You’re sitting in a hotel lobby, waiting for someone you want to impress. A song comes on and fills the comfy room where many people sit eating sandwiches and waiting for taxis. A couple of porters squeak by with those trolleys for luggage. You know the song and smile. I like this song. You stop smiling or maybe smile even more and chuckle at yourself because you realize the song is “Just the Way You Are” by king-of-cool Billy Joel. Just then, a couple in pastel coloured tourist clothes get up from their chairs. They like this song. They start dancing. Properly dancing. Little leaps and pulls, jumps and flies, like the lifts in Dirty Dancing. They’re having a great time in the lobby. People stop eating their sandwiches and watch them. They love them too. You don’t. You feel weird. Everyone jumps up and claps in time to the happy dancing couple. You feel unaccountably drawn to joining in. It wouldn’t be worth it not too. Just then, just when you’re clapping too to “Just the Way You Are,” you and the rest, smiling wide, the girl you want to impress walks in. Maybe that’s a long scene for a little thing, but what I’m trying to tell you about is the delirious embarrassment of watching Movin’ Out, the Billy Joel tribute musical I saw on Broadway last week.

It was quite a thing. Now I have a sympathy for Billy. He's sold 100 million records. No fool ever did that. He's got a touch for light rock. He's like Budweiser or something. But two hours of solid Billy, no dialogue, just dancing in that lightweight moderny repititive way, full of smiles and air punching, was like being drowned in bubble bath. Fluffy but ultimately lethal. The peak of wierdness was the Vietnam sequence, a homily to Apocalypse Now, twisting, raged, drugblinded wriggling on the ground with strips of light coming through the blind to the sound of, you guessed it, We Didn't Start The Fire. And then the happy redemptive ending for the identikit heroes, greeted with sighs of ecstasy from the tourist crowd, to River of Dreams.

Religious.