“I ain’t gonna worry wrinkles in my brow, cuz nothin’s never gonna be alright nohow,” says Hank Williams in Hank Williams: Lost Highway, quoting his song “I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive.” And he’s right—we already know how the Live Arts production is going to end. So why not just enjoy the show?
The show’s two hours take the audience on a breakneck journey, from the early stages of his career (when his mother, played by the excellent Jane Lynch in her Live Arts debut, ushers the boys to play for a couple of bucks at a bar) through the good times (Hank’s first visit to the Grand Ole Opry) and to the end, when Williams is found dead in the backseat of his baby blue Cadillac at age 29, his veins flooded with liquor and morphine.
It has been suggested that Williams’ lifelong struggle with severe back pain, and his self-medication, may have been the result of a minor case of spina bifida. Lost Highway brushes such details into the background and instead fashions Williams’ losing battle with booze and pills into a cautionary tale about the pitfalls of fame. Director Fran Smith writes in her notes that “the scripted text in Lost Highway is a somewhat shallow version of this country music legend’s short-lived life.” And indeed, the text that surrounds the songs could hardly aspire to the heights of Hank’s songs.
Williams (the amazing Dallas Wesley) is instead colored by a series of embarrassments—his real name’s Hiram and his mom calls him “Skeet,” he’s not a great guitar player and he’s bald as a bowling ball under that big white hat. What saves this musical from the kind of boilerplate moralism that made movies like Walk the Line and Ray tedious is, first, the sheer force of the songs.
The second is that they were able to find such a talented group of musicians in the Central Virginia to play Williams and the Driftin’ Cowboys. Just as Williams is described, Wesley (a Lynchburg-based singer-songwriter) has the dark, beady eyes Williams was known for, could easily “change clothes in a shotgun barrel,” and has the yodel to prove it. His Driftin’ Cowboys—Thomas Gunn on Bass, Jeffrey Justice on Fiddle and Dan Sebring on guitar—sound like the real deal. The boot-stomping singalongs make it worth the trip. So do the lonely dirges.
A more subtle delight is Garret Queen’s set design, which deftly tells the story of Hank’s life in one fell swoop: the porch where he learned to sing songs with his mother is framed within and extends outward to a stage, where a vintage condenser microphone stands, as if Hank walked out after a big breakfast and onto the Opry stage. Stage left is a diner where Hank later has a romantic run-in with a waitress (Mary Beth Revak), and on the other end is a gas pump where Tee-Tot (Steve Smith), who, upon hearing Williams’ “WPA Blues,” cautions the young songwriter: “If you want to find some hard times, find some of your own.” Hard times and good times, it turns out, are one in the same on the lost highway.
