Try as they might, director Martha Wilkinson and her talented ensemble of actors just can’t breathe enough life into a thin, tepid script to make it work onstage for audiences eager to be entertained. Virginia Cate and Duke Ernsberger’s Elvis Has Left The Building is pleasant enough, with a promising premise, yet it falls flat despite the best efforts of the cast and crew putting forth the new production at Chaffin’s Barn Dinner Theatre.
The playwriting duo’s earlier work, Frankly, My Dear—in which audiences were given some insight into the process of writing the screenplay for Gone With the Wind—was hugely successful and wildly entertaining in its Chaffin’s Barn incarnation. Starring Derek Whittaker, Chris Bosen, Dietz Osborne and Jennifer Richmond, it was as fun an evening of theater as I can remember, embodying the characters of David O. Selznick, Ben Hecht, Victor Fleming and Selznick’s long-suffering secretary with period flavor and nostalgic high-style. Directed by Wilkinson, it had a zany flair that made it fairly delectable.
As a result of that earlier production’s success, the premise of Elvis Has Left The Building sounds delightfully intriguing: During a week in December 1970, Elvis Presley disappears from Graceland, leaving his manager, known here as “The Colonel” scrambling to find him because he’s needed to pay off a gambling debt. Based very loosely on an actual event (the program tells us that “on December 20, 1970, Elvis Presley disappeared. No one, not even his manager Colonel Parker, knew of his whereabouts), Elvis Has Left The Building presents a “reimagining” of what could have happened during that fateful December week in 1970.
The play’s action takes place in The Colonel’s Memphis office (save for a misguided sequence set in a Las Vegas casino that is overlong, boring and uninventive) which holds even more promise for a Tennessee audience and, although it could well be set anywhere (why didn’t the playwrights give it more authenticity by using the names of real Memphis sites?). In fact, it’s that homogenized feeling that saps the script of much of its potential.
Wilkinson does good work in mounting the show despite its obvious limitations, using two screens to project images of Elvis and his life and times throughout the scant two hours of stage time, and costume designer Hannah Schmidt dresses her actors in costumes that perfectly evoke the early ’70s milieu of the piece.
Warren Gore is well-cast as The Colonel, giving a convincing reading of the role and imbuing his character with enough smarmy charm to make him appealing to audiences. Gore shows his comedic confidence throughout even when saddled with addle-pated dialogue.
Playing two would-be Elvises (or the Elvii, if you prefer) are Corey Caldwell and Alan Smith. Caldwell, in his third straight appearance on the Barn’s magically levitating stage, plays Elvis’ chum Candy, delivering his lines with a flourish (although his pre-show, out-of-character curtain speech laced with a cacophony of different voices grew tiresome after the first 30 seconds), but his attempts at physical comedy are forced and unnatural. That may be due, of course, to the fact that Smith (making his Chaffin’s Barn debut) is so adept at performing physical comedy. Clearly, Smith’s Elvis impersonation is the most credible, although some of his choices come across as too practiced and studied. And neither man is helped by the scene in which, as Elvis, they lip-synch to a medley of The King’s songs while supposedly entertaining a Vegas crowd. For that sequence to actually work, it requires much better special effects than the bland lighting techniques employed for the scene (that The Colonel’s big ol’ desk remains onstage throughout certainly doesn’t help matters).
