Theater Review: SHINERS (Woolworth Theatre in Nashville)

CIRQUE DU WICKS SALOON REVUE

Booze, mostly respectable eye candy, and the music turned up. That’s downtown Nashville in a nutshell. Until recently, Broadway (not The Great White Way, but the iconic southern thoroughfare) was replete with these three in the historical honky tonk bars that vibrated with live country and western tunes of Roger Miller, Loretta Lynn, and Johnny Cash. But that ain’t the way, anymore. No, now nearly all the tonks have three-plus levels of managed music ‘n’ liquor mayhem—sometimes from a live band, sometimes from a DJ—blaring competing noise in the form of stadium anthems from the likes of Shania Twain, Carrie Underwood, and Kid Rock. A fill-in-the-blank country music celebrity contributes their image to a venue that charges $10 for a cheap drink. What’s one gotta do to find something homegrown, local, different, and good in this town?

Chuck Wicks is the creator and star of a downtown Nashville theatre experience called Shiners; it’s also directed by him and Emmy-winning director/choreographer duo Nappytabs. It’s a comedic cirque-meets-vegas-meets-Broadway revue where one can booze, laugh, and “whoop!” the whole way through three nights a week from Thursday through Saturday. Shiners is loosely organized around a family reunion of moonshiners, hosted by Mason Shiner (Wicks) with baby sister Violet (Laura Osnes) close by. Once the audience takes the oath from Mason, the family festivities begin. Audience members may be invited to have a moment to shine, but more on that later. Suffice it to say—on the whole—audience participation is inevitable, especially from the front rows. But, throughout the evening, all family members are given a moment to shine.

The show begins with “Shine,” a thumping electronica-infused waltz with a catchy bar-room sing-along chorus. Overall, I thought the live voices were buried in the sound mix in service to the pre-recorded tracks played—and that’s especially inappropriate when you’re burying a Grand Ole Opry validated country singer and a Broadway musical Tony nominee. After the song and introduction is delivered—a nearly eighty minute program of jokes, gags, cirque acts, and tunes are performed.

Wicks navigates hosting duties as Mason with wit and warmth, and handles crowd work with ease. Ms. Osnes’s dexterous singing ability, comic timing, and magnetic charm made this reviewer wish there was more given for her character Violet to do. Krista Henderson and Leysan Gayazova showed out as Sugar and Spice Shiner with their consistently intense and eye-widening aerial routine that ratchets up the difficulty throughout; at the end of their act, many in the audience sighed in relief before roaring with applause and cheers.

Araz Hamzayev is a natural clown and his contortionist act as Uncle Buck is grotesque, impressive, and hilarious—and manages to thoroughly surprise and maintain focus. Jamilla Deville’s pole and static trapeze act as Jo Fixit felt a little drawn out, but nonetheless well executed; it showcased her tremendous body control and steely grace. Marek Rajczyk and Jacob Dominiak’s hand-to-hand acrobatic act as Bobo and Jimbo Shiner has an unnecessarily baffling, wince-inducing set-up, but once they’re locked into their performance—it’s a gift to behold the trust these two men have with each other. Watching them execute feats of faith relying merely on their own bodies to support each other in increasingly less reliable positions is gripping. There’s a bawdy member where a few men of the ensemble show the audience how skilled and cheeky they can be handling their business and the towel they wield in front of it, which elicits the well-earned wide-ranging laughter of equal parts anxiety and amusement.

Late in the show, six audience members are plucked from their seats to take the stage in a Family Feud style game show. However, that’s merely pretense for Michael Tumelo Moloi to showcase his talents for animal calls as Atlas Chaps Shiner. He’s a superlative animal caller and a mesmerizing gumboot dancer, and his inclusion in Shiners makes the revue necessarily a more well-rounded and diverse experience, but the writing doesn’t do a good job of making sense of his presence. Moloi is a captivating performer and he deserves all the stage-time he gets, and if the writing here wasn’t as strange or strained to connect to the family reunion, it would’ve elevated a diverting show into a surprisingly great one.

Kley Tarcitano’s production design initially emphasizes the “moonshine” theme with a barrel and a flight of jugs in front of it, but the coup de grâce is the LED wall that provides an array of backdrops; from Family Feud boards to a muscle car with pulsating lights, or color spectrum-spanning sky against a forest from the ground-level perspective. The backdrops never upstage, but always fit the scene sumptuously and luminously well. Peter Morse’s superb lighting design extends beyond the stage and illuminates different areas in the audience superbly as well. Lighting director Jake Shemon has no small task with the varied performances and extemporaneous nature of the family reunion and nails each spontaneous moment as well as the carefully crafted ones.

Nappytabs and Katy Tate elegantly generate dimension to their characters through their tailored specificity of movement and choreography. Each family member’s act tells a distinctive story and takes the audience on a specific unique journey, and for that—it is far more sophisticated than the fare Nashville is known for.

Is Shiners the home-grown live and local entertainment option that serves as a worthy alternative to the Broadway bar crawl or hallowed Opry evening? You bet. It’s better than a Broadway bar crawl by a country mile. And—with a few tweaks here and there—Shiners could find itself as composed, affecting, and sturdy as a night at the Opry. Shiners is entertaining and engaging with impressively executed performances from all.

photos courtesy of Shiners

Shiners
615 Ventures
The Woolworth Theatre, 223 Rep. John Lewis Way N. in Nashville
open run
Thurs & Fri at 7:30; Sat at 7
for tickets, visit Shiners