Movin' Out To Move Out of West End on May 22

Movin' Out, which enjoyed a successful run on Broadway, will wrap up its limited West End engagement early. The Billy Joel/Twyla Tharp musical was originally booking through July 17 at London's Apollo Victoria Theatre, but will now shutter on May 22. According to producers, the show "has not attracted the level of audiences needed to sustain the production, which requires two troupes of dancers."

Movin' Out was conceived, directed and choreographed by Tharp and is based on and features the Joel songbook. Through song and dance, it tells the story of two turbulent American decades for a group of lifelong friends.

The musical began performances in the West End on March 28 and officially opened on April 10 to mixed reviews. In his Theatre.com Review, Mark Shenton wrote: "Tharp's inspired and frequently thrilling dance explodes like a burst of adrenalin pumped onto the stage, but the particular joy of Movin' Out lies, too, in the illuminating way it reinvents not just the dansical but also the freshness that it brings to the increasingly stale jukebox musical that crafts a new story out of an existing pop repertoire… Movin' Out succeeds because it adds an extra interpretative layer to the storytelling that's already contained in the songs. It does this by threading a story told in a purely visual language of movement through them that tell not just of an era amongst a group of friends and their intersecting lives but also of the emotions and the exhilarations and losses of love that they suffer along the way."

Movin' Out enjoyed a three and a half year run on Broadway, where it made a profit. Despite the quick West End closing, a planned European tour of the tuner will still occur.