Review: Mel O'Drama's COUSIN CLEETUS Plays Printers Alley

For several years now, the peripatetic Melanie Roady - aka Mel O'Drama - has taken theater to the audiences all around the region, staging shows in various venues and locales where previously there's not been a lot of live onstage offerings, employing a good number of local actors and spreading the gospel of all things theatrical in the process. Now, fate and circumstance have brought the Mel O'Drama troupe to its first sit-down home: Events on 3rd, the Nashville entertainment palace first created by country music icon Boots Randolph in Nashville's legendary and historic Printers' Alley.

Just in time for the holiday season, the company's original "musical comedy dinner show," writer Curtis Reed's Cousin Cleetus' Country Christmas, is onstage through the end of 2015, offering audiences a tuneful, if sometimes tone-deaf, holiday extravaganza not unlike a Christmastime television special, the likes of which we haven't seen since the heyday of Hee Haw and other cornfed entertainment offerings. And like its predecessors, Cousin Cleetus' Country Christmas offers a good-hearted, if sometimes off-putting, holiday parable that features some mighty talented people deserving of a far-better script.

Make no mistake about it, however, Reed is a very talented writer and it's that knowledge that makes Cousin Cleetus' Country Christmas a surprisingly disappointing and unfocused show: the playwright employs every Southern hick, redneck, white trash, hillbilly stereotype in telling his convoluted tale of Christmas Eve mix-ups and hurt feelings. Case in point: a loving mother leaves her family on Christmas Eve because her beloved husband has disappointed her one time too many. That's just not the Southern way: I cannot imagine any good woman ditching her kids to go sulk at a hotel (even if there's more "mo" than "ho" to the establishment, the fancy terrycloth robe Mama wears sends mixed signals). It's almost as if some carpetbagging Yankee crossed the Mason-Dixon Line to craft a comedy that has a heart, but lacks a soul.

Along the way, the show delivers a swell program of musical numbers, including "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas," "White Christmas" and "Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer" that'll put you in the proper holiday spirit which, coming after a delicious meal served pre-show, is the most country-fried and authentic part of the production.

Director Ann Gwinn does double-duty, staging the show while playing the aforementioned Mama, and she's lucky to have a talented cast led by Nashville theater legend Danny Proctor as the eponymous Cousin Cleetus, whose supposedly dimwitted actions lead to the plot that plays out onstage. But Proctor's Cleetus is deceptively smart - he uses big words and stuff while he provides "narration," his word not mine, to propel the story along its merry way.

Proctor is given able support by a cadre of impressive Music City talents, including - in addition to Gwinn - Britt Byrd, Ashley Wolfe and Evan Taylor Williams (as his children Betsy Rae Sue, Irma Gene and Billy Bob), and Christen Heilman Runyon and Marty Morgan as his parents. The imminently watchable Byrd is full of energy as the six-year-old girl, while Nashville newcomer Wolfe commands the stage with a performance of "Santa Baby" that is clearly worth the price of admission. Williams gives a wild-eyed, slightly creepy, performance as the precocious Billy Bob and as cousin Duke McCoy. Runyon is obviously too young to play Meemaw, but she succeeds nonetheless in creating a believable character who's entertaining as all get out, paired with Morgan as her hard-of-hearing old man.

Despite the script's shortcomings - yes, there are some genuinely effective lines and a few really funny moments - Cousin Cleetus' Country Christmas remains a welcome part of the holiday season in local theater and, more importantly, it's great to see another venue offering live theater in our ever-growing (the masses are fairly teeming all along lower Broadway and in the streets nearby) downtown. We're hoping Mel (Roady and O'Drama both) and her hard-working cast and crew break all the legs as they try to establish a foothold in the tourist-driven Nashville economy.

• Cousin Cleetus' Country Christmas. By Curtis Reed. Directed by Ann Gwinn. Presented by Mel O'Drama Theater at Events on 3rd, 209 Printers Alley, Nashville. Through December 30. For details, go to www.melodramatheater.org or call (615) 457-1133.

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