HANK WILLIAMS: LOST HIGHWAY
At the Manhattan Ensemble Theater, 55 Mercer St. Telecharge, (212) 239-6200.
‘HANK Williams: Lost Highway” is the best example of a musician’s bio put on a stage I’ve ever seen.
In case you didn’t know it, Williams was the Alabama boy who, in the late ’40s and early ’50s (he died in 1952), wrote and performed songs of amazing poetry and pain.
The play that just opened at the Manhattan Ensemble Theater follows Williams musically through local gigs, radio appearances and triumphant appearances at the Grand Ole Opry. Later, concert blowups by a drunken Williams are sketched in.
We get the picture mainly, though, through the songs. The life is somehow all there in the music.
Williams, who is performed with an icy cool by the marvelous actor/singer/musician Jason Petty, starts driving those country roads with his tough, Marjorie Main-like mother, the daunting but delightful Margaret Bowman.
She drives her son and his band, the Drifting Cowboys, to places where they play Hank’s stuff: “Honky Tonk Blues,” “I’m Tellin’ You,” “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” “Jambalaya.”
A coldly pretty blonde named Audrey (well-played by Tertia Lynch) turns up and imagines she has a role not just as a wife but as a singer. Uh oh.
“Hey, Good Lookin’ ” gives way to “Lost Highway” and “Your Cheatin’ Heart.”
Two figures, present throughout the play at stage right and stage left, are Williams’s childhood musical mentor, the African-American Tee-Tot (the wonderful Michael W. Howell), and a roadside waitress (the saucy Juliet Smith), who stands for all the lonely souls of the South listening to Hank on the radio.