Fort Collins is easily Colorado’s most thriving theater community outside Denver. That’s because it has four symbiotic companies, each filling a significant creative niche.
For 34 years, the venerable OpenStage has produced vintage (“Threepenny Opera”) and contemporary classics (“Enchanted April”) with professional production values and a community-theater spirit of wholesale inclusion. The Carousel Dinner Theatre offers fine food and familiar family titles (“The Music Man”), and the rising, renegade Bas Bleu presents bold, essential risks (“Dirty Story”) in a sparkling new theater space.
The newest addition is Nonesuch, which since 2004 has brought the unusual mix of “intimate populism” to Bas Bleu’s former 49-seat home in the heart of the city. This gorgeous salon once hosted intellectually challenging titles such as Athol Fugard’s “A Lesson From
Aloes” and Harold Pinter’s “Old Times.” Today it’s home to long-running accessible favorites such as “Nunsense” and its current hit, the country confection “Always … Patsy Cline.” And it’s as cozy as your living room.
Something for everyone.
The seminal staging of “Always … ” was at Denver’s Galleria Theatre, and any subsequent effort inevitably suffers by comparison with Melissa Swift-Sawyer as Pabst-loving Patsy and Beth Flynn as her fan-turned-confidante, Louise.
But Nonesuch has an icon of its own in Gina Schuh-Turner, who made her own indelible impression on Denver audiences at the Galleria, starring for more than four years in “I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change.”
Schuh-Turner is a gifted singer and an impeccable, quirky comedian. It’s hard to imagine a more likable performer. But her face is so identifiable, it takes some doing to accept her as a convincing Cline. Patsy gets a bit lost in Schuh-Turner, rather than the other way around.
“Always ” has a novel approach to a biomusical. All the songs are Cline classics, but the story centers on narrator Louise, a Texas housewife and obsessive fan who brings the doomed star home after a concert to klatch over children and lousy husbands.
The risk in staging any biomusical is trying to imitate an inimitable legend. You can’t have talk of seven-minute standing ovations when the impersonator draws only polite applause. Schuh-Turner adroitly delivers the biggies such as “Walking After Midnight” and “I Fall to Pieces,” is delightful on uptempo ditties like “I Love You Honey,” and draws requisite chills in “If I Could See the World” and “How Great Thou Art.” She’s even more impressive scraping out the lower notes than tickling the higher ones. But you never get a sense you are in the presence of the legend herself.
That’s what happens when you ask a highly trained singer to replicate an untrained voice. That’s why theater singers don’t always make the most natural pop singers. They can be too technically proficient for their own good. Schuh-Turner starred off-Broadway in “The Fantasticks” – Cline never learned what a vocal key was. Channeling her unique phrasing has to come across as utterly intrinsic.
As Louise, the convivial Conover makes for a perfectly pleasant pal. But she’s getting by on a sweet smile, when there’s a much greater range of emotion to be mined. Flynn’s Louise was outrageous and irrepressible, making the inevitable tragic shift after news of Cline’s death that much more devastating. But few actors have the comic confidence, the ability to draw laughs from the most unexpected places, that Flynn has. As a result, director Nick Turner’s staging maintains a perfectly adequate, unshifting center – more reverent than raucous.
Even if it doesn’t pack the emotional wallop that it could, the mood is congenial and the music mighty fine. That combination makes for a winner … always.
Theater critic John Moore can be reached at 303-954-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com.
“Always … Patsy Cline” | *** RATING
MUSICAL|Nonesuch Theater, 216 Pine St., Fort Collins|Written by Ted Swindley|Directed by Nick Turner |Starring Gina Schuh-Turner and Nancy Conover|THROUGH MARCH 3 |7:30 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays (“Greater Tuna” plays at 7:30 p.m. Wednesdays and Sundays)|2 hours|$15|970-224-0444 or nonesuchtheater.com.
3MORE
“HAIRSPRAY” This phenomenally popular stage adaptation of the John Waters movie is the triumph of the little fat girl, set to some of the most infectious pop music in Broadway history. But hurry: There’s only enough aerosol to last six days. 8 p.m. Tuesday-Jan. 11; 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. Jan. 13; 2 and 7:30 p.m. Jan. 14, at the Buell Theatre, Denver Performing Arts Complex, 14th and Curtis streets. $23-$62 (303-893-4100, 866-464-2626, denvercenter.org or King Soopers stores).
“SPLITTING INFINITY” OpenStage Theatre explores “The Big Bang” in Jamie Pachino’s new play about a Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist who takes on the ultimate scientific experiment: to prove whether God exists. 8 p.m. Fridays-Saturdays and 2 p.m. some Sundays through Feb. 3 at the Lincoln Center, 417 W. Magnolia St. in Fort Collins. Additional performance 7:30 p.m. Feb. 1. $13-$20 (970-221-6730 or lctix.com).
“THE MUSIC MAN” Carousel Dinner Theatre presents Meredith Willson’s popular musical about the fast-talking traveling salesman Harold Hill, who gets conned into giving up the con by the good people of River City, Iowa. 7:45 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays, 1:45 Sundays (dinner 90 minutes before) through Feb. 17 at 3509 S. Mason St., Fort Collins. $34-$38 (970-225-2555 or adinnertheatre.com).
–John Moore
