American Blues Theater’s “Always … Patsy Cline,” with Liz Chidester/Photo: Michael Brosilow
The story of singer Patsy Cline is a sad one, marked by chronic hardship and struggle both personally and professionally, and capped by her tragic death in a plane crash in 1963, when she was just thirty years old. As an artist, she achieved widespread fame only posthumously, when her greatest-hits album stayed on the charts for an unbelievable 722 weeks. Her most famous songs—including “Walkin’ After Midnight,” “I Fall to Pieces,” “Back in Baby’s Arms” and the Willie Nelson-penned “Crazy”—are etched into the American songbook. Ranging from Grand Ole Opry country to folk classics to rockabilly to Top 40 pop tunes, Cline’s output involves a goodly number of cheatin’ hearts, lovesick blues and stupid cupids. After Judy Garland, Patsy Cline may be our greatest torch singer, her mournful, lovelorn side balanced against the feisty toughness of a bruised survivor.
One wishes that Ted Swindley’s two-person “Always … Patsy Cline”—which has been around in one form or another since 1988, and is now being staged by American Blues Theater in a production directed by Harmony France—were willing to dive more deeply into Cline’s aura of loss, longing, melancholy. Instead, the play gives us a clanking, cloying framing narrative that ends up taking over the show, frustrating our effort to get to know the woman behind the legend.
It’s a shame that the dramatic aspect of this play is so thin, even by the modest standards of the jukebox musical. And that’s because the spoken parts get in the way of Liz Chidester’s stupendous job in the title role, not so much playing Patsy Cline as channeling her. Chidester (who, like Cline, hails from small-town Virginia) is blessed with a rich, smoky alto voice with a gravelly edge, infused with a plaintive sincerity that’s pure country. The show is worth seeing just to hear that instrument of hers in action, reminding us why Patsy Cline and the Nashville sound in general remains such a force in American pop culture.
The five-piece orchestra—well-directed by Michael Mahler and grouped right at the center of Tara A. Houston’s simple, clearly articulated set—is uniformly excellent, providing a gritty, down-home accompaniment to Chidester’s soaring vocals. Michael Trudeau’s pinpoint lighting conveys the harsh, sweaty atmospherics of Cline’s endless one-night stands in Southern honky-tonk bars, while Lily Walls costumes the singer with paper-doll whimsy and flair, revealing multiple sides of her existence, from flashy star to demure professional woman, circa 1960.
American Blues Theater’s “Always … Patsy Cline,” with Molly Hernández and Liz Chidester/Photo: Michael Brosilow
Despite Chidester’s tour de force performance and the show’s strong musical and technical elements, two things preclude a wholehearted endorsement of the production. The first is the comic-foil character of Louise, a real-life woman depicted here as an obsessive fan who calls her hometown country radio station multiple times a day, asking the patient DJ to once again play the Patsy Cline numbers that she has long since memorized. Played with manic energy by Molly Hernández, Louise ends up upstaging her idol. Even after a couple of drinks from the theater’s well-stocked lobby bar, a little of Louise’s over-the-top ebullience and have-fun-or-else attitude goes a long way.
The Louise-Patsy bond is apparently meant as a paean to female friendship, but celebrity worship is not the same as sisterhood, and the relationship never comes off as either mutual or real. What Louise’s relentless perkiness does do is distract us from the depth and shading of Patsy’s own music, which by all rights ought to be the point of this show.
The other questionable choice here is the miking—actually serious over-miking—of the performers in the compact American Blues space. No seat is more than thirty feet or so from the stage, meaning a trained vocalist needs no amplification. The extraneous sound system gives a car-speaker tinniness to the show’s two dozen or so songs, a sin considering the quality of Chidester’s voice. As with the character of Louise, the goal seems not so much to pull us into Patsy’s emotionally complicated world as to beat us into grinning, toe-tapping submission.
If this sort of music is your sort of thing, by all means go see the play for Chidester’s superb rendition of Patsy Cline’s broad repertoire, all sung with a sultry, bluesy, heartfelt strength. If you’re like me, you’ll relish the music but go away a bit disappointed that a show ostensibly about Patsy Cline tells us so little about her—i.e., that it treats her as an icon, not a flesh-and-blood human being. Based on the musical legacy that she left behind, she was a woman of passionate oppositions, someone who, to quote a couple of the songs offered here, wished to “See the World Through the Eyes of a Child” but knew deep-down that “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky-Tonk Angels.” Like all great talents, Patsy Cline was a riddle, one that this show doesn’t even try to solve.
“Always … Patsy Cline” runs through June 21 at American Blues Theater, 5627 North Lincoln. Tickets are $39.50-$74.50, and are available by visiting americanbluestheater.com or calling the box office at (773)654-3103.
