The biographical musical premiered this week in Music City for a pre-Broadway run.
Call it an authorized musical biography, and you won’t be far off the mark.
Dolly: A True Original Musical, the frisky and frolicsome theatrical production that premiered this week in Nashville, was co-written (with Maria S. Schlatter) by Dolly Parton herself and features a cavalcade of songs (both new and classic) all penned by the beloved performer.
None of which should come as a surprise, since Dolly promised months ago while releasing news of the pre-Broadway world premiere in Music City: “I actually have always wanted to do my life story in a musical, and I just thought that I wanted to see it done while I was still around to be able to oversee it, to make sure that it's done properly, rather than to wait till I’m gone and let somebody else decide how they think it should be done.”
Still, it would be churlishly unfair, and largely inaccurate, to describe the musical – which will run at the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts on Nashville’s Belmont University campus through August 31 – as a whitewash. For one thing, Dolly simply is too vibrant and spirited to be labeled as some sort of bland hagiography, and too wink-wink knowingly self-mocking to suggest Dolly doesn’t mind making herself the butt of jokes.
When some chauvinist pig accuses her of being a “bra-burner” feminist, she quickly responds: “We all know if I set my bra on fire, it’d take three days to put it out.” On the other hand, the Dolly depicted here – portrayed by Quinn Titcomb as a precocious child star-in-the making, Carrie St. Louis as a naive but ambitious Music City newbie, and Katie Rose Clarke as an extraordinarily persuasive and compelling adult Dolly – is nobody’s doormat.
When longtime performing partner Porter Wagoner (a hilariously self-aggrandizing John Zdrojeski) tries to put her in her place, Dolly defiantly announces she’s the only one who’ll ever decide where that place is: “God made me. And he didn’t make me to be somebody’s girl singer for the rest of my life.”
Fluidly directed by Tony Award-winner Bartlett Sher, Dolly: A True Original Musical smoothly ticks off a list of major events in the personal and professional lives of its larger-than-life subject, following Dolly from her formative years in the Great Smoky Mountains of East Tennessee (robustly celebrated in the hand-clapping, foot-stomping number “My Mountains, My Home”) through her slow but steady rise to fame – as, yes, Porter Wagoner’s partner in performing – and her solo breakout as a genre-transcending, multimedia superstar, and finally back to Tennessee, where she thoughtfully resets her priorities while establishing herself as a widely-admired philanthropist, entertainer, and all-around great person.
In its current form, the show feels a mite slow to completely take off during its first act, and palpably rushed while sprinting through Dolly’s career highlights during its second.
To be fair, however, Sher’s pedal-to-the-metal approach is effective and appropriate during the Act II montage that begins with Dolly’s mainstream pop crossover success with “Here You Come Again,” continues with her starring roles in 9 to 5 and Sweet Magnolias, fleetingly acknowledges a few setbacks (her short-lived TV show and her co-starring stint with Sylvester Stallone in Rhinestone) and just as quickly references The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (complete with a silent Burt Reynolds look-alike).
The pacing builds incrementally as Dolly finds herself hounded by paparazzi, stressed by success – and increasingly worried about how much time she’s being separated from her supportive husband, Carl Dean (John Behlmann). All of which logically leads to Dolly’s return to Tennessee – and to Carl – where she recharges her batteries while planning altruistic projects like her Imagination Library to encourage young readers. (Listen closely, and you’ll hear a not-so-veiled reference to her support for medical research that eventually led to a COVID vaccine.)
But of course, there’s no retirement contemplated, since, as we all know well, and acknowledge gratefully, Dolly is still busy being Dolly.
There is a hard-to-ignore undercurrent of melancholy to the scenes in which her life partner woos, proposes, and encourages Dolly, given the recent passing of the real-life Carl Dean. But the well-cast John Behlmann is quietly splendid in the role, whether he’s shyly courting the young beauty he instantly recognizes as the girl of his dreams, initially rattled by her admission that she’s had earlier “boyfriends,” or serving as her biggest fan and loyal champion.
As Porter Wagoner, John Zdrojeski is – well, it wouldn’t be altogether spot-on to describe him as the perfect foil for Dolly (both St. Louis and Clarke), since he’s repeatedly outmatched in their duels of wit. (He’s borderline furious whenever she describes his trademark coiffure not as a pompadour – his preference – but rather as a bouffant.) Even so, the actor steals more than a couple scenes by lacing Wagoner’s egomaniacal rantings with welcome doses of uproarious self-parody, and suggests what might have been the result if, at some point in The Mask, Jim Carrey had evolved into a vainglorious country music star.
Among the other supporting players – and let’s face it, everybody is a supporting player in Dolly’s orbit – Jacob Fishel makes an amusing impression as Sandy Gallin, Dolly’s hard-charging agent and sympathetic confidant, while Beth Malone and Danny Wolohan do their considerable best to flesh out the thinly written roles as, respectively, Judy Ogle, Dolly’s lifelong best buddy, and Uncle Bill, who helps launch young Dolly’s career as a 10-year-old radio performer.
And at the center of it all, there is Katie Rose Clarke’s starring (and perhaps star-making) performance as Dolly. She certainly looks and sounds the part, but that’s only half of it. Clarke isn’t merely some better-than-average “Legends Show” impersonator – for much of this musical, she rises to the well-nigh impossible challenge of actually becoming Dolly for a couple of hours on stage, playing her not as a revered icon but as a flesh-and-blood human being, winning and resourceful every step of the way.
When the real-deal superstar makes an on-screen appearance overseeing the show’s final production number, it’s almost as though she’s expressing her approval of how she’s been portrayed by Clarke. As well she should.
By the way: Dolly: A True Original Musical isn’t Parton’s first venture into musical theater. Indeed, she received a Tony Award nomination for writing the music and lyrics for 9 to 5: The Musical, a 2009 Broadway stage adaptation of her popular 1980 movie. For the show’s pre-Broadway production in Los Angeles, she received a Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award for original score. And although it had a relatively short run in New York, a national touring company production of 9 to 5: The Musical was well received, as was a production in London’s West End.
