Sinatra on Stage: Come Fly With Twyla Tharp

Dance has gone mainstream. And that's just the way Twyla Tharp likes it

Brigitte Lacombe for TIME

Tharp's Broadway shows feature tunes by artists from Billy Joel to Frank Sinatra.

When Twyla Tharp was 8 years old, her family moved from rural Indiana to a small town near San Bernardino, Calif., and opened a drive-in movie theater. Tharp's mother, an accomplished pianist, had put her precocious daughter through the usual cultural paces--lessons in ballet and tap as well as several musical instruments--but the family movie palace is where Tharp got her first real feel for an audience. She'd work at the snack bar and sit in a junked car way up front to watch the movies--westerns, musicals, horror-film fright fests on Friday the 13th. Whenever a plot started to drag, Tharp...

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