Soured dream

Always . . . Patsy Cline is unbelievable fun

by Steve Vineberg

ALWAYS . . . PATSY CLINE.

By Ted Swindley. Directed by Misty Rowe. Musical direction by Jim Rice. Set designed by Jonathan Stapel. Costumes by Lesley Neilson-Bowman. Lighting by Bradley McLean. With Cindy Summers and Misty Rowe. At Worcester Foothills Theatre, through October 22.

The Virginia-born Patsy Cline died in a plane crash in 1963, but to many of us, she still embodies

the soul of country music. She had delicately furry articulation and a rollicking, sashaying spirit, and when she sang one of her great heartbreak ballads, like "Sweet Dreams" or "Faded Love," the famous catch in her voice -- what a voice-teacher friend of mine identifies as a modified yodel -- conveyed a naked romanticism. She went for broke in those songs, the way Billie Holiday or Frank Sinatra did in other genres of popular music, and like them, she developed an identity -- the hard-loving loser, the headstrong and heart-shattered survivor, flinging herself over one cliff after another with a laughing-at-fate ecstasy -- that her audiences fell in love with and wept along with.

Cindy Summers, who plays Patsy in the Worcester Foothills Theatre's season opener, Always . . . Patsy Cline, has studied Cline's style carefully, and except for a slightly overworked twang, she gets amazingly close. She's a little drab on the first few numbers, which sound like too much like wedding-band covers, but as the evening wends on, she moves into the music, and you stop worrying about how accurate her impersonation is. Some of these tunes are perilously difficult, like "I Fall to Pieces" and Willie Nelson's "Crazy," and Summers's musicianship is more admirable the tougher they are to perform. (The wonderful 1985 movie bio Sweet Dreams, starring Jessica Lange, contains a memorable scene where Patsy grows exasperated trying to figure out the quirky rhythms in "Crazy.") When Summers, backed by musical director Jim Rice and a half-dozen other instrumentalists, sings "You Belong to Me," that quintessentially '50s declaration of undying devotion (and sexual proprietorship), you can glut yourself on the creamy swirls of emotion in the forthright lyric and the unrestrained music.

The show itself, unfortunately, is another matter. Ted Swindley based his 1991 script on the friendship between Cline and Louise Seger, originally a fan Cline met at a club in Houston in 1961. (The title of the play refers to the familiar signature at the bottom of Patsy's letters to Louise.) Country music is cobbled out of workaday details and common feelings; it's premised on the notion that there's no difference between the singer and the listener because they've endured the same emotional tribulations. As Pete Hamill confirms in Why Sinatra Matters, what made Sinatra's career a triumph in the 1950s was the fact that millions of men felt that his recordings expressed their most melancholy impulses. But it would never have occurred to any of them to confuse his life experiences with their own; only country makes that claim. It's an illusion, of course (that's one of the themes of Robert Altman's 1975 film Nashville), but apparently Louise Seger got to live it. Building a play around their first encounter and subsequent correspondence confirms the illusion.

Swindley's script erases the line between celebrity and non-celebrity -- in his conception, Patsy is just like Louise, only she sings better. (Even if this were true, as a dramatic idea it's deadly dull.) In act two he tries to illustrate it by using Cline's songs to dramatize the friendship -- a device that gets awfully silly when she serenades Louise with "Faded Love" and "True Love," songs that are obviously not about the feelings of two heterosexual women for each other.

Misty Rowe, who plays Louise, has two tones, sentimental and raucous, and they're equally phony. No one places any constraints on her aggravatingly cartoonish performance -- Rowe also directed. And though Summers is a fine singer, she's not really an actress. She never suggests the hellion side of Patsy's personality (though we hear about it). She comes across as more of a debutante than a working-class Southerner. Her modesty as a performer is very pleasing nonetheless, but it's such a contrast to Rowe's flamboyance that you don't believe for a moment these two would become fast friends -- they don't seem to inhabit the same planet.

The audience at Always . . . Patsy Cline the night I attended jumped to their feet at the end, and no wonder -- they'd been milked into submission. Rowe swings her hips and trots back and forth across the stage to show us what a great old gal she is and saunters out into the audience to joke with the men and find a dancing partner. It's supper theater without the waiters. I know that Swindley's show has been a hit all over the country, but so has Nunsense.