2002-11-18
The Miami Herald
Christine Dolen
The odyssey of Urban Cowboy — A New Musical has already had enough trials and tragedy to inspire its own country song: creative squabbles, the death of director Phillip Oesterman, previews scratched due to a set that didn’t work right much before Saturday’s world premiere at the Coconut Grove Playhouse.
So maybe the real miracle of Urban Cowboy is that inventive director Lonny Price got it open at all.
Based on a magazine piece by Aaron Latham and the 1980 hit movie it spawned, the stage version of Urban Cowboy replays the rocky love story of Bud (Matt Cavenaugh) and Sissy (Jenn Colella), hot-blooded young Texans with big dreams.
Bud’s a hunky bumpkin from a far-away flyspeck called Spur. Sissy’s a tomboy whose yearning for love with a “real” cowboy always seems to end in black eyes and bruises. They meet at Gilley’s massive Houston honky-tonk, fall in love at warp speed, get hitched, then commence to cheatin’.
The movie Cowboy was dark and gritty, with Bud and Sissy violence-prone types who lived in a trailer and were, yes, a little trashy. The new, Broadway-aspiring musical is a sunnier critter, despite some cussin’, smokin’, drinkin’ and a not-very-racy bedroom romp that Bud has with a pair of sisters.
Some of this tonal difference comes with the territory. You need lots of musical and dance numbers, so plot gets short shrift, with archetypes (Bud’s wise aunt and ailing uncle, the roof-raisin’ no-nonsense black gal who manages Gilley’s, lusty cowpokes and the gals who inspire ’em) filling in the holes.
Some of the cornpone dialogue (by Latham and Oesterman) needs to go before the show plays another regional theater (my vote) or Broadway. One example, from Bud: “Hell, when I was born, one of my uncles had to sell a milk cow to pay the doctor bill.”
What the show does have going for it are terrific dancers doing wonderfully watchable numbers by choreographer Melinda Roy (Jerry Chestnut’s T-R-O-U-B-L-E becomes a show-stopper); musical director Jason Robert Brown’s deft arrangement of a country-hits score (plus three terrific new songs from Brown, making you crave more); James Noone’s versatile (and now-tamed) set-with-bull; and the solid work of its principal actors.
The charismatic Cavenaugh soars on Brown’s act-ending song I Take It Back, though he’s hard to buy as a guy who would hit his gal. Colella is twangy spunk personified. Leo Burmester and Sally Mayes have a cozy chemistry as Uncle Bob and Aunt Corene. Rozz Morehead rips the roof off Gilley’s with Jesse’s number Better Days. And as Wes and Pam, Marcus Chait and Jodi Stevens set Sissy’s and Bud’s cheatin’ hearts a-thumpin’.
The road to Broadway is rocky and long. But Urban Cowboy has already weathered plenty of pot holes.
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