The songs are sharp, but the script is flat

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This article was published 13/11/2010 (5737 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Prairie Theatre Exchange is letting patrons take drinks into the theatre for Back to You: The Life and Music of Lucille Starr.

Maybe management is hoping a lubricated audience will forgive the shortcomings of this stiff jukebox musical. Though it’s packed with first-class hurtin’ songs and toe-tappers, in theatrical terms it’s as riveting as a three-chord ditty scrawled on a cocktail napkin.

Bilingual country singer Lucille Starr was born Lucille Savoie in St. Boniface, but raised in Port Coquitlam and Maillardville, B.C. The bare-bones, two-act production that opened Thursday — with a capable three-man country band onstage — is directed by Barbara Tomasic for Vancouver’s Musical TheatreWorks.

Beginning in the late 1950s, the gorgeous Starr and her husband, Bob Regan, recorded as the Canadian Sweethearts. She was also signed as a solo artist and scored a massive worldwide hit in 1964, The French Song (“Quand le soleil dit bonjour aux montagnes”).

Back to You, named after a comeback album by Starr, recounts how Regan’s monstrous jealousy of her solo success and insistence on controlling her career essentially destroyed her potential to become a Canadian Tammy Wynette.

It uses two actresses to portray Starr. Beverley Elliott plays her as a divorced survivor in her 40s, giving her first comeback concert.

Elliott has a lovely voice. But from the moment she appears in a glittering pantsuit, she’s too low-key. She lacks the stage presence to make us believe the character is a top entertainer. She doesn’t fully plumb the emotion in poignant songs like Too Far Between Kisses. And she recounts the often harrowing events of Starr’s married life — depicted in flashback — in a rote acting style that skims over pain.

Playing Starr in the past, from childhood to her 30s, is cute, vivacious Alison MacDonald. She also delivers strong vocals, and the show’s best moments come when she sweetly harmonizes with Elliott. But MacDonald’s perky, musical-theatre-style performance is just as lacking in depth as Elliott’s.

What’s more, both are too prim for a country diva. The sultry, worldly Starr who’s shown in spike-heeled go-go boots on the show’s program is absent.

The real Starr had an emotive vibrato and an authentic yodel that aren’t captured here. (Incidentally, when performers fake singing into old-fashioned microphones but are actually wearing headset mics, the illusion is ruined if they stand a mile away.)

Jeff Gladstone fares somewhat better as Regan, but his ne’er-do-well character doesn’t need to be layered or nuanced. He’s the classic selfish, hard-drinking, womanizing charmer who becomes controlling, abusive and ultimately pathetic.

The biggest weakness of Back to You is the uninspired script by Tracey Power. As the older Starr traces the duo’s disintegrating marriage and career, Power’s thudding, too-literal lines inform us of what Starr felt. “Music is my life. It’s who I am,” the singer declares in one of many clunkers. There’s not a shred of artistry or originality in the domestic or backstage dialogue, either.

Still, anyone who appreciates rockabilly and country music of the ’50s through ’70s will enjoy the 19 songs, laced with steel guitar and underpinned by standup bass.

PTE may have programmed Back to You as a gesture toward the francophone community, since St. Boniface gets a passing mention and a few lyrics are in French. But that’s not a good enough reason to bring in a production that belongs in a dinner theatre, not on one of the city’s foremost professional stages.

alison.mayes@freepress.mb.ca