Review: Hank Williams: Lost Highway (Filament Theatre Ensemble)

  
  
Hank Williams:
   Lost Highway 

Written by Randal Myler and Mark Harelik
Directed by Julie Ritchey and Omen Sade
Athenaeum Theatre, 2936 N. Southport (map)
thru July 8  |  tickets: $19-$24   |  more info
  
Check for half-price tickets 
  
  
   Read entire review
  

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A hell-raising honky-tonk of a good time!

Filament Theatre Ensemble presents

Hank Williams: Lost Highway

Review by Clint May 

What is it about the trailblazers of music that follows an arc that’s almost as ingrained as the hero’s journey? Pain being a great driver of creativity that it is, it can only be expected. Tapping into that dark well helps an artist connect to something large at the core of the human experience. That brings them great “love” and fame in the form of adulation and gratitude for being the poet giving words to the nameless hidden fears that bind us more often than our joys. The first man to make this well deeply personal and modernize the honky tonk genre (and its progeny) was Hank Williams. As brought to life by Filament Theatre Ensemble in Hank Williams: Lost Highway, a labor of love becomes a transportive musical experience exploring the life and music of that bard of the heartbroken ballad.

We begin at the end. The 29-year-old legend (he looked older, but that’s the burden of an old soul) has already passed on from an inadvertent drug overdose en route to a concert. Hank’s (Peter Oyloe) life is then sketched in the interstitials of musical numbers by a combination of ‘scenelets’ and soliloquies by those who knew him best, with Hank himself never breaking the fourth wall. Hampered by a mild case of spina bifida, most routes of success (hard labor, the war effort) were closed to Hank in his native Alabama. A poor student and a boy with his “spirit on the outside of his body,” the boy who would be a star is changed by the gift of a guitar from his mother (Danon Dastugue). Shadowing an African-American by the name of Rufus “Tee Tot” Payne (Gerald Richardson) for lessons, the bluesy influence of those early years never left Hank’s music or his thoughts. We briskly move through the now well-known path of a fast rise to fame followed by a devastating crash. From churches to backwood honky tonks to the Grand Ole Opry to the hearts of Americans everywhere, the journey would influence the luminaries of genres far outside country music. His troubled marriage to the less-talented Audrey (Mary Spearen) provided the inspiration for many of Hank’s most poignant works, and Spearen has a difficult job of having to be intentionally poor at her craft but does bad extremely well. Coupled with his troubled relationship to salvation and a too-friendly relationship with alcohol, Hank’s lyrics would become more personal and more universal than those that had preceded him in the burgeoning genre that would become “country.” Every star afterwards would have to live up to the standard he set.

This is slightly more concert than biopic, and the music is the real draw. And why not? Everything you need to know about Hank is there in his lyrics. This is also Peter Oyloe’s star-turning inhabitation (not an imitation) of the legend, bringing each number to life with the help of an Opry-worthy band of cowboys. Jess Woelfel, Sam Quinn, Eric Labanuskas and Tim McNulty sound like born honky tonkers and provide the perfect counterpoints to Oyloe’s vocals. Able to yodel and warble with the best of the troubled troubadours, Oyloe’s heartbreaking renditions of the classics “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” and “Your Cheatin’ Heart” to the toe-tappers “Jamalaya” and “I Saw the Light” are brimming with the true grit of authenticity this role demands.

I said before that this is a transportive musical, and I wasn’t being hyperbolic: in the intimate black box of Athenaeum’s third floor theatre, the walls fell away and I was right there in the church, the backwoods, the grand stage, the truck stop. I also have to mention Gerald Richardson as Tee-Tot, the influence that Hank would credit all his life for his talent. Richardson takes the role as though he’s the avatar of the Blues themselves come to walk the Earth, and his presence hovers literally and metaphorically over the entirety of the production in an appropriate homage to a man whose true credit would come too late to find him in life.

Since 1954, Alabama has celebrated Hank Williams Day on September 21. Perhaps an appropriate slogan for the event could be found in the mantra of another troubled artist from a much older age, Christopher Marlowe, who famously remarked “What nourishes me destroys me.” The same drive that propels talents like Hank into the spotlight for that oh-so-wonderful love flowing from the audience (or the truck stop waitress) corrodes them even as it lifts them up in a devious feedback loop. It’s an old tale but never too old to be told. Fans of country and honky-tonk will love this show, and it may even make a few converts. When there’s this much talent on the stage, how can it not radiate some of that love back into the audience? It was a life too short, and perhaps that’s always regrettably inevitable, and all we can do is cherish what remains from those candles that burn twice as bright.

Ladies and gentlemen, Hank Williams is dead. Long live Hank Williams. 

Rating: ★★★★

Hank Williams: Lost Highway continues through July 8th at Athenaeum Theatre, 2936 N. Southport (map), with performances Thursdays-Saturdays at 7:30pm, Sundays 3pm.  Tickets are $19-$24, and are available by phone (773-935-6875) or online at OvationTix.com (check for half-price tickets at Goldstar.com). More information at FilamentTheatre.org.  (Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes, includes an intermission)

Photos by Laura Nash and Peter Oyloe 

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