From the Road: Fire on the Mountain

posted by David Dower

Scouting again. This time Molly Smith, Arena’s Artistic Director, had me on the hunt in Louisville. I went down and back on Sunday to catch a matinee of Fire on the Mountain at Actors’ Theater. You may be familiar with the theater from its annual Humana Festival of New American Plays.

Fire on the Mountain is a musical created by Dan Wheetman and Randal Myler. If you’ve been coming around Arena for a few years you’ll remember this team from the Tony-nominated Ain’t Nothin’ but the Blues, which was here in the 1996/97 season.

This time they’ve focused their attention on Appalachia, its miners and its music. And what music! It’s the music of the soundtrack of O Brother Where Art Thou and Gillian Welch. It’s blues and bluegrass and hillbilly and hoe down. It’s about unions and sweethearts and coal dust and paradise. 

Like their other collaborations (which include Hank Williams: Lost Highway) and Myler’s Love, Janis, Fire is essentially a study in a specific musical voice. There’s very little book to this show, putting the focus squarely on the sounds, rhythms, and harmonies of Appalachian roots music and the character of the people whose stories it tells.

Wheetman’s arrangements and musical direction are just beautiful, particularly in the hands of cast members Molly Andrews and “Mississippi” Charles Bevel. Late in the play there’s a duet between the two of them that is jawdropping in its harmonies, its bottomless pit of longing, and its boundless soul. “Bright Morning Stars” is alone worth the price of admission. But there are 30 songs in the show, including some familiar to me like “Which Side Are You On?” and “Paradise,” and if you appreciate this music it’s a feast. And the curtain call encore, a singalong of the union song “They’ll Never Keep Us Down,” sends fans out on cloud nine.

I arrived early enough to eavesdrop on conversations in the lobby before the doors to the theater opened. It’s part of the gig—I always want to know what an audience is thinking before a performance and where they’ve landed when it’s over. (If you see me standing alone in a lobby or out on the sidewalk, lost in some apparent fog, it’s likely I’m listening in on something…)

Sunday’s hubbub was especially lively. This was an added performance, so most of the people I saw it with were not subscribers to ATL. The preshow conversations involved stories of finding the building, of the long drive, of "the last time I went to a play…" and mainly of their excitement to hear the music. Clearly, word had traveled wide that this production was worth the trip for followers of this sound. There were a lot of young people along with their parents.

There was a special urgency in the performance itself, as so many of the songs are rooted in the hills of Kentucky, an area many in attendance obviously had tremendous affection for. I could hear people throughout the theater gasping in recognition at familiar numbers, weeping at times, holding their breath at others. I was glad to be there for a show that had that kind of electricity of authenticity for so many in the house.

An equal number of the songs sing the hills of West Virginia. I sat there wondering if we’d find the same current of connection if we produced the show at Arena. Given the hue and cry over the change of programming at WAMU when they moved their bluegrass program over to HD radio, my guess is that we would.

ATL did a nice thing by creating a photography and textile exhibit to accompany the show.  The photos of “Pictureman” Mullin were especially compelling to me.

Music:
Here's a link to listen to 4 songs from Fire on the Mountain: that's "Mississippi" Charles Bevel singing Been in this Storm So Long. And here's a link to listen to 14 songs from Molly Andrews' album Blue Morning Glory.