Country music-making ‘Lucky Guy’ packs a heap o’ hee-haws
Michael Sommers
May 20, 2011: A new musical that opened Thursday at the Little Shubert Theatre, “Lucky Guy” blithely hee-haws along a well-worn narrative path: Seeking fame as a songwriter, innocent Billy Ray arrives in Nashville only to stumble into the clutches of Big Al, a greedy wheeler-dealer, and Jeannie Jeannine, a glamazon country music star on the wane, both of whom are in cahoots to steal the kid’s surefire song hit. Prosaic though his plotting happens to be, writer-composer-director Willard Beckham gives his script and staging of the musical enough of a comical rainbow twist to make “Lucky Guy” into an amiable hootenanny with a big emphasis on the hoot. The storyline is strictly heterosexual, but Beckham’s silly, frilly treatment of it is very gay indeed.
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