Dan's Papers - September 21, 2007 - review: urban cowboy

Well, this year the Gateway Playhouse has certainly proved that you should never complain about Paul Allan and his colleagues not being willing to take chances. From the wonderful Cirque Dreams to the partially satisfying ice musical to the very unsatisfying 'tribute' to the great Sinatra coupled with a couple of very good musicals, Dream Girls and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, this has been a very different season. This trend continues with Urban Cowboy, the final offering of the main season. that is running at the Bellport theater until September 20th.

Based on a 1980 film that starred John Travolta and Debra Winger, this is a musical that really did not arrive with a great pedigree, having closed on Broadway in 2003 after a very short run of 60 performances. It would be interesting to know why Gateway thought they could do much better with this revival. The show revolves around a young Texan cowboy (Bud) who comes to the big oil city of Houston to work on a refinery, make money and return home with a wife to buy some land and raise a few cows and a family. Sounds good and indeed within the show you can feel at times that there is a good musical waiting to get out. The problem is that when they created this musical, for some reason the decision was made to use existing Western type songs from a variety of sources rather that have music and lyrics written specially for the show. The result is a mish-mash of styles that never gels and lyrics that are not totally specific to the plot, so everything drags despite the almost incessant rhythms that prove that there is only so much foot stomping that even talented dancers can do without it becoming repetitive and boring. The book is not much better with dialogue that is truly banal at times.

It is a pity because the members of the large cast, without exception, are really talented. Daniel Damon Joyce as Bud and Noel Molinelli as his girlfriend/wife, Sissy look good, sound good and have a chemistry between them that makes you care for the characters. Similarly, John Halbach as the villainous Wes and Kathleen Monteleone as Pam the oil-rich girl who likes cowboy rough trade and tries to take Bud away from Sissy after a big argument early on in their marriage, play and sing their parts well. The partnership of Steve Luker and Tina Johnson as Bud's long suffering aunt and uncle works well together and produces a few well needed laughs. If only this cast had some better material to work with!

The majority of the action takes place in Gilly's, a cavernous honky-tonk bar that apparently is legendary in Houston. The main set is very atmospheric but gives problems to the stage director when center stage has to be used to represent other places such as an oil refinery or a bedroom.

There is a lot of stomping type dancing but the piece de resistance is the famed mechanical bull, which is impressive and a lot of stage time is taken with members of the cast being aspiring bull riders. They all held on extremely well - only falling when it was required for the story line. Much of the action at Gilly's involves bar life in the 60's when sexual promiscuity was at its height and the guys and girls gyrate to choreography that, presumably, the choreographer intended to be erotic but the result is more like a bad Brittney Spears video (no comment on whether there has ever been a good one), coupled with a frat house binge drinking blue collar culture, rather than a Texan version of the "Kit Kat" club of Cabaret fame or the homoerotic naughtiness of 'La Cage aux Folles'!

The music is well played by the band led by Music Director Andrew Austin that spends its night suspended over the stage.

Selecting the program for each new season can never be easy and when you realize that there have been no really successful new musicals for almost the last ten years on Broadway or in London that are currently available for regional theaters such as Gateway because they are either still on Broadway or on National tour, the problem is made so much more difficult. Maybe Gateway will choose to revert to staging some classic plays as well as continuing to stage some of the really great musicals of the Rodgers and Hammerstein/Lerner and Lowe eras plus, of course, stage productions of the Cirque Dreams quality. Using second or third rate musicals, even under the guise of their being "cutting edge," is not fair to either the performers or the audience.