“Music City” at the West End Theatre (Photo: Ashley Garrett)
Stop lying to yourself, you erudite New York theatergoer: country music is fun! The genre is full of big hooks, clever and catchy lyrics, and rollicking grooves. It tells stories of sweet or lost love, hard drinking, open roads, and wistful dreams. Roll your eyes all you want, but I bet you are tapping your foot and singing along by the third chorus.
Music City captures all the best qualities of country music and brings them to life in a small Upper West Side theater. The show is the twangiest, honky-tonkingest, shit-kickingest musical this side of Nashville. And it is an absolute blast.
Produced by Bedlam, the uber-inventive company that constantly finds creative ways to rethink theater, the new musical with music and lyrics by certified country music hitmaker J.T. Harding and book by Peter Zinn, Music City invites audiences to open-mic night at an East Nashville dive bar called the Wicked Tickle. Bedlam has converted the West End Theatre into a saloon that oozes authenticity (set design by Clifton Chadick). String lights and handbills on the wall, an old piano in the back, $4 PBRs and High Lifes (Really! Four bucks!), and the dreams of a thousand aspiring songwriters soaked into the walls and rafters.
Brothers and best buds Drew (Jonathan Judge-Russo) and T.J. (Stephen Michael Spencer) rule open-mic night at the Tickle with their rowdy party anthems. They catch the ear of record producer Tammy (Leenya Rideout), who is scouting new acts either for their big break or as songwriters for megastar Stucky Stiles (Andrew Rothenberg), who is looking for a revamp as his gold records grow dusty and stale. The boys need money to cut a demo, so they make a dangerous deal to serve as curriers for a local drug dealer (also Rothenberg), and T.J.’s eye soon wanders from the goals he shares with Drew and onto an enchanting songwriter known only as 23 (Casey Shuler) who wanders into open-mic night. These various plot points all eventually find intersection and tension before the show’s final verse brings us to a grand conclusion in just the way we’d expect a country ballad to do.
Oh, and hot tip: get to the theater early. Open-mic night starts before curtain then transitions into the play, and Bedlam has been lassoing some big-name stars to perform (my show featured members of Old Dominion).
Under the direction of Eric Tucker, Music City feels vibrant and urgent. The actors move throughout the theater, in and around the audience who are never not essential to the show’s setting. The emotions, fears, and desires driving these characters may seem as melodramatic as they are on hit country records, but this cast pours themselves into a story that takes downhome to operatic lengths.
And the music sounds like it is delivered fresh from the top of the country charts. Sometimes that is quite literally true, as the show features songs like “Sangria,” “Smile,” “My Masterpiece,” and “Somewhere in My Car” that Harding wrote for Blake Shelton, Uncle Kracker, Darius Rucker, and Keith Urban respectively. Because Harding has also written for the likes of Kenny Chesney, Dierks Bently, and Florida Georgia Line, Music City’s entire score feels like the beating pulse of contemporary country. The cast frequently plays guitar and other instruments (Rideout consistently surprises by grabbing a new instrument), but they are backed by a band that seems as rocksteady as the best studio session crew (Julianne B. Merrill, music direction and keys, Drew Bastian, drums, Ann Klein, guitar, and Tony Tino, bass). In a manner that only the best musicals can achieve, this show is at once about the music and its story, which are inextricable and essential to each other.
Music City feels as earnest as a smiling bartender welcoming you into a no-pretense bar where the beer is cold and the bearhugs are plentiful. It unabashedly celebrates the spirit of country music, giving its Upper West Side audience a chance to drink down a cold can of Americana charm.