THEATRE
REVIEW:
“LOST
HIGHWAY: THE MUSIC &
LEGEND
OF HANK WILLIAMS” at the Old Globe Playhouse
KPBS
AIRDATE:
It's the kind of story we love to love. Creative artists who are focused with
pinpoint brilliance in their professional lives but disastrously out of control
of their personal lives. Whose every
act of creation is balanced by one of destruction. Think of Mozart, Dylan Thomas,
So here we have the meteoric rise and
precipitous fall of Hank Williams, the man who turned the country on to country
in the late forties, and after four years at the top of the music world, died
in 1953 - at age 29.
What we like in these stories is the details,
but we don't get many here, because, apparently, nobody knows them. We learn that Williams was a boozer, he had
a hard-headed, Bible-thumping, back-breaking Mama and a first wife who dragged
him down in any number of ways. He ran
around, she ran around, they got divorced, he married again. We learn nothing of the second wife. Instead, we meet an unnecessary waitress
with whom he has a one-time fling, but who stays onstage, inexplicably,
throughout the show.
Never mind.
What we miss in personal background is more than
made up by the music, which reflects the inner workings of the
man. We get a good sense of Williams'
early inspiration -- a black, blues street singer named Tee-Tot -- and a feel
for how Hank's music evolved, mixing Hillbilly, cajun, boogie, blues, yodeling,
swing and gospel to come up with timeless winners like "Hey, Good
Lookin'," "Your Cheatin' Heart", "I Can't Help it if I'm
Still in Love with You," "Jambalaya," and "I'm So Lonesome
I Could Cry." Can't you just start
right up singing these songs? And they're
all over forty years old. And they
still sound great, as whined and yodeled by Mark Harelick, who co-wrote the
show with Randal Myler, the director.
"Lost Highway" is more of a concert
than a play. Harelick himself has
called it "a performance piece with connecting text." The setting is perfect for a country
concert. Outdoors on the Globe's
Festival Stage, with Harelick wailing his guts out and charming the audience as
Williams must have done in the early days.
He sounds like him, even looks like him: lean and gaunt, dark and intense. He puts a lot of ache into those lyrics, just as Williams
did. And you just can't help but like
him.
Harelick has great backup, in his talented
band, posing as The Drifting Cowboys, and especially in Ron Taylor as the
boom-voiced powerhouse, Tee-Tot, who mesmerizes the audience with his blues and
the mournful slide-guitar of Kevin Moore.
The set is as appropriate as the setting, the
cast is excellent, and the music....
Well, even as a non-country fan, I loved it. You should know that Mark Harelick doesn't play for Tuesday and
Wednesday performances, but I hear that Michael Bryan French is purty darn
good.
Spend an evening on the "
I'm Pat Launer, for KPBS radio.
©1992 Patté Productions Inc.