This week's reviews feature local poet's newest work, Elegies of the Dead, and a review of the Riverside Center for the Performing Arts' production of Heartbreak Hotel.
The King of Rock and Roll; or Uneasy Lies the Head that Wears the Crown Heartbreak Hotel at Riverside Center for the Performing Arts Written by Sean Cercone and David Abbinanti Directed by Jacquez D.L. Linder-Long
The legend of Elvis Presley is easy to understand, it’s almost the model for superstardom in the modern entertainment world. A young person is driven by a need to create something in their own voice, but the world isn’t ready for it yet. Before they discover what that voice is, they learn from everyone they can until they are faced with the feeling that doing the same thing is leading to mediocrity and silencing their voice. So, they do it differently from what’s expected, and it turns out to be just what everyone was waiting for. They become STARS!
And then they have to keep doing it in a way that’s different from their old stuff, and they have a tendency to get bored with their own innovation. They feel lost; life happens because they are not alone, and they are people instead of icons. And a crisis builds speed until they crash into a wall of reality. And they have to evolve to survive. So they do, and they succeed again.
Riverside’s production of Heartbreak Hotel follows the blueprint for this stardom model, step by step. It’s a bright and entertaining show that’ll please Elvis fans, pop culture mavens, and nostalgia buffs alike.
The play tracks Elvis from his twelve year old self (1947, and played by a charismatic Grayson Lewis) through his triumphant return in a 1968 special (played by Elliott Litherland). He learns guitar with the encouragement of his mother and begins performing at the Sun Records studio (played as a teen by Luke Purcell). The first act is a detective story that hunts for the person behind the legend and explodes with Elvis’s career at a performance on Louisiana Hayride as the singer (still playing his own guitar at this point). Here he learns to perform with both his voice and his hips.
The play takes many side trips to the roots and influences on Presley’s music and his deep connection to Southern Black culture. These moments provide a welcome respite to the express-train action of the first half of the show (count the costume changes). Pay attention to the projected datelines, they’re the main indication of who you are watching.
Period costuming is also a big hint, and the era-appropriate looks of each cast member can lend just as much as the narrative in tracking the story, both with clothing and hairstyles. Suggested scenery contracts your attention to one section of the stage for some scenes and opens up to the whole stage with the entrance of the singing and dancing chorus, then contracts to very personal moments once more. Lighting suggests location, time, and mood as much as scenery does, and the whole production speeds by without a break.
Kid Elvis learns guitar because he’s always had an affinity for music, and because his mother, Gladys, uses her own money to buy the instrument. Vernon, Elvis’s father, is somewhat clueless as to what to do with this boy but loves his wife and son enough to support them. And so Elvis wanders into the world of Memphis music. His roots run deep as he enters Sun Records and meets the owner (and soon mentor), Sam Philips, who is portrayed by the same actor as Vernon (Andy Braden) with a character so completely different that I did not recognize him as the same person. (The same is true for Hope Blahusch doubling as Dixie Locke/Anne-Margaret.)
All this is told in flashback sequences, the framing for the action is Presley’s 1968 TV special. In the opening scene he collapses to his knees. This moment will be resolved in the final scenes, and it’s not giving too much away to say that Elvis is on a path to self-awareness and acceptance.
The show as a whole maintains a breathless pace to complete the history between the two 1968 moments. Characters appear and disappear from the story, although doubling the actors involved does occasionally provide a track to understand their role in Elvis’s life. Vernon is marginalized as Elvis’s father, but Sam Philips becomes a stand-in father soon into the next moment. Blahusch (Dixie) is a high school flame of Elvis who later plays Anne-Margaret, a free spirit who ushers Elvis into the Swingin’ Sixties.
During this process, Litherland’s Elvis slowly adopts and eventually is overcome by the need to be the King of Rock and Roll. All he wants at the beginning is his guitar and to please his mom (and later the memory of his mom). As he continues to add to his “properties”-house, family, spouse, etc., he starts to become overwhelmed by responsibility. Litherland and his personal charisma carry the audience through the whole process.
The projections, the doubling strategies, costuming and other visual cues are the necessary glue to a through line that is “unstuck in time.” The narrative is stream of consciousness, and jumps freely from 1947 to 1968, and sometimes has all three Elvis actors appearing in the same scene and communicating with each other. In a less capable production the continuity might be lost, but under Linder-Long’s direction and Riverside’s tech staff, we never lose sight of when or where we are in that 21-year span. The influence of Southern culture is underscored in particular in examples of Black rhythm and blues and gospel music; and the tragedy of Southern culture is underscored by the assassination of Martin Luther King, portrayed as an emotional gut-punch in a powerfully staged scene.
Characters come and go, we meet them, and then they fade away. Sometimes they appear again later, sometimes not. Two highly personal moments stand out because they express musically the emotional content of the scenes: Kid Elvis’s solo on the death of his mother and Elvis’s reaction to his newborn daughter (“Can't Help Falling in Love”) express the emotions that go beyond the image of the King, where we see the boy and the man as a vulnerable human being.
To my mind the only thing “off” in the production is that Priscilla’s character is given short shrift. It’s a weakness in the script, not in the production. Kiley Earnest provides a strong performance but the character as written tends to disappear from the scene, in part because Elvis has left Graceland behind for Hollywood. The script glosses over the less orthodox elements of their courtship and marriage.
The orchestra is clean, accurate, and energetic: the live orchestra is a hallmark of the production style for Riverside that sets them apart from other theatres in the area. Sometimes the energy overcomes the singers, which seems to be an everlasting problem with sound when everything is amplified.
The chorus does their job well, without fuss. They flood the stage with period dance moves on cue, and while most numbers are competent and energetic, they really shine in the Act II Elvis/Anne-Margaret number “You’re the Boss.”
Colonel Parker’s influence and control over Elvis’s ascension to the throne is portrayed well by Ian Lane, who thankfully avoids the scenery chewing that others have brought to the role, finding the underlying humor while not avoiding the control he had over Elvis’s life. The women in Elvis’s life who provide the artist support, aid, and comfort (and an occasional shove toward success) shine in their enthusiasm as they recognize his talent and help him grow.
Having now seen five different onstage “biopics” outlining the career of pop artists, I have to say that this show deals well with the business of creating an image while allowing the audience to hum the tunes as the show is going on.
If you go, you will surely have fun.
Dennis Wemm is a retired professor of theatre and communication, having taught and led both departments at Glenville State College for 34 years. In his off time he was president and sometimes Executive Director of the West Virginia Theatre Conference, secretary and president of the Southeastern Theatre Conference, and generally enjoyed a life in theatre.
I drop my dead behind, as old live oak releases leaves. Sorrow is many-colored.
From “Mortal Triplets”
In elegies to those now gone, and meditations on what it is to wrestle with our mortality, Sam breaks with the pall of darkness associated with our demise and instead leverages color to accentuate the range of emotions and experiences both for those dealing with loss and those facing their own mortality.
The fleeting gift of dispersed light is highlighted in “May 1978, The First,” where “Pastel women” are set against the graveside where “our vision of the sinking coffin,/murmuring against the waste of Spring.”
While in “Two shoes Name the Garden,” color both highlights the life and vigor of his former English teacher, she of “steel-gray and “iron-red hair,” and hints at the Alzheimer’s that would rob her mind of its life. “But behind her gray eyes, the plaque / was already building, beginning to divide / all she had been from all she could remember.”
For Sam, color is not simply something to be appreciated in this life, however, but it brings into sharper relief the grays we more often associate with life’s end.
In “The Science of Shadow,” Sam plays with the obstructions to light that create gray shadows. We are reminded that everything that starts in color is eventually devoured by shadows created by a blockage that sands between an object and the pure light of the sun that illuminates its colors.
What bothers Sam, however, are less the shadows that will eventually enshroud us all, but the words he now expresses which become shadows. Words that are “meant once, then unmeant forever.”
We even find this diminution of our colors with the physical remainders of those who came before. In “Going through Photos of the Dead,” Sam laments the transition of “Kodachrome to sepia.”
Sam’s play with colors is what gives contours to the mysterious interchange between ourselves and the dead.
In the final poem of the book, a meditation titled “How the Dead Are Heard,” Sam writes of hearing what he “thought” were the dead speaking. But the dead speak to no one — even Sam.
Perhaps, however, they do, through the natural world and its color.
The dead speak to no one, not even each other, not even to the wind that suddenly picked up again, vibrating the aspen leaves rustling in their yellow significance.
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