Album Review: KNOXVILLE Handles Complex Themes with Grace

When you first begin listening to a new score by Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty, you can feel confident you're going to get two things: a masterclass in craft, and a masterclass in character. Their latest musical, Knoxville, absolutely upholds this tradition, with a beautiful, bittersweet score that encompasses big, heady themes and small, deeply human moments.

Look closely enough, and you'll find that many of our truly great musical theatre writers have certain ideas, questions, or themes that pop up, time and time again, in their work. With Ahrens and Flaherty, those ideas often center around the idea of community, identity, and questions along the lines of "Who am I?" or "Who are my people?" or "Where do I come from?" Knoxville, with a book by Frank Galati, explores the ambiguous, and sometimes even contradictory, nature of those questions, through the lens of James Agee's Pulitzer-winning novel A Death in the Family, which, in turn, was inspired by events in Agee's own life.

We're first introduced to Knoxville through the eyes of the Author (Jason Danieley), the grown-up version of the young boy, Rufus (Jack Casey), whose family is thrown into upheaval by unexpected tragedy. The opening number is almost reminiscent of a more haunting Oklahoma, with a pastoral sound and image-heavy lyrics that seem to "zoom in" from depicting the physical place on a broader scale to the community to individuals within it.

Our primary focus is on the Follett family: Rufus, his free-spirited father, Jay (Paul Alexander Nolan), and his anxious, religious mother Mary (Hannah Elless). There are also other seemingly-familiar characters, like Jay's slacker brother Ralph (Joel Waggoner), the stuffy-but-also-cool Aunt Hannah (Ellen Harvey), and Ralph's climbing wife Sally (Sarah Aili). The trick of the score, though, is how each subsequent song unfolds a little more, and a little more, about these characters, avoiding archetypes and, instead, giving them the warmth and complexity of real human beings.

So much of Knoxville rests in the tensions between opposing ideas: agnosticism and nature versus religious faith; staying home versus leaving; wild abandon versus stability and responsibility; the vastness of the world versus the smallest details of life having meaning. One of the musical's best, most moving, and most memorable songs outlines these tensions: "Outside Your Window," sung in full by Danieley and Nolan and reprised later. With the haunting richness of the male chorus behind them, the men's voices carry so much nuance with every word and note. Lyrics like "needing less and wanting more" and "some combination of what's lost and what lies ahead" lay out the inner conflict for each of the characters: to figure out their place in the world, and to find meaning and even understanding.

The score, with its bluegrass, country, folk, and blues sounds, finds every little detail of these characters and their emotional arcs. Jay's tenderness on songs like "Father to Son" contrasts with his grand, poignant thoughts on "Outside Your Window" and, later, "That's What I Believe." It would be easy to dismiss Elless's Mary as just his contrast, an upright, deeply religious, "ordinary" woman to his flashy charmer - but, by now, we should know that's not what's going to happen.

In fact, Elless gets some of the score's most touching, internal, and complex songs. "Ordinary Goodbye" meditates on the very nature of that descriptor, "ordinary," while "In His Strength" is essentially the show's 11-o'-clock number. It's a powerful and complicated number, as Mary goes through a crisis of faith - both in her religion and in her memories - and, ultimately, comes out the other side with a willingness to allow some questions to be unanswered and to remember love itself as a type of redemption and strength.

The score also gives its supporting characters the chance to shine. Ellen Harvey's Aunt Hannah anchors two memorable numbers with very different tones. First up is the upbeat, gleeful "Life Is in a Store," a toe-tapping tribute to the joys of shopping. Later, she takes on the polar opposite "Whatever It Is." This composition has shades of "You'll Never Walk Alone," but Flaherty's melody is gentler and more tender, rather than a reach-the-rafters buildup. This is also where Ahrens's lyrics offer insights into the musical's thematic spine, with lines like "Pretty sure that God don't come easily, but when hope is gone, and your strength is too, that's when I'll pray with you" and "Call it God or call it fate."

Even characters who sit at the fringes of the story get to share in the key moments, highlighting the show's theme of community and interconnectedness. The terrifying and sad "A Cotter Pin" is sung by a random bystander (Scott Wakefield), and Sarah Aili gets the showstopping "Black Dress," a song that forces us to see the rage, frustration, disappointment, and limitations behind Sally's seemingly-superficial exterior. And it's Nathan Salstone who gets to lead "The Butterfly," the delicate, poignant, penultimate song. Once again, the show finds a way to express sentiments that, in lesser hands, could be saccharine - but, here, I dare you not to get emotional at this simple, soft expression of hope and renewal. The same can be said of the finale, which closes out with images of connection: "pass[ing] our descendants going up and down the stairs" and "home is the place you start." The acceptance of not getting answers is the answer, and I hope, indeed, that this is just the start of the journey for Knoxville.

KNOXVILLE was released digitally on Broadway Records on October 21st. It is available on iTunes, Spotify and other platforms.

The Broadway Records website is HERE and the Ahrens and Flaherty website is HERE.

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