Review Lonestar, Texas: A Popcorn Throwing Rock Country Musical at United States Art Authority [theater]

All theater—maybe even all art—is a collaboration between the performers and the audience, at least to some extent. The performance brings out an audience's emotional energy, which in turn fuels what occurs onstage. It's the whole point of live theater, and the reason why this brand of performance endures, even as its influence has diminished. There are a lot more people on the planet today then there were back when theater was a mainstream way to tell a story, and it's hard to get them all in the same room at the same time, but that exchange of energy between the audience and the performers isn't going to occur when you're packed into the Drafthouse to watch New Moon.

So, fuck yeah—we love theater here. It's interactive by its very nature, and we like to be interacted with in a medium other than Twitter. The Vestige Group, whose original musical Lonestar, Texas is entering its second weekend at Spiderhouse's United States Art Authority, is into that interactivity, too, and Lonestar takes it to an extreme—audience members are encouraged to buy bags of popcorn to throw at the performers, to boo and hiss the bad guys, and to cheer the heroes. Loudly, and with great enthusiasm.

But all that interactivity comes at a price, and in Lonestar, that price is pretty steep: In the pursuit of engaging the audience by having the three Sexy Cowgirls flirt with them, the Narrator speak directly to them, and the villain be so vile as to encourage popcorn-throwing, Lonestar spends almost no time actually telling its story.

The show opens with an extended exposition, a long twenty-plus minutes of dodging around any sort of story. We spend most of that time with Tyler, the narrator (Jonathan Terrell), despite the fact that he's not actually relevant to the plot of the piece. Instead, he introduces the other characters one-by-one, giving us our first taste of who we'll be watching throughout the evening. Which is really a bit of a drag—none of the characters are so nuanced that we need to be introduced to them outside of the context of the story, because all of the information conveyed in that expository sequence is made perfectly clear every time they appear on stage. In the interest of interactivity, we don't get to enjoy much of anything resembling a story.

What story there is plays out like this: Timothy, the thief with a heart of gold (Brock England), steals the car of Darlene, the damsel in distress (Sarah Berger), while she's in the back seat. As they bicker briefly, he becomes distracted and crashes the car, at which point he takes her to a motel room for safekeeping. The evil Texas Ranger Rex Mason (Benjamin Wright, who'se also responsible for the book and lyrics), with sidekick Wilson (Spencer Driggers)in tow, arrives at the scene of the accident, determines that a damsel in distress is involved, and decides to solve the crime so she'll shower him with gratitude. He deduces Timothy's guilt, arrests him, and, aside from a brief twist at the end, that's the extent of it.

It's frustrating, because it violates a lot of the compact between the live performers and the audience that we talk about up there. The idea is that the show will offer the audience some real engagement, and the audience will feed the performers their emotional energy. All of that gets short-circuited here, though—since we don't get to see much action, we don't get to feel for the characters, and the crowd response almost occurs in spite of the show. We're not given the opportunity to ever believe in the burgeoning love story between Timothy and Darlene (the two aren't even given a duet), and Ranger Mason's villainy is so one-dimensional (if you didn't get the fact that he likes to rescue women in trouble so he can fuck them in the introduction, it's helpfully explained by every line of dialogue he has in every scene, a song, and a discussion at the beginning of act two between the Sexy Cowgirls) that there's not much joy in booing him, or cheering the lovers.

But we paid for the popcorn, so we're going to throw it. The interminable opening sequence occurs in a venue that sells beer, so a little bit of rowdiness is going to happen by the time the second act rolls around. And the audience paid for a good time, so they're going to have one. But Lonestar doesn't do a whole lot to fulfill its end of the bargain—the show is designed to make the audience very meta-aware of the whole experience, and it's a bummer. When you've got a narrator telling you how you're supposed to feel about the characters and Sexy Cowgirls dictating to you where the action is taking place, it's awfully hard to get swept away in what's happening. The cheers and boos, at that point, feel pretty meta, too—we cheer where we'd cheer if these were characters we liked, and we boo where we'd boo if we actually thought that Ranger Mason were a villain. When your performance is as self-conscious as Lonestar's, then your audience reaction isn't going to be spontaneous or sincere, either.

To its credit, Lonestar does rectify some of its problems in the second act. The Sexy Cowgirls, at this point, talk to each other, rather than the audience—though their conversation, focused on how they see through all of them men they spent the first act throwing themselves at, feels kind of phony—and the Narrator's presence is diminished, favoring a straight-ahead build to a climax. The music gets catchier at this point, too, with Berger delivering the show's only truly memorable number, "The Man Who Gave Me Whiplash", and we even get a twist when Driggers' Wilson, perhaps the show's only genuinely likable character, pops up for the climax. It's also a whole hell of a lot shorter than the first act, which tells you most of what you need to know about Lonestar, Texas: It's the sort of show that's at its best when it's hurtling toward its ending, rather than trying to convince the audience that it should be excited about an ending that's coming. Unfortunately, for most of the evening, it's way more concerned with the latter.

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