Hicks on Six review
Dark Star: The Life & Times of Roy Orbison
Mayfield Dinner Theatre, Mayfield Inn & Suites, Edmonton
Through Nov 7, 2010
Tickets: Mayfield Dinner Theatre

If you’re a dinner theatre that seeks to entertain as wide a spectrum of age and interest as possible, picking a show centering on the life and music of Roy Orbison is inspired.

Because Orbison must be one of a mere handful of popular musicians whose career began with the ’50s crooners, embraced the early ’60s Elvis era, stayed on top of the Beatles, the British Invasion and then saw a mighty renaissance in the late ’80s thanks to contemporary artists re-recording his songs.

Indeed, talk to anybody under 30 at the Mayfield for this show, and they will tell you they had no idea how many Roy Orbison songs they recognized, but had no idea he created and sang. Besides the mighty Pretty Woman, there was Wake Up Little Susie for the Everly Brothers, Cryin’, It’s Over, Blue Bayou (a #1 hit when re-recorded by Linda Ronstadt), Love Hurts, Running Scared, Only The Lonely, Blue Angel and then his tunes with the Traveling Wilburys in the mid-’80s.

It’s amazing how young Orbison was, at 52, when he died of a heart attack in 1988 just as he was prepared for a come-back tour, because his music spanned so many eras.

The Mayfield Theatre’s great strength, thanks to artistic director Van Wilmott’s combined musical and theatrical talents and his ability to assemble a cast equally adept at acting, singing and being a performing band unto themselves, is the telling of such stories as Roy Orbison’s.

It’s done through a narrator/emcee (Kevin Dabbs) who sets the scene, then multiple scenes from Roy’s life, to the full performing of Orbison’s songs. It also really helped for this story that Edmonton singer/actor Roman Pfob had the voice (the soaring voice), the acting skills and enough of the looks, to play Orbison himself, while Dabbs as the emcee provides the enthusiasm and bounciness to balance out the Orbison character’s low-keyness.

This crew made what is actually a very complex show look as easy as cruising in a ’50s convertible with Orbison’s tunes on the radio.

The story started in Wink, Texas, where Orbison is a shy introverted kid whose musical talent and his band gave him social status – how, in the ’50s when music was local, Orbison won talent shows, appeared on variety radio and tv shows, had his own local tv music show: How he opened for and befriended Johnny Cash, who introduced him to Sam Phillips of Sun Records leading to his first recording contract.

It’s a wonderful story, well told – opening all our eyes to the great influence Roy Orbison actually had on pop music, as he, as a musical innovator, introduced recording techniques that were unheard of before, how his own music naturally evolved thanks to his own musical restlessness. He had to create, to adapt, and that’s what kept him in good stead with so many different audiences over the years.

The Dark Star refers to much of the sadness in Orbison’s life, especially the death of his beloved wife in a traffic accident, followed just a year or two later by the deaths of their two young sons in a house fire when Orbison was touring. Professionally, Orbison’s life was not all roses either, as this story details.

It’s a thoroughly satisfying show: Pfob captures the essence of Orbison’s shy but appealing character that made him such an icon among his own musical peers, and it is great fun how the cast can play out a skit or scene from Orbison’s life, then pick up their instruments and become a band.

You leave the Mayfield full of wonder over Orbison’s life, and thoroughly educated in his stellar influence on modern music – some of the scenes telling how the Traveling Wilburys were created are full of fun, the Traveling Wilburys being an off-the-cuff collaboration between friends Orbison, Jeff Lynne from Electric Light Orchestra, George Harrison, Tom Petty and Bob Dylan that resulted in two of the best-selling albums of the ’80s.

One small note of assurance: If you’re one of those baby boomers who simply doesn’t go to concerts anymore because they are too damned loud, it’s OK. The Mayfield Dinner Theatre is very, very good at not cranking the decibels up to brain-destroying decibels. The volumes are just fine, even to these ears that were partially damaged by far too many killer sound-level rock concerts during my time as rock music reviewer for the Edmonton Sun and before that The Edmonton Journal, from 1978 to 1985.

Excellent show. Highly recommended. four stars out of five.