Winter is at its height, the economy is in the gutter, and so are your spirits. It might be just the time to raise the latter with some truly silly entertainment. If so, a couple of musicals that opened last week could be just the ticket.
Seeing Idols of the King at Foothills Theatre provided two firsts for me. It was my first-ever visit to Worcester's professional stage company, and my first experience of an Elvis impersonator. The show, concocted by Ronnie Claire Edwards and Allen Crowe, is a concert of 16 classic Presley tunes, from "Hound Dog" to "Can't Help Falling in Love with You," interspersed with scenelets involving a wide (no, make that weird) variety of idolators of the King, all of them performed by two chameleon actors, Bill Mootos and Lynne Rosenberg.
Edna and Zig are an elderly couple whose lifetime pinnacle came when Elvis stopped his tour bus outside their home and asked to use their toilet. "The King's Throne" has been a tourist attraction ever since. The couple's larcenous grandson and his scrappy girlfriend Raynelle are hitch-hiking and bickering their way across the desert, bound for Vegas to see Elvis, after their Harley has run out of gas. Other Elvis-obsessives include a pregnant, tripping flower child who imagines her embryo is his child; a flaming fey wedding planner whose impeccable taste is outraged by a bride who wants a "Blue Hawaii" ceremony; and a dorky paranoid convinced the government is implanting thought-transmitters in everyone's fillings and… I can't quite remember how this one connects to Elvis.
There are also a few nods to the King's fabled generosity and down-to-earthiness, including the waitress with a dying child whose hospital bills he paid, and the Vegas floorshow stripper, pursued by the star and finally seduced by his, gosh, just plain niceness.
Rosenberg and Mootos are wonderfully versatile, animating each of their roles and making the most of sometimes pretty thin material.
But the main attraction is Jack Foltyn. He's an experienced Elvis impersonator, but his Elvis isn't a picture-perfect, note-for-note facsimile. It's an affectionate, tongue-in-cheek impression calculated not to astonish us with verisimilitude but to charm us with the whimsy of it all.
Foltyn gets the voice just about right, especially on the low-register ballads. He's a much better dancer than Elvis, and in his lithe frame the trademark gyrations become almost acrobatic routines. He doesn't look all that much like his model, and doesn't really try to, apart from '50s-styling his jet-black hair and donning the King's costumes, from black leather to sequined satin. His version of the signature sneer reminded me more of Harrison Ford's cockeyed grin than Elvis's curled lip.
And that's what I liked most about his performance. It's a shared joke with the audience: "This dress-up game of make-believe is kinda silly, but isn't it fun?" And the screams emitted by the middle-aged women in the audience were in that spirit—I think.
Foltyn is backed by a tight quintet led by musical director Fred Frabotta. Russell Garrett's production in Foothills' cozy subterranean theater is lively, the songs are timeless, and the sparse audience on a snowy preview night was delighted—especially when "Elvis" roamed through the audience kissing every one of the women.
Burly Boys
Lumberjacks in Love, at the Majestic Theater, is by Fred Alley and James Kaplan, the same team responsible for last winter's Guys on Ice, about three men in an ice-fishing shack in northern Wisconsin. This one is about four men in a lumber-camp bunkhouse in northern Wisconsin circa 1900. The all-male ethos is the same. That wooden structure is the boys' clubhouse, no girls allowed. Except this time a couple of women do intrude.
Each of the lumberjacks has his reasons for staying single. Minnesota Slim (Eric Love) got his heart broken and stomped on by his childhood sweetheart. Dirty Bob (Van Farrier) hasn't washed since his dear departed mama stopped bathing him, so he's not fit for anyone's company. Muskrat (David Mason) figures he'll never get as close to anyone as he was to his special pal, who was stung to death in a bee encounter.
Moonlight (Alec Nelson) gets his romance from dime novels about Annabelle Braveheart, but he also thinks he's falling in love—although to his chagrin, it's with a young boy known as The Kid, who lives in the camp. Thing is, The Kid's really a girl (Shelby Leshine) disguised for self-protection in this male domain, and she has a hankerin' for Moonlight.
The other woman, Rose (Cate Damon), is also an imposter—the authoress of the Annabelle Braveheart bodice-rippers, doing incognito research on the lumber camp locale of her next book. At one point she dresses up like a fella too. In fact, there's enough cross-dressing and gender disguise here to stock a Shakespearean comedy. And along with this theme, there's plenty of gay innuendo, but it's neither belabored, dismissed nor quite resolved. It's the show's most endearing trait—the vision of burly boys you'd expect to be gay-bashers, merely bemused by the notion that a guy could fall for a guy.
The songs—and there are a lot of them—are for the most part jaunty and forgettable, with clodhopping choreography by Brian Fournier. My favorite number was the shortest: Minnesota Slim's little prayer to the Lord (who, after all, is a bachelor) to help him stay single.
There's no bad language in this PG-rated bunkhouse, but lots of bad grammar and very bad jokes. (And yes, someone does say, "I'm a lumberjack and I'm okay.") The six-member cast, under Danny Eaton's direction, attack this flimsy vehicle with gusto and mine all available laughs in the goofy dialogue and slapstick situations. A special word for young Shelby Leshine. She's the "kid" among five seasoned pros, and she more than holds her own.
Idols of the King: through Feb. 1, Foothills Theatre, 100 Front St., Worcester, (508) 754-4018, www.foothillstheatre.com.
Lumberjacks in Love: through Feb. 15, Majestic Theatre, 131 Elm St., West Springfield, (413) 747-7797, www.majestictheater.com.
