footnotes and sidebars," she says. "I love them." She shakes her head. "Not in the theatre. Not when you already have two principal characters. Get rid of all the sidebars. I don't care how much you love this. Cut it. Gotta cut it."

Dance, she says, "works best if you're not too literal with it, if you leave enough room so people can write their own story on top of your story. You've got to put in detail in order to give it a tangible place - you can't get to the cosmic without the specific. But you must not become so literal with the information that it puts a wall between what you're trying to communicate and the audience."

If the New York theatre critics don't quite connect with her efforts, it won't be the first time. While "Singin' In The Rain" ran for 367 performances, it was not exactly a critical success. One of the problems, Tharp says, is that the show's writers, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, had also written the film, and they were unwilling to tamper with dialogue that had worked well once before.

"This time around," Tharp says dryly, "there were no writers." But even without pesky collaborators, there are plenty of pitfalls for a Broadway show - especially one that can't be pigeon-holed. And Tharp could easily have taken her Billy Joel idea to a ballet company, secure in the knowledge that "Movin' Out" would live in the repertory for years. Why take the risks of a commercial production on Broadway?

"Billy has a large audience," she says, dead-pan. "Who wants to turn anyone away?"

"The steps here are the text; they are the dialogue," Tharp explains over an early dinner at a pub not far from the Richard Rodgers Theatre, where "Movin' Out" opened Thursday.

When "Movin' Out" opened in Chicago earlier this year, theatre critics gave the production mixed reviews, complaining about the lack of a story. Tharp has since reworked much of the first act to clarify the narrative. And she's determined to get audiences to think differently about dance and theatre.

"It's theatre, it's dance, it's music. I think it's interesting for people to be given these choices," she says.

The collaboration between Tharp and Joel seems an odd one. Tharp made her name creating ballets - for the Joffrey, the ABT and the Royal Ballet, among others - that ripple with an edge of modernism and intelligence. Joel is a sentimentalist; no rocker wears his heart on his sleeve quite like Joel.

It was Tharp's son and chief production associate, Jesse Huot, who suggested rock, she recalls. Joel emerged as the most obvious choice. Tharp is 61 and her son is 31, yet both "grew up" on Joel. Since cutting his first single in 1972, he's done everything from love songs to rock to even a classical album, "Fantasies & Delusions," released last year.

After getting Joel's approval for the project, Tharp mined his work and life. She used the wistful 1977 song "Scenes From An Italian Restaurant" to set the stage, tweaking the year from 1975 to 1965 but keeping the setting the same: Joel's own hometown, Hicksville, Long Island.

She also borrowed the song's main characters, high school sweethearts Brenda and Eddie - "the king and the queen of the prom riding around with the car top down."

After studying yearbooks from Joel's own high school years, she and costume designer Suzy Benzinger dressed the guys in jeans and sneakers, the girls in Keds and clam diggers; the cheerleaders' white-and-orange ensembles come straight from Hicksville High.

While drafting the story, Tharp went back to Joel with a question: What happened to Brenda and Eddie?

His answer was a passel of his songs. Tharp spent a weekend with the CDs and eventually came up with this simple story: Brenda and Eddie split up while their friends James and Judy tie the knot. Brenda eventually falls in love with Eddie's best friend, Tony, a romance interrupted by the Vietnam War. The friends spend the second act rebuilding their postwar lives.

The show's title was Joel's idea and it carries a double meaning: It refers to the restlessness of small-town teens yearning for something larger in life and it also refers to the draft.

America's baby boomers came of age during the Vietnam War and grew into adulthood in its aftermath. Joel wrote "Prelude/Angry Young Man" in 1976 based on an acquaintance who was a Vietnam vet, Tharp notes. She herself choreographed "Hair" in 1978, just a few years after the war's end.

Tharp praises the dancers for helping her mold the characters, from Tuttle's delicate Judy, often shod in toe shoes rather than sneakers, to Selya's burly Eddie, the former football star in sweats.

She mixed ballet with modern gestures - high fives, even some breakdancing. "It was finding the right movement that would show the righteous rage of these men, finding that movement that would dramatically give you that narrative," Tharp says.

She also confesses that she stole freely from her own canon of choreography for "Movin' Out." A bar scene in Saigon, for example, harks back to "Re-moves," performed 36 years ago. And some of the lifts - particularly during the military scenes - come straight from "Hair."

"Movin' Out," she says, is a look back at more than just the Vietnam era.

"The score represents 25 years of Billy's work," she says, "and this evening represents at least that much of mine."

"I don't want to just be known as 'the Billy Joel guy,'" Cavanaugh says. "That's certainly no offense to Billy, because Billy's my favorite. But there already is a Billy."

You wouldn't confuse him for Joel based on appearance alone. Cavanaugh is tall, light-haired and a good two decades younger than the diminutive Joel, whose hair is dark and graying.

"Since age 7, the guy's been my musical hero as a performer and a writer," Cavanaugh says.

"But I never wanted to be his imitator. I'm just singing his songs, and obviously I'll phrase things the way he does - that's the way I've always heard it, so that's the way it's going to come out."

Two years ago, Cavanaugh was supporting his wife and 6 year-old son as a bar pianist in New York-New York, a Manhattan-themed casino in Las Vegas. Last February, his manager dropped by the bar, unannounced, with a famous client: the "Piano Man" himself.

Joel recalls being impressed by Cavanaugh's act. "He had really good musicianship, he could play a song at the drop of a hat, he had energy, he had pipes," Joel says.

He wasn't specifically looking for someone to sing his songs in "Movin' Out" - Tharp ultimately made all the casting decisions herself. But one of Joel's associates, who was also at New York-New York that night, recommended that Tharp audition Cavanaugh for the show.

The audition, combined with Joel's endorsement, was enough to land Cavanaugh the job.

Since then, Cavanaugh's professional relationship with Joel has extended past the boundaries of the musical. On the final night of Joel's recent concert tour with Elton John, Cavanaugh joined his hero on stage at Long Island's Nassau Coliseum to sing and play one song: "Movin' Out (Anthony's Song)," of course.

Joel started the song himself, but after the first verse he surrendered the keyboard to Cavanaugh, who played and belted the lyrics with conviction. Joel faded into the background, shaking a tambourine and dancing with a back-up singer.

"I was nervous about how the crowd would react, because they paid to see Billy," says Cavanaugh. "But they knew it was just for one song, and they seemed to enjoy it, so that made me feel great."

The crowd roared its approval - standing, clapping, hollering, cheering him on.

Audiences have been responding with equal enthusiasm to Cavanaugh's performances in "Movin' Out." At a recent performance, his bow received easily the most calamitous applause of the evening.

Besides cheering his fiery performances of Joel's songs, audiences seem to respond to his stamina.

The two-hour "Movin' Out," which follows four friends from high school in the 1960s to the aftermath of the Vietnam War, has practically no dialogue: It is almsot entirely singing and dancing.

From the bubble-gum-and-bobby-socks nostalgia of the first act through the much darker second act - in which the main characters lose themselves in a haze of drinking and casual sex - Cavanaugh's energy never seems to flag. He growls his way through "Shameless," croons prettily on "She's Got A Way" and tosses off the devilishly hard piano passages in "Prelude/Angry Young Man" with apparent ease.

"People ask me if I would consider acting, and I guess I would, but my main love is performing music," he says.

Cavanaugh has nine months left on his "Movin' Out" contract; if the show is a hit, he will stay with it at least that long. After that, he plans to compose original music and perhaps perform his songs - which he describes as influenced primarily by Joel and the Beatles - in night-clubs around New York.

But he worries that fans will think, "nothing but Billy Joel," he says.

Joel agrees that that's a valid concern. "It's hard," Joel says. "He's going to get that Billy Joel sound-alike thing, all the material is Billy Joel material. And if the show is a hit, is that a good thing for him or not? Who knows? But it could also be a star-maker vehicle.

"I think he's a talented writer. He's more of an old-school songwriter in that he uses real chords, he plays a real instrument and he harkens back to another era."

Cavanaugh has made some contacts at Sony, because the record company is doing the show's cast album. "They're great, they've been really nice and very complimentary," he says, before imposing a reality check.

"But then again, I have a deal with them singing Billy Joel songs, and that's the only deal I have. So we'll see."

She's been called "the dance world's brainiest brat." Billy Joel says she's "the most driven person I've ever worked with." The other day - in a conversation peppered with references to Proust, Mozart and genetic research - Twyla Tharp showed both sides.

"I don't like downtime," Tharp says. She works, she goes to the gym, she's writing another book.

"I've missed two deadlines now," she says, "so I feel like a real writer."

She also feels embattled, especially after the show's rocky and well-publicized tryout in Chicago.

"There's no way to be ready for vitriol," she tells The Post about comments like "stupefyingly cliched" and "crazily uneven."

"We were performing one show at night and rehearsing another during the day," she says. "It was very difficult for the dancers."

It was just as hard, her dancers say, for the 61 year-old choreographer.

"You know that expression, 'Eat, sleep and drink what you're doing?' Well, that's her," says star dancer Elizabeth Parkinson.

Tharp knows a little something about dedication. She took dance, piano, violin, viola and German lessons by the time she was 6, but she always wanted to be a dancer, and then some.

As she wrote in her autobiography: "I had always seen myself as a star - I wanted to be a galaxy."

She danced through two broken marriages, love affairs (with Mikhail Baryshnikov and David Byrne) and all nine months of a pregnancy.

The day after she gave birth, she did plies - "just to be sure that I'd never resent my son for interfering with my career."

He didn't. In fact, Tharp credits her son - 31 year-old Jesse Huot, the general manager of her dance troupe - with suggesting she make a musical to Joel's music.

He also got her through the Chicago debacle.

"What he did was to scientifically apply every single review and make a grid," Tharp says. "When we saw more than two or three critics saying the same thing we said, 'Let's look at this.'"

So she redid the prologue and simplified the plot, which follows Brenda and Eddie and their friends through the '60s, Vietnam and its aftermath.

Now it's up to the critics, many of whom savaged her last Broadway effort, 1985's "Singin' In The Rain."

Clearly, Tharp doesn't always get what she wants. Not even at lunch - when her roast chicken arrives as roast beef.

"This doesn't look like roast chicken to me," she says. The waitress demurs, and Tharp turns to her publicist, a strong, tall silent type she's nicknamed Bubbles.

"Bubbles, does this look like roast chicken to you?"

He shakes his head and the waitress takes the plate away.

Just then Tharp breaks into song: "There's no business, like show business, like no business I know!"

And for the first time that day, she smiles.

"A lot of great moments in American music," Billy Joel muses, "have come when someone smooshed together a couple of things that no one thought of putting together before."

Meet "Movin' Out," which opens tonight at the Richard Rodgers Theatre and might be summarized like this: Twyla Tharp has fused 30 years of Joel's music into a two-hour tale of youth, heartbreak, tragedy, pain, reconciliation and redemption, focused on the lives of several high school friends and told entirely through dance.

"We called it a musical first," says Tharp. "But that was a mistake. It seems to be a new form no one has found a name for."

The show began simply enough. Tharp, who says she's listened to Joel's music for many years, outlined her idea to him and asked for his music. He said yes.

"I've always thought about a stage show," he says, "because my songs are about characters in a specific time and place." But after that first song, he adds, they often went their own way. He didn't realize Anthony of the song "Movin' Out" showed up years later in "Shameless," he says, until Tharp pointed it out.

"I was too close," he says. "When Twyla found these guys again, it was like a reunion."

Tony is one of the show's protagonists, along with Brenda and Eddie ("Scenes From An Italian Restaurant"), Judy ("Why Judy Why") and James ("James"). But Virginia of "Catholic girls start much too late" fame didn't make the cut, and Joel admits he was at first "a little disappointed" about that.

"Hey, she was a big part of my life," he says, laughing, but adds that he sees why she didn't include it.

"I thought about her," Tharp says. "There just wasn't room."

It took extensive cutting, she notes, to whittle Joel's catalogue down to two dozen songs that tell the tale and showcase the styles in which he has written. "Without that range," she says, "you could never sustain an evening."

"I grew up on everything from classical to jazz and rock," Joel says. "So I was always conscious of elements of rhythm and syncopation. That's what makes composition interesting."

Joel says he's also aware that, despite recent hits like "Rent," rock and roll has a mixed record on theatrical stages. "The music had to be authentic," he says. "I didn't want 'Goodnight Saigon' to sound like it was 'Tonight' from 'West Side Story.'"

So far, the show has been a hit with audiences, despite mixed reviews for its Chicago tryout.

"Some of the negatives in the reviews, Twyla and I agreed with," says Joel. "It needed some work and we did it. That's what out-of-town is for."

The challenge, they say, is to make a unique fusion succeed. "We want to appeal to an audience beyond core Billy Joel and Twyla Tharp fans," Joel says. "We think we do."

Joel was in the news earlier this year for postponing a series of shows with Elton John and doing a stint in rehab. He says he's still baffled at how much attention that drew, but says he now feels "just fine" and is writing both pop and classical music.

"The big thing to me is that I'm doing it," he says. "I'm working on a lot of things I like, and it's just a matter of time before one of them becomes a project."

"Movin' Out," the new musical collaboration between pop legend Billy Joel and choreographer Twyla Tharp - firing up audiences and the box office - will officially open at Broadway's Richard Rodgers Theatre October 24th, 2002, following previews since September 30th, 2002.

The bookless show moves seamlessly from Billy Joel hit to Billy Joel hit, using the lyrics and Tharp's rigorous, demanding choreography to trace a tale about five friends and lovers across three decades. The story follows the travails of Brenda, Eddie and Tony, names familiar to any owner of Joel's breakthrough 1977 album, "The Stranger."

As the lyrics of Joel's anthemic song "Scenes From An Italian Restaurant" go, "Brenda and Eddie/Were the popular steadies/And the King and the Queen of the prom/Riding around with the car top down/And the radio on." In the tune, the couple gets married, hits the skids and breaks up (all of which happens in the first 10 minutes of "Movin' Out").

The musical drafts the character of Tony from "Movin' Out," as in "Anthony works in a grocery store/Saving his pennies for someday." After leaving Eddie, Brenda hooks up with Tony. Meanwhile, two other characters from Joel songs, James and Judy, fall in love and get married. All is relatively sunny until the Vietnam War drafts all three men, sending back only two, and casting the group of friends into emotional and psychological turmoil.

The piece is without question the most dance-heavy show currently playing on Broadway, causing many viewers to label it a ballet, albeit an extremely accessible one. There is no dialogue and all the songs are performed by pianist, singer and Joel sound-alike Michael Cavanaugh, who sings non-stop and heads an on-stage band during the show.

The musical's songlist is a collection of pre-existing Joel songs which make up the narrative's score. "It's Still Rock and Roll To Me" functions as a sort of overture, introducing the characters. The story kicks off with "Scenes From An Italian Restaurant." Among the other selected tunes are such monster Joel hits as "We Didn't Start The Fire," "Big Shot," "Uptown Girl" and "Just The Way You Are," as well as more obscure early work like "James," "Summer, Highland Falls," and "Prelude/Angry Young Man."

Speaking of the impetus behind the project, Tharp told Playbill On-Line, "I've known Billy's music since it was released. I've known all the albums as they've come out, and I've not only listened to them, but I've danced around to his music in the studio. But it was only recently that I began to think trying to find a coherent arc that would help place it all in a single dramatic spine."

When asked about how she matched her movements to Joel's songs, Tharp observed: "Some of the time is was about finding movements that would be appropriate for the music, but that's because the music was appropriate for the moment and the characters. For example, 'Prelude/Angry Young Man,' which opens the second act, is actually a song about a Vietnam vet and so therefore is exactly what we're doing, so everyone's in the same boat. Then there are other songs where I don't run exactly parallel to what Billy's intending in the song, for example 'She's Got A Way,' which is a beautiful ballad. We have an essence of romantic love in the way we portray it, but it has a sourness to it, again because of the corrosion of the war. There I was seeking to express and make clear that sense of things, rather than to be illustrative of Billy's music."

Tharp continued, "We kind of shift gears in the second act and much of it does become interior monologue as opposed to plot. It also shifts decades so we move from a more 'fable, fairy tale-esque, once-upon-a-time-long ago' feeling to something that's a little closer to us... The first act up until the war sequences deals with a sort of optimism, the attitude in America that we can fix anything, a kind of frontier spirit.... Act Two becomes about just survival."

The cast, all highly experienced dancers, includes Elizabeth Parkinson as Brenda, John Selya as Eddie, Keith Roberts as Tony, Benjamin G. Bowman as James and Ashley Tuttle as Judy. The cast of 27 is completed by Scott Wise, Andrew Allagree, Mark Arvin, Aliane Baquerot, Alexander Brady, Holly Cruikshank, Ron De Jesus, Melissa Downey, Pascale Faye, Scott Fowler, David Gomez, Meg Paul, Laurie Kanyok, William Marrié, Rod McCune, Jill Nicklaus, Rika Okamoto, Karine Plantadit Bageot, Lawrence Rabson, Dana Stackpole and John J. Todd.

"Movin' Out" had a tryout at Chicago's Shubert Theatre this past summer, a run that was occasioned by some mixed reviews and a lot of show doctoring by Tharp.

The Tribune critic, Michael Phillips, was invited back in last August and published a sort of re-review on August 22nd, 2002, which included comments by Tharp. "The guiding principle was this," said Tharp. "If it's confusing, cut it out." According to the article (which a show spokesman confirmed was accurate), the number "I Go To Extremes," which had followed "Movin' Out" in the opening sequence, was cut. The latter number, which once featured Keith Roberts and a bevy of females, now involves the male leads.

Designers are Santo Loquasto (sets), Suzy Benzinger (costumes), Donald Holder (lighting) and Brian Ruggles and Peter Fitzgerald (sound).

Stuart Malina is the music director on the venture.

Matinees of "Movin' Out" will feature different leads and a different singer than will the evening performances.

On Wednesday and Saturday matinees, Brenda and Eddie will be played by Holly Cruikshank and William Marrié, while David Gomez will be Tony, Dana Stackpole is Judy and Wade Preston is on vocals.

At all performances, Scott Wise will play Sergeant O'Leary and the Drill Sergeant, and Benjamin G. Bowman will portray James.

The shifting line-up, which is detailed in the show's program, was no doubt devised to afford the lead performers a break from the physical workout provided by Twyla Tharp's choreography.

During evening shows, Cruikshank and Gomez are part of the ensemble. Marrié and Stackpole are swings.

"Movin' Out" is at its best in its more joyous, celebratory moments, and Tharp wisely builds the show to a rousing finale, one that has the four leads and ensemble hurling across the stage.

Oddly enough, the show "Movin' Out" most resembles in spirit is that other boomer-biased Broadway production, "Mamma Mia!" Part of the success of the ABBA musical is based on the audience's previous knowledge of the songs. That helps "Movin' Out," too. It's the nostalgia of recognition, cuing theatregoers to respond to what they already know.

In "Movin' Out," Joel's gritty numbers are intended to tell the story. They sure work as individual songs. Whether they are a strong enough narrative thread is another thing.

"He doesn't look like a happy camper," one source said of Joel, whose music is featured in "Movin' Out," a Broadway show that premiered October 24th, 2002. "He has lost weight. He is brooding. And, the time I saw him, he looked inebriated."

Taking even a sip of liquor can send a recovering alcoholic over the edge and into old habits, says National Institute on Alcohol Abuse spokeswoman Ann Bradley. "Some alcoholics can resume moderate drinking," she says, "but we advocate total abstinence."

Other recent Joel sightings, say sources, include:

On September 28th, 2002, Joel has lunch by himself at a hip New York eatery. Famed columnist Cindy Adams says he polished off a bottle of something other than water. Later, he turns up at another bar, The Bitter End. A fan who had his picture taken with Joel there reported she smelled liquor on the singer's breath.

October 6th, 2002 Joel orders two bottles of champagne at The Ritz-Carlton for him and eight friends. He has three glasses, pays and leaves a big tip after playing the piano for nearly two hours.

October 7th, 2002 patrons at The Ritz-Carlton see him wobbling in, then out of the bar. "He seemed disoriented," a source said, "and a doorman had to escort him to the elevator."

October 12th, 2002 at 7pm, he is seen again at the Ritz bar, drinking champagne with friends.

So, what's eating the rock and roll Hall of Famer? The singer of such classics as "Uptown Girl," "Allentown" and "New York State of Mind" says he has deep regrets about not finding a woman he could be with forever, and feels lonely. He recently ditched his beloved Long Island for Manhattan, hoping to find his great love.

The big move came shortly after he was released, in June, from the New Canaan, Connecticut, Silver Hill Hospital. Joel had checked himself in there just five days after wrapping his '99 Mercedes around a pole near East Hampton, NY, and two weeks after his ex-girlfriend, Inside Edition reporter Trish Bergin, married someone else. He told one reporter at the time that he had been on a "red-wine diet."

Which means, according to my sources, that not much has changed since the summer. Even worse, Joel is now denying he is an alcoholic.

"I'm an alcohol abuser, which is different," he told NBC's "Today" show host Matt Lauer October 17th, 2002, adding that he can stop and control his drinking. His fans sure hope he is right.

"Movin' Out" has a fresh approach: lure Broadway audiences in with Joel's ever-popular songs and then educate them with the artistry of a full-length ballet by director/choreographer Twyla Tharp, best known in this neck of the woods for her work on 1985's forgettable stage version of Singin' in the Rain and as choreographer of the film Hair. With "Movin' Out," Tharp dares audiences to forget conventional Broadway narrative and follow her characters through several decades of heartbreak and renewal purely through dance and a string of Joel's greatest songs. (Apparently, some audiences haven't taken Tharp up on her dare as a blunt 11-sentence synopsis of the plot is provided in the program).

Happily, the odd coupling of Joel and Tharp is a surprise success, and both artists come out the better for the meeting. "Movin' Out" uses 24 of Grammy-winner Joel's rock and pop hits - performed live by inexhaustible "Piano Man" Michael Cavanaugh and a smoking nine-piece band which reminds us why live is better than Memorex - and a handful of pre-recorded pieces written for his 2001 classical piano album "Fantasies & Delusions." The career retrospective, which includes megahits like "She's Got A Way," "Big Shot," "Pressure" and "We Didn't Start The Fire" overpowers Joel's recent public battles with loneliness and the bottle and reconfirms his immense songwriting talents. Tharp, meanwhile, proves that even she can wow Broadway audiences with a full-length pop ballet that remains deeply rooted in classical dance. Audiences looking for some big-time Broadway hoofing won't be disappointed by even the more eccentric moments of Tharp's "Movin' Out" work, which invites everyone in to join in the fun.

"Movin' Out," which follows a group of Long Islanders for several decades, finds its lead characters in the lyrics of some of Joel's most famous songs. From his legendary platinum 1977 album "The Stranger" we meet Brenda (Elizabeth Parkinson) and Eddie (John Selya), the "popular steadies" of "Scenes From An Italian Restaurant" and Tony (Keith Roberts) and Sergeant O'Leary (Scott Wise) of "Movin' Out (Anthony's Song)." Joining them are Benjamin G. Bowman and Ashley Tuttle as high school sweethearts James (from a little-known song of the same name) and Judy (could she be named after the early Joel rarity "Why Judy Why"?). But audiences hoping to follow the story purely through the lyrics will be confused. Joel's songs aren't shoehorned into situations - instead they provide a general outline of the action. And the songs are carefully chosen to avoid clunkiness (Fret not - none of the characters in "Movin' Out" are "living here in Allentown").

Instead of lyrics or dialogue, we have Tharp's electrifying nonstop choreography, which succeeds in telling the simple story with clarity for most of the night. Act One is the weaker of the show's parts - the introduction of the leads is rushed, and there are some awkward military passages detailing basic training and a Vietnam War battle scene, but there is still much to admire: James' touching proposal to Judy during Joel's evergreen love song, "Just The Way You Are," Eddie's loneliness dance after the Brenda breakup to one of Joel's best ballads, "Summer, Highland Falls" and the "Elegy: The Great Peconic" scene that closes the act with the classic heartbreaking image of soldiers returning home from war. Act Two is comparatively bulletproof, as the show finds its soul in the characters' post-war heartbreak and confusion. "Movin' Out" ultimately comes to a moving close to the evocative lyrics of Joel's "I've Loved These Days." An intermissionless approach would have worked better for the emotional arc of the show, but it's hard to fault the hard-working cast of dancers for taking a break to catch their breath.

The principal performers of "Movin' Out" are, in a word, stunning. Parkinson, the Nicole Kidman look-alike who first captured Broadway's eye in "Fosse," has the meatiest part and performs it breathtakingly. She generates a good amount of heat with the equally-wonderful Roberts in a series of electric Act Two sequences: the confrontational entanglement of "Big Shot," the angry competition of "Big Man On Mulberry Street" and, finally, the terrific "Shameless," in which the lovers finally melt in each other's arms in the sexiest pas de deux to grace a Broadway stage in ages. As Eddie, the cocky loner whose life is shaken by his experience in Vietnam, American Ballet Theatre vet Selya stands out in solos, which show off his acrobatic prowess. Bowman and Tuttle, also veterans of the ballet world, inject great passion into the heartbreaking story of James and Judy (which culminates in Tharp's "Goodnight Saigon" sequence that succeeds in matching the emotional weight of Joel's heart wrenching song). In addition to the likable leads, the entire "Movin' Out" ensemble (of both the Broadway and ballet worlds) displays a joy for performing that's infectious.

Cavanaugh, the talented young singer/pianist who overlooks the stage from a hydraulic platform on Santo Loquasto's industrial set, provides an invaluable service as the show's human Billy Joel jukebox. He sounds like Joel and his robust performance of the familiar songs will more than satisfy diehard fans in the house. Still, the highlight of the show is the dance and although Cavanaugh sings with passion and verve, he's ultimately playing second fiddle to the action below - hey, even Joel himself would have trouble competing for attention with Tharp's thrilling feats of dance. Finally, after the curtain call, Cavanaugh is given his own well-deserved spotlight moment, performing "New York State of Mind" for the enthusiastic hometown crowd.

Part musical, part rock concert, part ballet, "Movin' Out" defies categorization and certainly isn't for everyone. Musical theatre purists may bemoan its simple story and the lack of a libretto, while modern dance followers could be turned off by the more razzle-dazzle moments of Tharp's work. But for theatergoers in the mood for an adventure, "Movin' Out" is a true original and a triumph.

"Movin' Out," for the record, has only one principal vocalist: the remarkably accomplished pianist and Billy Joel-sound-alike Michael Cavanaugh, who performs on a platform above the dancers with an excellent 10-piece band. There's a self-contained polish about his singing that does not encourage theatregoers to join in. Up to the show's finale, you're unlikely to feel any overwhelming urge to tap your feet or shimmy your shoulders.

This is because Ms. Tharp has created numbers that, at their best, internalize the score. Each principal performer seems to have his or her own special dialogue with the songs; the dances become shaded personality sketches, expressing individual reactions to mass-marketed music.

It helps that the characters in the show, which is set in Mr. Joel's native Long Island, are just the sort of people who would grow up listening to and identifying with Billy Joel songs. They are less rebellious, less hip precursors to the New Jersey kids who would latch on to Bruce Springsteen.

Ms. Tharp honors the hopeful squareness of her characters' youths and the self-destructive, masochistic streak that runs through Mr. Joel's ballads of disappointment in adulthood. Throughout, she makes wonderfully elegant use of their uncool klutziness. You can imagine yourself becoming these characters in a way that the idealized sophistication of Astaire and Rogers, say, does not allow.

The show begins with a prologue, set to "It's Still Rock and Roll To Me," in which the characters introduce themselves with the sort of exuberant, rough-edged poses common to teenagers, guys flexing their muscles and girls wriggling their hips. The dominant feeling is of people trying on attitudes that don't fit.

There are five fully defined characters: Eddie (Mr. Selya) and Brenda (Elizabeth Parkinson), the king and queen of the prom, who break up soon after the show begins (to the strains of "Scenes From An Italian Restaurant"); James (Benjamin G. Bowman) and Judy (Ashley Tuttle), whose love seems more durable; and Tony (Keith Roberts), part of a tight trio of friends with Eddie and James.

What follows has been examined to the point of weariness in films like "The Deer Hunter" and "Coming Home" and novels like "Machine Dreams." The three men go to Vietnam as soldiers. Only two return, and all four survivors - the men and women - bear psychic wounds that will not stop festering.

That is pretty much it, folks, and yes, you've heard it before. But with a wide-ranging physical vocabulary that quotes everything from "Swan Lake" to Michael Jackson's moonwalk, Ms. Tharp uses this basic story in the way choreographers of storybook ballets used fairy tales like "Sleeping Beauty." The dancers' movements, especially those of the men, keep uncovering deeper emotional levels that are anything but simple.

Not everything works with equal effectiveness in "Movin' Out," which Ms. Tharp has completely restructured since its initial, poorly received tryout in Chicago. An all-American jalopy (a Mustang convertible, if you please), used in the early scenes, hulks leadenly on the stage, symbolic dead weight.

Ms. Tharp's staging of "Uptown Girl," led by the lissome Ms. Parkinson, feels like a weary reworking of Mr. Joel's video for the same song. On the other hand, a ballet of mourning, performed by Ms. Tuttle and three male dancers, is a devastating study in frenzied grief, with faint shades of Martha Grahamesque tragedy.

Overall, "Movin' Out" is more compelling in shadow than in sunshine, though Donald Holder's superb lighting evokes both eloquently. (The simple, poetically stark set is by Santo Loquasto.) The conventional pas de deux of courtship have nothing on the harsh, hostile dance of recrimination in which Mr. Roberts and Ms. Parkinson seem literally to be tearing each other apart.

The Vietnam sequences, especially one rendered as a phantasmagorical flashback, are both harrowing and lyrical. Even more impressive are the numbers that plumb the lowest depths of Mr. Joel's songs about self-laceration and descents into substance abuse ("Big Shot," "Captain Jack"), in which period styles from disco to break dancing are executed with skilled sloppiness. And Suzy Benzinger's costumes slyly reflect changing times, with a jolting, brilliant nod to punk rock in a war widow's costume.

Ms. Tharp makes hedonism seem aromatically joyless, and I kept expecting my clothes to reek of smoky, sweaty bars afterward. Mr. Selya is extraordinary in these sequences, as Eddie slides further into drug-induced nightmares, in which he often seems to be floating and crashing in one moment.

I wasn't really convinced by the bright, upbeat scenes of salvation that end the show, which suggest that the answer to depression and suicidal tendencies is jogging. But Ms. Tharp stages her dances of reconciliation and redemption with such infectious New Age-flavored glee that you can feel the audience members loosening up gratefully.

Only when the amazing Mr. Cavanaugh finally gets his deserved moment in the spotlight with the encore, "New York State of Mind," do the theatregoers start wriggling happily like the crowds at "Mamma Mia!" After all those images of pain, there is a catharsis in being allowed to feel that Mr. Joel's music is still - if not only - rock and roll.

"Only when the hostages came to a show after they were released from Iran," recalled Bebe Neuwirth. Tommy Tune said he'd never seen it either.

Right before "Movin' Out" started last night, Billy Joel came in to take his seats with daughter Alexa.

And the crowd - which included Rod Stewart, Rosie O'Donnell, Clive Davis, Denise Rich and producer Phil Ramone - burst into a spontaneous three-minute standing ovation. Billy looked shocked. There was cheering in the Richard Rodgers Theatre. And this was before the show even started.

By the time it was over, newcomer Michael Cavanaugh - whom Billy found at the New York-New York piano bar in Las Vegas - was an overnight sensation, and Joel had a Broadway hit on his hands.

Inside the theater during the show, the preternaturally young Tommy Tune literally swooned and gasped at Twyla Tharp's muscular dance numbers and hoofers including the phenomenal Elizabeth Parkinson, John Selya and Keith Roberts.

"Wait, look at this," he kept saying to his companion. Later he told me he'd visited the show in Chicago during tryouts, but he seemed awfully well-versed in all the numbers.

Rod Stewart and girlfriend Penny Lancaster did not make the afterparty, although everyone else did. Seems Rod and Penny got confused about the half-block walk to the Marriott Marquis, and are now somewhere in Manhattan in a limo.

Rod's new album, "It Had to Be You: The American Songbook," though, is set for a Top 20 debut next week, and I'm sure he'll be back by then.

"I feel great," a reserved Joel said moments before the curtain went up. "Twyla had a vision, and I think that was the most important thing about making this work. When somebody has a vision that intense, the best thing to do is get out of the way and don't mess with it."

Joel also joked that he's "not even sure what to call this thing" - a "dance musical" conceived by Tharp and based on more than two dozen of the Long Islander's songs.

"It's not a traditional musical," he said. "But I like that it's risky and different."

Joel was escorted into the Richard Rodgers Theatre by Alexa, who had not seen the show during previews.

"I've been busy with school and everything, and my dad keeps asking me, 'When are you gonna see my show?'" said the 16 year-old. "This is a big night for him."

Joel's mom, meanwhile, behaved like any kvelling parent.

"We always knew he was talented as a kid," riffed Rosalind Joel, who says her favorite song in her son's repertoire is "She's Always A Woman."

"Am I excited? Sure, it's unbelievable," she added, "but I'll tell you, after 30 years of this, you calm down after a while. To me, he's just a very talented boy and a very good son."

"Movin' Out," which opened last night at the Richard Rodgers Theatre, gives Broadway the jolt of genuine energy it needed this season.

In a word, the show's a blast.

It is a non-stop dance piece by the great choreographer Twyla Tharp, to the music of Billy Joel.

The Joel vocals are faithfully executed - but not slavishly imitated - by a vibrant 29 year-old singer named Michael Cavanaugh.

There is a vague narrative line in the show, but the story isn't really the point. The point is dance, rendered with the tactile muscularity that is the Tharp signature.

This is not Tharp's Broadway debut: In 1981, she staged the impressive "Catherine Wheel" to the music of David Byrne.

At 61 she is, of course, widely respected as one of the leading lights of American dance, and has headed her own company, Twyla Tharp Dance, since 1965.

But her dances are still like no one else's. They go from formal balletic pairings to bruising battles of bodies in ceaseless motion, with a formidable grace as their visual baseline.

They are incredibly difficult and demanding to do, and they are brilliantly executed here by a cast of seasoned Tharp dancers.

Here she takes on some 30 years of memorable songs by Joel, including "Uptown Girl," "Big Shot" and "Only The Good Die Young." She uses 29 songs in all, including the best-known ones, and (much to Joel's credit) there isn't a clinker in the bunch.

These songs made Joel, now 53, the bard of Long Island, its answer to New Jersey's (much darker) Bruce Springsteen.

You realize how many of these songs are etched on your brain, even if you didn't particularly think of yourself as a Joel fan going into the show.

A great 10-piece rock band, with Cavanaugh sitting Joel-like center stage at the grand piano, sits on a highly mobile electric platform whose home is above the dance action. But sometimes the whole thing swoops down to take a more central position.

Santo Loquasto's very high-tech set, with visible elevators on each side, is a presence in motion onstage, though it mostly gets out of the way to let the dancers dance.

Donald Holder's lighting is spectacular, sometimes enveloping the whole theater in massive lighting effects.

Suzy Benziger's costumes are precisely on point, too, and we get from them a sense of the sweep of history over 40 years.

The loose story line follows a group of Long Island friends from their innocent high school days in the early '60s, through the transforming trauma of the Vietnam War, to something approaching present-day health for those who survived the war.

Early on there is a full-sized red Mustang on stage, which manages to be part of the dance.

A central couple is Brenda (the dazzling Elizabeth Parkinson at the evening performances) and Tony (Keith Roberts), who come together, break apart, and ultimately come together again (in a dazzling pas de deux to "Shameless") after decades of obsession with each other.

John Selya, meanwhile, plays Eddie, who becomes a junkie after his Vietnam experience and suffers years of disorientation: At one point the ghosts of his Vietnam buddies rise up like the revolutionaries in "Les Miserables."

He finally rejoins the living with a combination of rigorous jogging (at this point he wears a track suit and headband) and the romantic attentions of Judy (Ashley Tuttle), who has been left a widow by the war.

Benjamin G. Bowman is James, of the eponymous song ("We were always friends/From our childhood days").

What may surprise the older members of the audience is to see Scott Wise, once Broadway's premier chorus dancer (he was featured in 13 Broadway shows, and won the Tony Award for "Jerome Robbins Broadway" in 1989), now relegated to the non-dancing roles of policeman, drill sergeant and bartender.

Wise is listed, however, as the show's assistant director and assistant choreographer.

There is a 12-member dance ensemble, some of whose members stand in for the leads at matinee performances.

This is far from the first Broadway show to consist entirely of dancing. Bob Fosse choreographed "Dancin'" in 1978 and was the subject of the posthumous "Fosse" some 20 years later. There was Tharp's own "Catherine Wheel," and most recently "Contact," the long-running, all-dancing show by Susan Stroman.

But "Contact" was done to a hodgepodge of old records - while the Joel score gives this piece a strong musical identity and a unity of sound that "Contact" didn't have. Also, Stroman's Broadway dances clearly were not on a level with Tharp's dance-recital choreography.

The story it sketches is a baby boomer's tale, but Tharp wants you to be able to project your personal story on it without effort.

This is, of course, the show to take your non-English-speaking friends to.

But just about anybody under 50 would be energized by this remarkable marriage of song and story, which ultimately may represent the essence of Twyla Tharp more than that of Billy Joel.

Note that the longer second act is far superior to the short first act, as the dancers literally take off on the wings of what remains Joel's irresistibly propulsive music.

Don't ask what "Movin' Out" is. Just find a way to see it. It provides more gut-wrenching lows and more spirit-lifting highs than anything Broadway has seen in years.

The Great White Way has offered other all-dance shows lately - the British "Swan Lake" and "Contact." "Movin' Out" falls into that category. Only this time the choreography makes it a masterpiece.

Twyla Tharp has taken 28 familiar songs by Billy Joel and put dances to them. Nobody talks. A single singer, Michael Cavanaugh, covers the Joel tunes in a voice that recalls the songwriter's but doesn't slavishly imitate him.

There's a story. Five friends graduate from high school. A young woman switches her affections from one guy to another. The remaining couple gets married.

The lead dancers were recruited from ballet companies, though they have been working with Ms. Tharp for the last two years. In this opening section, sometimes their moves seem stiff and too conventionally balletic.

But then the three men enlist and go fight in Vietnam, and all hell breaks loose. Early in her career, Ms. Tharp invented a dance vocabulary of twists and thrusts and collapses that uniquely conveys a world of pain and inner torment. As soon as the soldiers disembark, the show reverts to her modern-dance style and becomes riveting.

At intermission, you wonder whether there's enough of an underlying myth here to equal the power of Matthew Bourne's haunting Swan Lake. No worries. Ms. Tharp is telling the story of someone who's gone to hell - and back. Her hero, played by John Selya, crashes when he returns from the war. He lives on the streets. He frequents sadomasochistic bars.

Eventually, though, he begins to heal, as do the other characters. He's like "Orpheus" - only he gets the promise of joy when he returns from the "Underworld."

All these fabulous dancers outdo themselves, but Mr. Selya is on another level yet. He gives one of the classic dance performances of all time - something you can tell your grandkids you got to see, like Nijinsky or Baryshnikov.

Ms. Tharp's long dance piece "Catherine Wheel" starts out with a grim story but culminates in one of the longest, most exuberant finales ever. Without repeating herself, she does the same thing here. "Movin' Out" leaves you gasping for air. You're not supposed to feel this much - this bad or this good - at a mere Broadway show.

Obviously this is a must-see for Billy Joel fans or dance mavens. But the appeal of "Movin' Out" stretches farther - to regular theatergoers and beyond.

"Movin' Out" is no exception. A dance fan's dream, it's Tharp at her best, incorporating even break dancing and the electric boogaloo. But she's tried to string Joel's strident songs into something like a coherent plot, an attempt that backfires.

A bunch of friends bond, break up, get engaged; the guys enlist in the army and wind up in Vietnam. One dies; the others suffer trauma and dislocation, drugs and kinky sex. After a while they all get on with their lives.

Tharp convincingly reproduces the nightmare of war with fewer than a dozen guys and a battered tank, and builds a deliciously lascivious duet for Parkinson and Roberts to "Shameless."

In a pivotal Act II number the program calls "Eddie Attains Grace," the beleaguered hero finally appears to have shaken his demons. The agent of his transformation? Jogging. Delivered from the chaos of the '60s, from war and drugs and shattered romantic dreams, he's left with and redeemed by endorphins, clean-cut clothes, and his buddy the beat cop.

For some, this resolution will seem adequate. But to those who believe the social changes wrought in the '60s, spearheaded by the so-called counterculture, were genuine and deep, the denouement rings more than a little hollow.

Endorphins may get you through the day and a bottle of champagne through the night, but a real vision for the future - at this particular fraught moment in global politics - is missing from the stage, as it is from most of our current political discourse. The lessons of Vietnam, so affectingly enacted in "Movin' Out," seem to have been lost.

"Movin' Out," the beleaguered Twyla Tharp-Billy Joel theatrical collaboration that tried out at the Shubert Theatre in Chicago this spring, has opened on Broadway to generally positive reviews - including an all-important enthusiastic notice in The New York Times.

The warm critical response is a significant vindication for Tharp. Following the show's lukewarm reviews after the Chicago opening, Tharp radically revised her dance-driven attempt to forge a cohesive narrative from Joel compositions.

Here's A Sample of the New York Reviews:

Ben Brantley, The New York Times: "Ms. Tharp and her vivid team of dancers unearth the reasons certain cliches keep resonating and, more important, make them gleam as if they had just been minted. In chronicling the stories of five blue-collar friends from their glory days in high school through the Vietnam War and its long hangover, 'Movin' Out' vibrates with a riveting uneasiness. The show translates the subliminal anxiety you always feel watching dancers onstage...into a study of characters who cannot find equilibrium. They are adolescents jolted out of their expected roles...before they have had a chance to form their identities."

Clive Barnes, New York Post: "They can call...'Movin' Out' a musical until they're blue in the face. But if it looks like a ballet, sounds like a ballet, feels like a ballet and dances like a ballet - it is a ballet, the first full-evening Broadway ballet, at least since Matthew Bourne's 'Swan Lake' a few years back got Broadway's feet wet."

Howard Kissel, New York Daily News: "Let's get one thing straight right off the bat: The dancing in 'Movin' Out' is spectacular. Twyla Tharp's choreography to music by Billy Joel is extraordinarily demanding, but her young dancers perform it with astonishing commitment and energy."

In Twyla Tharp's very first public performance, back in 1965, she danced briefly to Petula Clark’s pop hit "Downtown." No one covered the event. "I was really pissed," Tharp recalled over breakfast last week, still sounding a little irritated. "I would’ve taken a really foul review."

Since then, Tharp has continued to blast the boundaries between high and low art. She put ballerinas in tennis shoes, and choreographed for American Ballet Theatre. She made dances for movies and her own company, using music by Mozart or the Beach Boys with equal flair. No one ignores her now. This week Tharp faces the critics again when she opens "Movin' Out," a hugely ambitious $8 million Broadway show she conceived, choreographed and directed to the music of Mr. "Uptown Girl," Billy Joel.

Both Tharp and Joel are quick to say that "Movin' Out" is not a musical in the conventional sense. "We can’t come up with a name for what this is," says Tharp. "This is not a book musical; we do not have book scenes." Or dialogue. But the show has characters and a narrative line, expressed in dance, that Tharp has pieced together from Joel's songs. "Movin' Out" follows a group of working-class baby boomers from New York's Long Island, who couple and uncouple, and endure the destructive forces of Vietnam and the counterculture. Joel's songs - from the more innocent "Uptown Girl" to the darker "Prelude/Angry Young Man" and "Goodnight Saigon" - are played by a live rock band, as Tharp's crew dances the action in her famously eclectic style, from the sweet and balletic to the violently kinetic. "I always felt Billy could do a Broadway show, and a Broadway show was something that always interested me," says Tharp. Two years ago she called him and proposed the idea. "I didn’t want to do something like this before," said Joel, on the phone from his boat off Long Island. "People have sent me cornball, clichéd scripts about 'Piano Man' or 'Uptown Girl.' But Twyla approached me about choreographing to the music, and I thought it was a natural." Tharp had choreographed some of Joel's music, and he went to see it. "I was really moved," he says. "The dancers had become these people in the songs."

It's an intriguing concept, if tough to pull off. In the Chicago tryout, "Movin’ Out" was hammered by some critics. Tharp rolled up her sleeves and began "pruning," especially the problematic first act. Friends such as director Mike Nichols offered suggestions. Joel himself had weighed in early, recommending musicians for the band, including a singer/piano player Joel saw in Vegas who's his doppelgnger in the show. "But Twyla made the ultimate decisions," he says with a laugh. "If you stand in Twyla's way, you die!"

Tharp's choreography always lets her dancers' personalities emerge, which is critical for a show like this where the characters don't speak. Six of the principals have toured with Tharp's company, and they've got her demanding technique nailed - you're not likely to see such virtuosity on any other Broadway stage. Still, Tharp's been bruised on Broadway before: she took a critical beating for her 1985 staging of "Singin' In The Rain." But the fate of "Movin' Out" is more likely in the hands of fans than critics. To anyone who thinks Joel's and Tharp's fans couldn't overlap, Twyla has this to say: "The guy on the street has always been my hero, just the way the guy on the street has always been Billy Joel's hero." Tharp at 61 is as determined as ever. She even says she's likely to perform again herself. "I know only this - You never say no to anything."

The audience in Chicago's Shubert Theatre is on its feet yelling, and choreographer Twyla Tharp stands up, too, scrawling notes and intently watching the curtain calls amid the commotion. The instant the house lights go up, she scrambles to get backstage; then, after a few quick meetings, she's out the stage door and racing toward her hotel, talking every second of the way. She's not in any hurry. She's just thinking. But thinking is something she likes to do aloud and at top speed, a little as if she were bulldozing a building for the fun of it.

"What are we going to call it? What is it? Is there a word?" she keeps demanding. She's been eavesdropping - some people in the audience are confused by the show. The newspaper ads call it "a new musical," but there's no dialogue to convey the story, not even a voice-over like the one that drove the action in Contact. This show is all dancing, fueled by a rock band performing songs by Billy Joel. "You know what it is?" she says at a street corner, eyes darting as she waits impatiently for the light to change. "It's a full-length. That's what it is. It's a full-length ballet. But you can't call it that." Sure you can, if your goal is two weeks at Lincoln Center and a faithful audience of ballet lovers. Tharp's show, however, is headed for Broadway - eight performances a week, top ticket price $95, no margin for error. What is it?

"Movin' Out," as the ads now make clear, is a Broadway show, period. No handle at all. "Actually, that was Billy's suggestion," says Tharp, scarfing down take-out sushi in midtown last week. "Just use the title, and let everybody else call it whatever they want." Good idea, because this hybrid defies all categories. It certainly doesn't look like a full-length ballet - not with a ten-man band headed by Michael Cavanaugh pounding away from a platform overhead so that the music is right smack within the frame of the dancing. (The danseur noble who enters driving a '67 Mustang doesn't exactly evoke Sleeping Beauty, either.) Tharp chose 29 of Joel's songs, putting them in a sequence that allows both words and music to generate a story line about the sixties and their aftershocks. Vietnam is at the center of the narrative, but through and around the war, we see high-school kids from Long Island growing up and crashing headlong into America.

Often the choreography mirrors the lyrics; sometimes Tharp just rides the music. She stages the straightforward love song "She's Got A Way," for instance, as a wistful duet for four. The two lovers - one in Vietnam, the other back home - never touch or even see each other. Each is partnered by somebody else. "I said, 'You know, Billy, I'm destroying the context of your songs,' " says Tharp. "He said, 'Fine, go for it.' "

Tharp has always wanted movement to be the chief storyteller in this show, but for a while she was encouraging the dancers to speak up, too. "We had a lot of yelling and screaming going on," she admits. "You get energy from that. I said okay, this is good, we need more." She kept piling it on, until a woman in the audience was glimpsed covering her ears, then her eyes, then her ears again. That gave Tharp pause. Finally, Jerome Robbins, who died four years ago but remains a trusted source of wisdom for Tharp, convinced her she was overwhelming the audience with too much information coming from too many directions.

"Jerry and I used to carry on this argument all the time," she recalls. "He said, 'You can't talk in dance.' I said, 'Jerry, you're so old-fashioned, of course you can talk in dance.' He said, 'It does not work.' So here's Jerry in Chicago, sitting over here, and he's just grinning and saying nothing. Shaking that head from time to time. All right, Jerry, all right. This time they have to shut up."

So they shut-up and danced. Meanwhile, the first reviews came in: The Chicago critics loved the dancing, but they couldn't follow the story. Tharp lined up all the reviews, studied them, and sprang into action. "I'm going, Okay, these are the specific confusion points, break them out, break them down, confront them, analyze them, and say yea or nay," she says. "Some of them I thought were wrong, some of them I said, 'You're absolutely right, this is not reading as intended. Fix it.' It's like in fairy tales, there's always the one jewel hidden by many brambles. The challenge is always to take away the dross and leave that thing. That's what editing is about, and that's what this process is." By the time the show went into previews at the Richard Rodgers Theatre, where it opens officially on October 24th, 2002, she had cleared away acres of brambles. But she's still eavesdropping on the audience to find out if the jewel is visible.

Tharp knows she stands accused of ambition, commercialism, and every other sin against art, but she's always believed that good dance belongs in people's lives right next to eating and sunsets and baseball. Any delivery system that works is fine with her. She's fielding spectacular performers, including mile-high Elizabeth Parkinson, whose legs alone deserve a dressing room with a star on the door, and John Selya, already one of those Tharp immortals (Baryshnikov was another), who embodies her wildest movement ideas with such wit and clarity it's as if he's channeling her.

"Everybody who is looking to go 'Sell-Out! Compromise!' can just get over it," she says. "You show me this year a better pas de deux than 'Shameless.' Anywhere, on any stage in the world. You show me a better operatic sequence in dance than 'Goodnight Saigon.'" Last week, she talked to a man in the audience who told her he came because he's a Billy Joel fan. By the end of the show, he was a convert, transfixed by the dancing. But is it art that did the trick? "You tell me," Tharp fires back. She loves demolishing this question. "I just think dance is very grand. And I think it's very, very capable - dance can express anything. So you tell me if it's art."

"These are not the best of times," says one Joel lyric in the show, "but they're the only times I've ever known."

And "Movin' Out" captures them perfectly.

"This was something different," he says. "This came from left field. It wasn't necessarily based on a book. It was based on the lyrics to my songs being the dialog to a show that was danced. So what you have is a band playing the music. A guy playing the piano and singing the songs above the action and the dancers are the characters from the songs... Brenda and Eddie, and Anthony, Judy and James. One of the questions Twlya asked me from the beginning was, 'What ever happened to Brenda and Eddie after this? What did Anthony do? Where did these people end up?' And I said, 'I don't know.'"

"Movin' Out" attempts to answer those nagging questions left in Billy Joel's lyrics. Mr. Joel's music often involves telling very personal stories about slices of American life. He can make you feel that the characters in his songs are not just people he's met over the years, but the kind of people we've all known at one time or another.

Billy Joel's says his style of musical storytelling has made for a smooth transition to Broadway. "Actually I was writing little musicals when I was doing my albums anyway. A lot of the albums have a theme. There's a beginning, middle and an end and they're stories in their own right."

"Movin' Out" doesn't follow a single Billy Joel album or theme. It pulls songs and characters from many different albums spanning the songwriter's twenty-two years as a popular music composer. While the Broadway musical does attempt to put a face on some of the characters in Joel's music, Mr. Joel himself says that the show will not detract from any of the songs' personal meaning. Rather, he says that for his fans, it will bring new dimensions to the characters he sings about.

When Billy Joel isn't spending time watching "Movin' Out" on Broadway, he'll be continuing his world tour with fellow "Piano Man," Elton John. Mr. Joel adds that he still has a lot more songwriting that he wants to do. He's expressed interest in writing more classical music. He's even toyed with the idea of writing an entirely new Broadway show.