Exhibitionism

Always ... Patsy Cline

Running time: 2 hrs

These days you can get about as close to a star in the music industry as you can to Alpha Centauri. On the rare occasions that they aren't secure inside a posse of bodyguards or a limo or behind the safety glass of television, those recording artists who have won the fame game are playing arenas where they appear to the average fan about the size of a thumbnail. Time was, however, when stars weren't always so distant, when it was possible on occasion for a fan to make contact and a connection – a real, human connection – with a star.

Always ... Patsy Cline tells one such story, as related by Houston homemaker Louise Seger, a devotee of Cline's from her early appearances on Arthur Godfrey's television show. The night her idol finally came to sing at a club in the Bayou City, Seger arrived hours early and not only met Cline, who showed up all alone, but became her protector that evening: chatting her up, cutting a deal with the club's owner, leading the band, even bringing the singer to her home after the show. That night launched a friendship that continued through letters until Cline's sudden death in 1963.

Ted Swindley, the show's creator, serves up Louise's tale like a Sunday supper, loaded with chicken-fried colloquialisms and a basket of buttered y'alls. And as he has her deliver it all straight to the crowd, there's the potential for the audience to wind up with mostly corn and ham. But the Zachary Scott Theatre Center production cuts through the mawkishness and Lone Star hokum. Latifah Taormina's Louise effuses such a genuine enthusiasm for Cline, an excitement so effervescent and pure, that it's disarming. Just watching her watch Jessica Welch's Patsy sing – her face rapt, beaming – is to know that she speaks from the heart.

And once Welch sings, we understand Louise's devotion to Cline. Welch's voice captures the plummy fullness of the original, that lush alto that can drip with seduction or throb with heartbreak. It's a wondrous voice, luxuriant and creamy and so dense with feeling. With it, Welch ignites torch songs like "Crazy," gliding from note to note like a steel guitar, with all the twang and ache of that instrument in her voice, too. And singing country blues, she works that alley cat growl for all the sexy intensity that Cline imbued in such songs. At such times, Welch has an impish turn to the corners of her mouth, as if she's recalling some private joke. It wouldn't surprise me if the joke were that she's having as much fun singing as we're having listening to her.

The wonder of this show is that we come to feel as close to Cline as Louise does. Even with Michael Raiford's roadhouse set stretching fully across the back of Zach's Kleberg Stage, the show feels as if we're at the kitchen table where Louise sits reminiscing. There is a warmth that radiates from the stage – a warmth in Raiford's wood-paneled walls, in Jason Amato's lighting, in the genial demeanor of the onstage band, and especially in the performances that director Dave Steakley has drawn from the two leads – and it draws us in close, to share a cozy moment with a star.