The “Beverly Hillbillies” come to “Green Acres” in this bluegrass-gospel musical, back at Taproot for the third time and still packing them in.
The title is “Smoke on the Mountain” by Connie Ray and Alan Bailey. It’s hokey, simple-minded, strictly from corn and so incredibly sincere you can’t fight it. Like it or not, none of us who saw it could help ourselves. We all ended up clapping our hands and singing along.
The setup posits Pastor Mervin Ogelthorpe (Kevin Brady) waiting with his congregation for the Sanders family to show up. The place is the Mount Pleasant Baptist Church in Carolina, 1938. Times are hard. Folks are down. The hope is that the Sanders family will lift everybody’s spirits by leading them in the church’s first ever “Saturday Night Sing.”
All of which makes sense enough but can also put you off.
Remember, we are talking about a prayer meet in the Bible Belt during the Depression. This means Fundamentalist, Southern-Baptist Revivalism. This means a root of Christian ministry that calls for baring your soul in public, breaking into song at the drop of a hat and suiting a Bible quote to any occasion.
Hardly the stuff of relevance to today’s fast-spinning, high-tech world of globalizing sophistication — don’t you think?
The Sanders family does show up, bringing with them the spirit that the holy rollers get excited about.
Pa Sanders (Edd Key) tells of the blessing that came his way when he resisted the devil’s temptation to sell beer out of the family retail store. The next day, his bank loan came through so that he could finish the porch he was building for Ma.
Ma Sanders (Theresa Holmes) testifies to a revelation she had when a June bug landed in her glass of lemonade.
Daughter June (Loni Kappus) confesses that, unlike the rest of the singing Sanders, she can’t carry a tune in a bucket. But hallelujah! When a door shuts, a window opens. June has the gift of hearing what others say and signing it for the deaf.
And so it goes with the testimonies of the other three of the Sanders family as to how they came to serve in the singing ministry.
Son Stanley (David Anthony Lewis) was called home after drinking and womanizing and because of the unbearable loneliness of being jailed for months for brawling in a bar in the big city.
Another son, Dennis (Allen Cox), afflicted with a stammer, gave up the urge to preach when the only audience he could reach was the family dog, Rufus. Rufus howled, and Dennis knew.
Another daughter (Audrey Bean) saw the light after trying out for the role of Scarlet O’Hara when David Selznick was casting for “Gone With the Wind” in Charlotte. All she got for her high hopes was a flirtatious wink to send her back home and four months of waiting for nothing.
Mind you, each testimony to personal revelation is delivered with a straight face and in a tone of voice that is matter of fact. Each one is followed by the rest of the Sanders family erupting into a hymn or exhortation or outright expression in song of thanksgiving or sheer jubilation.
Some of the lyrics get a little hard to take. One likens Christians to cowboys riding against Satan’s sinners like rustlers. At stake are lost souls like stray cows on the open range.
But the cumulative effect of simple sincerity sustained without let up through outrageous melodramatics and hillbilly corn, is irresistible.
I wouldn’t have thought it. It surprised me. Call it herd instinct if you like. But one way or another, when the show was finishing, I was standing up with everybody else at Taproot and clapping and singing, if you can believe it, “Bringing in the Sheaves.”
That old-time religion, there’s nothing like it.
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