Delicate Bawdry

By T.E. Kalem

THE BEST LITTLE WHOREHOUSE IN TEXAS

Book by Larry L. King and Peter Masterson

Music and Lyrics by Carol Hall

Choreography by Tommy Tune

Few things are more infectious in the theater than spontaneous good fun and the warm feeling of sharing the evening with amusing, if slightly disreputable friends. Even by theatrical proxy, there is a certain insidious charm and exoticism in experiencing, through staged illusion, the magic of venturing into forbidden places and untoward happenings that might rarely have been accessible, or perhaps acceptable, in ordinary life. Despite its concupiscent locale and a generous quota of oft-deleted words, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas is a font of fun and friendliness.

The evening has the flavor of a tall tale recounted by an accomplished barroom raconteur. The story derives from a little civic melodrama that really took place in a small Texas town some years ago, and it is engagingly rich in regional nostalgia and spiced with delicate bawdry. Not surprisingly, the co-author of the libretto is a storyteller of no mean skill, Larry L. King, an accomplished journalist who wrote a compact account of the actual facts underlying Whorehouse after they occurred. To tell it as it is in the show, a rural community, Gilbert, has long tolerated, secretly relished, and certainly patronized a venerable bordello run in a rectitudinous fashion that would be the envy of most private-school headmasters today. Governors, Senators and mayors unwind from the cares of office in the chambers of the Chicken Ranch, as the place is known from a Depression custom in which local farmers traded live fowl for the favors of the girls. Postpubescent lads, like the winning Aggie football team, matriculate to manhood here under expert tutelage. The prevailing tuition fee is $3. "That's back in the days of Roosevelt nooky, not Carter coffee," says one character who clearly intends to hold the line on inflation.

Despite the vigilant but not unsympathetic eye of Miss Mona (Carlin Glynn), whom no one would presume to call a madam, the girls feel that this house is cozier than home. But a puritan nemesis stalks them: a local TV Savonarola nicknamed "Watchdog" (Clint Allmon) who is bent on inflaming the Bible thumpers and incriminating the pols till they close down the Chicken Ranch.

Sheriff Ed Earl Dodd (Henderson Forsythe) puts up a doughty fight against the miscreants of reform, and if pithy Southwestern scatology could carry the day he might conceivably have saved the ladies of the evening. It is a rip-roaring performance by Forsythe, who in past plays has often been immured in elegantly manicured drawing rooms. He is particularly sympathetic in his valiant defense of Miss Mona, whose long-ago lover and protector he has been.

In a production in which everyone may take pride, Tommy Tune excels for the freshness of his choreography. One number, in which drollery parallels satire, has six girls of vacuous countenance with dummy life-sized replicas of themselves clinging to them on each arm. The 18-person line swings into a Radio City Rockettes routine that may, quite possibly, induce laughsphyxia. To match this showstopper, Tune has a show-stomper in which the entire Aggie football team unbenches its mighty legs in unison.

Dance is wedded to music in this show, and Carol Hall's country-and-western score is a consistent delight. She is loyally aided by topnotch musicians and some singers who are obviously AWOL from the angelic choir. If there is anything in vocal terms that can be labeled a blowtorch song, Delores Hall delivers it with fiery sensuality in Twenty-Four Hours of Lovin'.

Presently housed in Manhattan's closest approximation of the Deep South, at Greenwich Village's Entermedia Theater, this musical looks suspiciously like a migrant entertainment giant. If it should move north to Broadway, there will be many more eyes than those of Texas upon it.

-- T.E. Kalem

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