FIRE
Directed by James MacDonald. Written by Paul Ledoux and David Young. Starring Ted Dykstra, Rick Roberts, Nicole Underhay. To May 18. Shoctor Theatre (The Citadel). Tickets available through The Citadel box office (425-1820).
The first act of Fire ends with a sort of duet between brothers Cale and Herchel Blackwell. Herchel (Rick Roberts) is preaching up a storm at his father’s church in Arkansas, while his wayward, piano-playing sibling Cale (Ted Dykstra) is hundreds of miles away, delivering a roof-raising rendition of “Good Golly Miss Molly.”
One brother supposedly has his mind on God while the other is supposedly going straight to the Devil, but they’re both caught up in the same sort of ecstatic frenzy, both of them flying close to a flame that will soon burn them both up.
Cale and Herchel are, of course, thinly disguised versions of Jerry Lee Lewis and Jimmy Swaggart, the cocksure rock star and the fundamentalist preacher, who in real life were cousins but who in Fire have been turned into brothers for maximum metaphorical impact.
The first half of the play is devoted to Cale’s rise to fame and his equally quick fall due to drugs and booze. The second half focuses Herchel, who becomes a successful televangelist but who alienates his father and his wife when he begins extending his influence into the political sphere.
There’s something very Canadian about the way that Fire removes any sexual element from Cale and Herchel’s sins. True, Cale takes an underaged lover just like Jerry Lee Lewis did, but that never blows up into a career-killing public scandal the way it did for his real-life counterpart. And unlike Jimmy Swaggart, Herchel never gets embroiled in any kind of sexual scandal—the worst thing we ever see him do is secretly endorse a smear against a Senate candidate.
If there’s a flaw in Fire, it’s that (except for a truncated glimpse of Cale beating his young wife) we really don’t see these two men wrestling with sin and giving in to their darker urges and appetites. In Fire, sin remains an abstract concept instead of a matter of the flesh.
That said, Ted Dykstra gives an absolutely fantastic, down-and-dirty performance as Cale. Dykstra doesn’t just nail all the externals of Jerry Lee Lewis—the bleached hair that flops over his eyes in mid-performance, the thrilling boogie-woogie piano solos, the ability to pound the keyboard with his bootheel and his backside and still make it sound musical—but he gets the internals right too: the way Cale’s high-living good ol’ boy attitude masks a hard, selfish core.
Dykstra is never better than he is in the scene where an aging, washed-up Cale delivers a rambling, bitter, half-drunk between-song monologue before launching full-tilt into “Great Balls of Fire.” We’ve been waiting the whole show to hear this song, and Dykstra doesn’t just do a great rendition of it; he performs it in character—depressed, yes, and angry and too drunk to leap around the stage the way he used to, but still able knock the song out of the park, the notes still pouring out of his fingers as naturally as breathing. He’s phenomenal.
Roberts is also excellent in a challenging role. He gets an aria of his own at the top of Act Two, with a lengthy sermon that starts small but soon has him racing around the stage, dancing, lifting his hands to heaven, and stomping the floor to taunt “Ol’ Splitfoot” down below him in Hell. To Roberts’ credit, he never turns this routine into an easy caricature of the blustery Southern preacher—it’s a genuinely exultant performance, and it’s followed by a terrific , rousing song, “King of Glory,” in a witty ’80s-style synth-gospel arrangement by Melanie Doane.
Fire’s script, by Paul Ledoux and David Young, is a little schematic, with a tendency to underline its points through heavy-handed metaphors like Cale and Herchel’s youthful “blood brother” oath. And while Nicole Underhay plays her well, the character of Molly, who loves both men and sees them at their best and worst, always feels more like a script device than a three-dimensional person.
But all those great rock songs Jerry Lee Lewis used to sing could be pretty schematic too, and they’re some of the liveliest music of the century. It’s all in the playing, and Fire rips up the joint like there’s no tomorrow.
