'Doyle and Debbie' do right by country
SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Thursday, July 09, 2009
In another writer's hands, it would be material for an all-American tragedy: a young single mom with three unruly kids, from a background of poverty, abusive relationships and thwarted dreams, hitching her star to a washed-up, just-this-side-of-desperate aging country singer fighting multiple demons. But with the duo named Doyle and Debbie, it's played for laughs, working surprisingly well and effortlessly charming the pants off its audience. Whether you love Nashville-style country music or can't stand the stuff, it's likely to charm yours off, too.
In the Long Center's 250-seat black-box Rollins Studio Theater last month, the set re-created Nashville's Station Inn (a real-life honky-tonk and the show's actual home base); the audience sat either in bleachers or at red-checkered tables for four. The staging included a mock dressing room where, in contrast to their constant stage patter, the duo say not a word to each other. The set-up should be similar when `The Doyle and Debbie Show' returns to the Long Center for shows this weekend and next.
Bruce Arntson (Doyle), who wrote or co-wrote the songs, and Jenny Littleton (Debbie) inhabit their characters with near-creepy perfection. Bursting with forced, unctuous cheer, Arntson resembles a 40-ish, clean-shaven and slimmed-down Dom DeLuise gone all Nashville on us. His Doyle Mayfield is an unstable recovering alcoholic who spends most of the evening treading the line between puppyish eagerness to please and going completely off the rails (and once, memorably, crossing way over that line). He's an unreconstructed chauvinist given to lyrics like "Eat your peas and shut your piehole, woman" and singing the praises of "Fat Women in Trailers." He's oblivious to his mediocrity and un-PC nature, happily giving his partner songs to sing with lyrics like "Just keep me barefoot and pregnant, and I'll be your baby doll" (his idea of writing from a woman's point of view).
Debbie, for her part, is given to comments like, "The stressful drudgery of my daily life just melts away when I'm in the midst of Doyle's fan base."
Most of the time, the considerably younger Littleton, as the "third Debbie" in the act's history (discovered singing in a VFW hall just six weeks previously, as the story goes), outshines her partner - which is, really, the point. With her large, blue-lidded eyes fixed in a long-suffering, far-off gaze, and mouth in a red-lipped pout, she often seems to be contemplating going solo even in the midst of a duet, but can't help being drawn back to her flawed partner.
The duo, plugging in jaw-droppingly off-color words and phrases into traditional country song structures, are a stone cold hoot (this is not a show to bring the kids to, unless your kids are, say, 27 and 31). It takes talent to play country for laughs, and both Arntson and Littleton have it - Arntson is an expert at yodeling and Southern auctioneer-style fast singing, and Littleton, a Tennessee native, has the twang down pat and accurately runs the scales from Patsy to Dolly. As two outsiders who live for applause, they nail traditional country's down-home platitudes, shirt-sleeve patriotism and too-public recountings of trials and tribulations in a bid for audience sympathy (as if saying, "Hey, our lives are just as miserable as yours, but at least we can sing about it and you can applaud us!").
In its raising of lowbrow Southern culture to the level of something approaching art, "Doyle and Debbie" can be enjoyed on more than one level, but the songs put it way over the top. In a good way.
These Doyle and Debbie song titles might offer a hint to the show's content (hear some music samples at www.doyleanddebbie.com):
'Grandma Flickertail'
'Whine Whine Twang Twang'
'Stock Car Love'
'Barefoot and Pregnant'
'Snowbanks of Life'
'Daddy's Hair'
'Harlequin Romance'
'Fat Women in Trailers'