Why Bob bombed on Broadway

WHAT has Bob Dylan done to deserve this? First reports reach us from Broadway, where The Times They Are A-Changing (or, to put it in a more stirring way, Dylan - The Musical) opened last week. And first reports are not good.

Even on the Great White Way, where "jukebox musicals" have long been inflicted on an otherwise blameless public, the New York Times decided "these spectacles of torture with a smile, frightening though they may be, are but bagatelles compared with the systematic steamrolling of Bob Dylan."

The New York Post was more lenient, summing up the concept as "downmarket pretentiousness gone cheap", while Variety's critical smack-down blasted it as "a plodding, literal-minded fable that's vibrant and busy but also chaotic and narratively incoherent." So far, the last quote looks like the front-runner for the show poster.

Frankly, though, what were you expecting? The jukebox musical is a format so cynical and patronising that ticketholders should receive a complimentary slap in the face at the box-office. A risk-averse strategy for creating musicals in which the most complicated variable - the hummability of the score - has been worked out decades beforehand, the main challenge of the form is to ration out greatest hits along a glib cut'n'paste storyline.

The jukebox musical has been with us for some time - Buddy, the Buddy Holly singalong, opened in 1996 - but the current contagion can easily be traced back to 1999's Abba-rummaging show Mamma Mia! A connect-the-dots approach to Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson's songbook, set on a sun-dried Greek island, its prefabricated appeal ensured that the show would make more than $1 billion at the box office.

If Mamma Mia! is to be blamed for the subsequent exploitation and commercial disasters perpetrated against The Beach Boys (Good Vibrations), John Lennon (Lennon) and - is nothing sacred? - Johnny Cash (Ring of Fire), it's a crime made worse by the fact that the Abba show is ridiculously enjoyable.

But there's a world of difference between the good-time disco-pop of bouncy, beardy Swedes and the opaque lyricism and declamatory delivery of Robert Zimmerman. And the trouble with The Times. . . suggests that the jukebox might finally, mercifully be running short of adaptable hits.

But what's really irking the critics is how choreographer Twyla Tharp, who (and we may have to take this on good faith) worked wonders with her Billy Joel musical Movin' Out, became so stymied by Dylan - as though someone who could locate an easy plot point in the not exactly impenetrable words of Uptown Girl should have as much ease with the surreal twists of Desolation Row.

Clearly though, Dylan has to bear some responsibility for this himself. The idea for the musical was apparently his own (he is credited with orchestration) and the rather airtight defence of non-involvement by Lennon, Cash or Elvis is not Dylan's to claim. Of course, there could be another reason Dylan okayed this apparent shambles. The jukebox musical depends on inbuilt familiarity with the source material, and Dylan has never been particularly comfortable with familiarity. The Judas of folk music, who would later loan his gaunt features for the benefit of a lingerie ad, who has starred in documentaries, issued his memoirs, kept releasing new albums and who tours without relent, is about the only living icon whose mystery isn't damaged by ubiquity.

If there's little to be gained, however, from watching his oeuvre contorted into a coming-of-age story, in which the protagonist wonders how many roads he must walk down, or encourages the object of his affections to lay, lady, lay, before leaving his adversary knock knock knocking on heaven's door, then there may be a more encouraging lesson for us in Las Vegas.

Right now in Sin City, The Beatles musical Love, performed by Cirque Du Soleil and boasting an heroically reinterpreted score by George Martin and his son Giles, offers an antidote to the poison of the jukebox: choosing not to string out the hits like glittering beads on a flimsy thread, but to make the music itself tell a story.

Martin's free rein with the material, encouraged by Apple Corps, means that The Beatles's songs now resemble individual characters, their melodies exchanging a brisk dialogue. The drums of Strawberry Fields Forever conspire together with the horns of Sgt Pepper; the open guitar chord of A Hard Day's Night bleeds into the orchestral crescendo of A Day in the Life.

If the jukebox musical is here to stay, Martin's approach seems like a better way forward than Dylan's roughly plotted karaoke session. It's the difference between creating a showstopper and finding the hits that merely slow a show down.