CDs: Make Like a Nail and Press On

Neither the best nor the worst of a slew of off-Broadway musicals that opened in the fall of 2005, The Great American Trailer Park Musical first attracted attention at the 2004 New York Musical Theatre Festival. This was the same event that produced another notable off-Broadway musical, Altar Boyz, and, like that show, Trailer Park wound up having its commercial off-Broadway production at Dodger Stages.

With music and lyrics by David Nehls and book and direction by Betsy Kelso, Trailer Park received mixed reviews and had a run of just over two months. It was set in Armadillo Acres, a fictional North Florida trailer park in the town of Starke. As Kelso writes in the CD notes, it's "a place where people lean on each other, knowing they are accepted despite their shortcomings, quirks, and missteps."

The show is hosted by a Greek-chorus trio Marya Grandy, Linda Hart, Leslie Kritzer of narrator-commentators who also play various roles in the action. The central characters are an agoraphobic wife Kaitlin Hopkins; her toll-collector husband Shuler Hensley; a new-to-town stripper Orfeh with whom the husband strays; and the stripper's gun-toting ex-boyfriend Wayne Wilcox.

Backed by a band of five, the rhythmic, driving score is heavy on the sounds of country, blues, and rock. No other number quite equals the lively opening, "This Side of the Tracks," that introduces all but the last of the above-mentioned characters. But other catchy items include "It Doesn't Take a Genius" for the husband/wife/stripper triangle, backed by the girl trio; "But He's Mine"/"It's Never Easy" for the romantic trio; and the finale, which contains the show's most memorable lyric, "I'm gonna make like a nail and press on."

It's all less than distinguished and, like its inhabitants, on the trashy side. Still, one has to acknowledge that the Trailer Park score is entirely appropriate to the intermissionless show's milieu and characters. From an overqualified Hensley to a robust Orfeh, the singers are all quite fine.

LONE STAR LOVE PS Classics

After an extensive regional life that included developmental productions at the Great Lakes Theatre Festival in Cleveland, Repertory Theatre of St. Louis, and Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, the musical Lone Star Love was several times announced for Broadway. Instead, it opened in December, 2004, at off-Broadway's John Houseman Theatre. An adaptation by John L. Haber of The Merry Wives of Windsor, the musical resets Shakespeare's play in 19th-century, post-Civil War Texas. The show's original title and now its subtitle was The Merry Wives of Windsor, Texas.

In the musical, John Falstaff Jay O. Sanders is a sergeant in the losing Confederate army. He receives a dishonorable discharge and is banished from the Carolinas, so he decides to travel west and arrives in Windsor, where he becomes involved in comic and romantic complications with Aggie Ford Beth Leavel and Margaret Anne Page Stacia Fernandez, the wives of wealthy cattle ranchers Joseph Mahowald, Dan Sharkey. Margaret's daughter, MissAnne Page Julie Tolivar, is drawn to Fenton Clarke Thorell, a handsome, yodeling cowboy new to Windsor, although her father wants her to marry the sheriff's nephew Brandon Williams and her mother favors the local doctor Drew McVety.

The music and lyrics for Lone Star Love were by Jack Herrick, one of the Red Clay Ramblers, a bluegrass-jazz-rock string band that has appeared in or composed scores for such previous theatrical attractions as Diamond Studs, Fool Moon, and A Lie of the Mind. Not only did the Ramblers provide accompaniment for Lone Star Love, but they also played Falstaff's cohorts Bardolph, Pistol, and Nym.

In The New York Times, critic Charles Isherwood called the show "sweet-tempered" and "cheerfully hokey," noting "a tangy country-and-blues score." But he also felt that "{the songs} essentially adorn or interrupt the action rather than propel it forward...the show tends to dawdle when it should sprint." Summing up, Isherwood called it "the kind of pleasant, competent show that somehow leaves you with an itch for the offensively bad."

Directed by Michael Bogdanov, Lone Star Love played just two months at the Houseman. About a year later comes the cast album from PS Classics, a recording likely to promote further regional productions. It's interesting to note that the press release accompanying the CD states that plans are still underway for a Broadway transfer, "with the show expected to open in a Shubert house early in the 2006-2007 season."

For a short-lived show, Lone Star Love has been accorded fairly elaborate packaging. On the recording, cast replacement Joseph Mahowald sings the role of Frank Ford, a part created off-Broadway by Gary Sandy.

With a band consisting of the three Ramblers and three more musicians, the score is moderately lively and catchy, although country has never been a style I favor. While there's a rousing title song, it is for the most part the more emotional or romantic numbers that come off best. These include "Prairie Moon" and "Count on My Love" for MissAnne and Fenton; "Cowboy's Dream" for Fenton and Miss Quickly Harriet D. Foy; "World of Men" for the two wives; and Mrs. Ford's dramatic solo, "Texas Wind." Leavel, Thorell, and Tolivar stand out in a good company.