MOG

This Halloween season (and it has become a full-on season, for the love of Hallmark, with kiddie trick-or-treating trumped by costume-clad adults indulging in ribald chicanery at parties and public events), the scariest sight I’ve seen so far has nothing to do with witches or skeletons or glowering jack-o'-lanterns. But vampires are definitely involved.

The horror was couched in a video clip of the “Like a Rolling Stone” dance number from renowned choreographer Twyla Tharp’s Broadway revue “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” which is built around the songs of none other than the Bard of Hibbing, Minnesota, Bob Dylan. A grinning, tousle-haired young man with a guitar prances around the stage and sings one of Dylan’s greatest numbers - an electrified-folk anthem from the watershed album, "Highway 61 Revisited," that stands as a powerful and significant benchmark of the rock era - in a glib yet histrionic voice, as dancers in wacky animal costumes leap around him.

Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited

I’ll admit that I saw the performance out of context, which doesn’t make it any more tolerable. If it’s emblematic of the rest of this “rock ballet,” then…yikes!. If it’s the worst of it, it’s still an abomination. Although this is not your traditionally Gothic vampirism, someone sure is feeding on Dylan’s legacy - and it sucks.

Dylan had to sign off on such a high-profile project. The money must have been tempting, and he’s entitled to do what he wants with his own creations. Still, this is a guy who has embodied the iconoclastic artist and poet since his first taste of fame in the early ‘60s, who always moved to the beat of his own heart, who just released the critically-lauded album “Modern Times,” and who is continuing to tour successfully. He don't need the scratch. And I think that a cobbled-together compendium and reinterpretation of his material to accommodate the glossy world of the Broadway stage (and chase box-office receipts) diminishes his canon.

Tharp, for all of her modern dance cred, is simply following the success of her previous contribution to the heinous rise of “jukebox musicals” such as Abba’s “Mamma Mia,” The Four Seasons’ “Jersey Boys,” and Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire”: “Movin’ Out,” the tepid, feebly plotted tribute to the lounge-rock banalities of Billy “Piano Man” Joel.

Only in the world of craven show-biz commerce could Billy Joel and Bob Dylan inhabit the same plane.

“The Times They Are A-Changin’" has a romantic “Fantasticks”-like plot with a circus setting, which is not to suggest that the producers, the performers, Tharp or Dylan are clowns. Dylan should emerge unscathed after the show runs its course, including the inevitable touring company coming to a theater in your town. His revolutionary songs and his songs of revolution, his tender ballads and his balls-to-the-wall rockers will endure, blah, blah, etc.

As Bob’s reputation goes, I’m thinking that a better title for the production would have come from another of his albums: “Blood on the Tracks.”