Lost Highway - Thru April 20, 2008 at Virginia Stage Company's Wells Theatre
Lost Highway - Thru April 20, 2008 at Virginia Stage Company's Wells Theatre
Musically, 'Hank' sets the woods on fire
Musically, 'Hank' sets the woods on fire
Jarrod Emick is winning as the iconic country singer in 'Hank Williams: Lost Highway,' but given the dramatic events of Williams' life, it's curious that the script skims over them. (Courtesy photo)
These lines from Hank Williams form perhaps the most dramatic pop song about human loneliness in the American lexicon. The hopeless quality of lost love and lost ambition permeate. To hear it should send chills up your spine. It is a drama all to itself.
It is curious, then, that there is so little drama in "Hank Williams: Lost Highway," the show that has settled in to the Virginia Stage Company's Wells Theatre through April 20. Walking in the footsteps of an earlier box-office bonanza for the company about Patsy Cline, this show is sure to be a crowd pleaser that will encourage continued musical "biographies" such as "Ella," already scheduled for next season.
"Lost Highway" is not much of a play, but it offers an altogether pleasant concert evening that re-creates the music of Williams, a singer who ranks with Bob Dylan in writing and recording songs with the down-home, common-folk feel of America. Jarrod Emick's vocal impersonation of Williams' style is largely effective, and he is backed by a simply terrific group of musician-actors who suggest the Cowboy Drifters - complete with harmonica, banjo and even spoons.
Musically it's a great evening, but dramatically it takes the high road (make that the superficial road) at every step rather than getting into anything like what must have been the rowdy, gritty world of a country boy coming up through the ranks of the music business in the 1940s and '50s.
Writers Randal Myler and Mark Harelik faced a difficult challenge in dramatizing Williams's life. After all, this is the story of a man who simply drank himself to death. Fame, as is so often the case in these musical biographies, is depicted as the villain.
The play begins with a funeral, but everything after that is upbeat, with comic asides to dispel any hints of dramatic conflict. Family troubles are avoided. So are marriage problems and eventual alcohol and drug addiction.
Williams comments that he has no drinking problem: "If I get drunk, I just fall over. No problem." He urges that we shouldn't "worry about nothing because nothing is going to be all right anyhow." Folksy asides let the audience off the hook just in case they begin to get emotionally involved, which, given this treatment, is unlikely.
The troubled marriage to Audrey Williams (a woman who spent much of her life after his death in furthering, and cashing in on, his legend) is treated casually. The divorce is simply announced, and his subsequent marriage to someone named Billie Jean is short-shrifted. Audrey, played with amusing flair and verve by Lauren Bauer, is used for comedic purposes in two segments to display how bad a singer she was. One would be enough.
Several monologues by a waitress who becomes involved with Williams seem superfluous, particularly a lengthy one that is meant, one suspects, to create the mood of the times. It brings the show to a stop.
If drama were being sought, the writers could have made more out of the controversial firing of Williams from the Grand Ole Opry as a result of allegedly drunken behavior. That episode is dismissed quickly. The film version of Williams' life, called "Your Cheatin' Heart" (1964) and featuring the unlikely casting of George Hamilton, made more of both the marital troubles and the controversy over the firing.
Williams died on New Year's Day 1953 in the back seat of his powder blue Cadillac convertible somewhere in West Virginia en route to an afternoon show in Ohio. He was just 29.
The play features a long goodbye. Too long. First, the widow reads a farewell missive. Then, the entire cast comes on for a kind of "Chorus Line" finale: a revival-style chorus of "I Saw the Light," designed to send everyone home in a happy spirit. If drama had been sought, a single spotlight on a solitary Williams singing "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" could have been chilling.
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Lost Highway - Thru April 20, 2008 at Virginia Stage Company's Wells Theatre
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