The Houston Critic

Looking for Truth
October 1, 2014 — A line in one of the songs from tonight’s performance of “Nashville Hurricane” says something about looking for truth. Maybe, I was looking for truth. The spine of the play strains credulity a bit, being somewhat like a children’s story, with convenient wisdom and plot movement. “He forced me” to write this review this way just like the protagonist in the play was forced to play music, don’t you know.
If Chase came down from Canada or over from Florida to school the local Houston blues legends and Taylor clinicians with his guitar playing, with the truth in his blues, with the heart rending emotional beauty of being, finally, happy, I’m not sure he succeeded. The happiness that the Hurricane found felt wistful and not even breezy to me, but maybe it was a child’s tale told with caricatures of Southern life, confederate flagged bars, where great black touring bluesmen, who sound a little like one of Richard Pryor’s old characters, get beaten up and thrown in a closet, where mothers who can only reward people that care for their son for a year with venal pleasures, blow in and out like hurricanes, where the manager is white and the star is brilliantly simple, where the drunken old blues player is, suddenly, self-reportedly, a teetotaler but still has that same drunken air about him.
The Taylor guitar sounded typically “bright” for a Taylor, which is to say that maybe the expression system wasn’t adjusted for the room and maybe the strings were so close to the frets, for the purpose of making an acoustic guitar play like an electric, so that I could hear the tinny sound of the strings hitting the frets when they vibrated. Some folks swear by ‘bright’ guitars but even bright ones maybe should be played with good coordination of the left and right hands, exact coordination for the fast passages as well as the slow ones. I’m sure it was something like  the guitar didn’t belong to him or the Houston humidity or jetlag that had the guitar music slip sliding away a bit, but it was a bit of a problem for me, as I was expecting to be schooled, to have his performance Vai-ing for my approval. Maybe he played exactly the right number of songs for this show. As an added note, I might say that he oversold the “playing all the parts of the last song” thing a bit. You go and decide for yourself. Tell Chase I sent you.
If superlative guitar playing wasn’t on the playlist, maybe what was on there was a one-man-show night of finely acted characters with well-timed and beautifully executed transformations from one character to the next. After I realized that the way to tell the drunken mother from the drunken bluesman talking was that the mother always held up an air cigararillo, I could allow myself to see the amazing interplay of fixated and wandering drunken eyes. Wow! This Chase Padgett guy knows something about drunkenness. He seems to have studied it, to have become it. Chase was fun to watch and his acting was detailed, specific, and relatively believable when he didn’t go to caricature for the sake of humor. (best reason to go there, in my opinion) . He handled the ‘specialness’ of the Nashville Hurricane with deft care. He was able to show, later than I would have liked, the face of the evil promoter by shifting his eyebrows and adjusting the intensity in his eyes. Cool stuff, this character transformation stuff was.

Because his guitar playing actually was pretty good and I’m sure I didn’t do him justice describing the characters, we’ve decided to put up some clips of him playing the songs and characters from the show.

You only have a few performances here before the show goes back to Canada. Head out to Theater Lab tonight!