Reviews

The Great American Trailer Park Musical

According to David Finkle, this tuneful tuner is good enough to give you a good time.

Orfeh, Shuler Hensley, Marya Grandy, Linda Hart, and  Leslie Kritzer in The Great American Trailer Park Musical
(Photo © Scott Landis)
Orfeh, Shuler Hensley, Marya Grandy, Linda Hart, and
Leslie Kritzer in The Great American Trailer Park Musical
(Photo © Scott Landis)

Over at the Armadillo Acres trailer park in Starke, Florida, the owners got satellite dishes on their grounded ve-hick-les. They’re shurrly pullin’ in Jerry Springer’s talk show, on which they’d shurr ’nuff recognize all that pushed-up cleavage and big hair. But mostly they set on lawn chairs, observing their own cat fights and entertaining the paying customers on the far yonder side of the footlights. They have a helluva good time doing so, since they have no qualms about saying what’s on their uncluttered minds.

Normally, Betty (Linda Hart), Linoleum (Marya Grandy), and Pickles (Leslie Kritzer) just shoot the torpid breeze while catching rays. But during the time it takes The Great American Trailer Park Musical to speed by, they grab the opportunity to comment with a lot of snap on a potentially combustible situation. The agoraphobic Jeannie (Kaitlin Hopkins), who occupies the colorful trailer stage left, has pooped many parties for her toll-collector hubby Norbert (Shuler Hensley); so he’s easy pickings for new arrival Pippi (Orfeh), a bodacious number who makes her living at the local strip joint, The Litter Box Show Palace.

Pippi’s on the run from her ex-con boyfriend Duke (Wayne Wilcox) and knows there’ll be hell to pay if and when he catches up with her. Since this is a piece of 90-minute theater — well, it is now, having endured significant cuts during previews — there’d be no show if he didn’t catch up with her. When he does, the plot that librettist (and director) Betsy Kelso has thought up goes curiously toothless, though there is a cute twist to bring the action to a happy conclusion.

It looks as if it’s going to be some time — or never — until Jerry Springer: The Opera reaches Manhattan, so The Great American Trailer Park Musical is a good bet to fill the gap. This situation probably wasn’t what Kelso and songwriter David Nehls had in mind when they decided to write about these folks, but it is one reason to see their tuneful tuner. The other reasons are many; the whole Trailer Park team has collaborated craftily, and the result is a property that doesn’t lodge in the memory once it’s over but is entertaining while under way.

The denizens of Armadillo Acres don’t have much more than two nickels to rub together, but their producers have poured a lot of loose change into making this show shine like aluminum siding. Derek McLane has designed it with an eye toward lots of color and adaptability, and Markas Henry has made sure that the many costumes are also as colorful as a bag of Reese’s Pieces. There’s a song called “Storm’s A-Brewin’ ” during which the cast members get dolled up in Vegas lounge-act duds and are lit accordingly by Donald Holder; it’s a thigh-slapper just for the look of it. (Considering the damage that Katrina and Rita have done lately, it may seem to some as if this gaudy musical number is a case of bad timing — but never you mind, Mabel.)

Kelso is canny enough to understand that if you’re only supplying enough of a framework to make the audience believe they’re watching something substantial, you’ve got to move it along as quickly as possible. So that’s what she does, ably assisted by choreographer Sergio Trujillo. His dances, if that’s what the lively exercises are, include a lot of strutting and shimmying and pelvis pumping. No one’s allowed to stand in one place too long, with the exception of Jeannie, who eventually is able to step away from her trailer and grind with the others.

Nehls has stitched together a country-rock score that calls for some hefty belting. Fortunately, he gets it from performers who can sing, act, joke around, and pelvis-pump with the best of them; cocky as you please, they sell Nehls’s ditties as if hawking rhinestones on the Home Shopping Network. While their wigs shake, the ladies sing so loud as to be heard all the way to Dade County; and the two men acquit themselves with the same all-purpose pow. Hensley gets away with Norbert’s frequent use of the phrase “holy ham sammiches,” and that can’t be an easy thing for any actor to do — not even a Tony Award winner. If these toughened pros can’t make The Great American Trailer Park Musical genuinely great, at least they make it right good enough.