Old songs, new hope, good show at Wayside

Even in the world of make-believe, one reality hits hard. In an economic depression — and if this isn’t a depression, it’ll do till one comes along — people cut the extras first.

And for many people, the arts are extra.

Like everyone else, theaters are tightening their belts, and in some cases, starving anyway. Roanoke’s 40-year-old mainstay, the Mill Mountain Theatre, has closed its doors. Staunton’s American Shakespeare Center (The Blackfriars) has laid off six workers and is struggling to keep going.

This news has everything to do with this review.

Wayside Theatre in Middletown, facing the same problems as professional theaters everywhere, has made a cost-saving change to its current season. Playing through the middle of March is Warner Crocker and Steve Przybylski’s original script, heavy on the bluegrass and just the right, light touch on the story, “Southern Crossroads.”

The set-up will sound familiar. The year is 1933 and the ’20s have roared themselves deep into a Great Depression. The Greene Family Singers, a traveling band of country and bluegrass musicians, find themselves locked out of the now closed theater where they were scheduled to play. Lacking even the money for a hotel or the fare for a train, they set up shop under the marquee and hope that passing townsfolk will like the music enough to throw spare change into their instrument cases.

Best news of all: These actors really are musicians and their renditions of “Times Are Gettin’ Hard, Boys,” “Cripple Creek” and “Worried Man Blues,” just to name a few, are worth the trip up the valley all by themselves. Just enough story emerges to give continuity to the songs and a familiar, likeable take on the Greene family.

Shannon (Thomasin Savaiano) and her five brothers are carrying on the family’s musical tradition and now find themselves stuck in a small Virginia town. The theater marquee still reads “New Hope — Green Family Singers” but the doors are padlocked and a “foreclosed” banner stretches across the front.

Marian (Dacia Dick), fiancee of Loomis (Vaughn Irving) took the little money they had to get a hotel room and hasn’t come back. Then William and Matilda Samuels show up (William Diggle and Leah Raulerson), smug, rich and untouchable, to tell them that they’re breaking numerous ordinances and best get off the property — quick.

But they keep on playing such well-known greats as “Goodnight Irene,” “I Saw The Light,” “Shenandoah,” and “Midnight Special,” and the audience (played by the audience) cheers and yells for more.

That incident in New Orleans involving an accidental death doesn’t discourage Rusk (David Maga) from playing a mean ragtime piano. And even though Ewell and Willis (Larry Dahlke and Steve Przybylski) aren’t much for conversation, they can sure cut loose with the guitar, ukelele, fiddle, accordion, or anything else that carries a tune.

Robbie Limon, best known in this venue for his performances as Buddy Holly and Hank Williams, returns to play Wallace — and a helluva bass fiddle. Not having their own drum set doesn’t discourage the brothers from using buckets, bottles, whistles, tin pans — even their sister — for percussion. The results are pure joy.

The road takes a few gentle turns, and I won’t give anything away except to say that when Mr. Samuels comes back without his wife, his performance of “Little Brown Jug” is worth a whole pocketful of spare change.

True to an understanding of what audiences want — especially now — the story concludes on an up note; knots are tied and the circle is unbroken. Let us hope that the reality haunting this lovely piece of make-believe will do the same.

Margaret Lawrence is a member of the American Theatre Critics Association. She teaches drama at CCHS.