Southern Comfort

Della’s Diner serves up down-home humor and patter in an
Appleseed Christmas show

It’s the cult musical that (almost) nobody in town has heard of. Tom Edwards’ Della’s Diner: Blue Plate Special opened in Atlanta in 1978 and has been running continuously somewhere in the former states of the Confederacy ever since. Fifteen years ago Maureen Harrington, one of Syracuse’s favorites, played the lead for three months in a sold-out Alabama production. Harrington now directs the Salt City premiere of Della’s Diner for Appleseed Productions at the Atonement Lutheran Church, 116 W. Glen Ave. 

Some Southern products, like apple pan dowdy and Stuckey’s Pecan Logs, do not travel well. Others, like Always, Patsy Cline, are embraced in Yankeeland. Harrington is counting on audiences voting for the second. As it turns out, a Patsy Cline signature song, “Crazy,” shows up in Della’s Diner. And so do a lot of other things, from false eyelashes to brain surgery. 

The show is self-billed as a country music soap opera done karaoke style. A young man in a headset, the TV studio stage manager (Donnie Williams), warms up the audience before the curtain and appears to be in charge of the flashing “Applause” sign. An offstage baritone (Calvin Wilcox), providing the thunderous offstage narration, asks the kind of narrative questions found on old-fashioned radio serials: “Who is Joey’s real daddy? Will Ronnie Frank and Ramona go through with their D-I-V-O-R-C-E ?” Red lights left and right tell us when we’re “On Air,” and upstage an arm keeps throwing snowflakes against a closed window to remind us it’s Christmas.

The diner of the title belongs to a scrappy blonde named Della Juracko (Karis Wiggins) somewhere in rural Tennessee. At the beginning of the action she hides some important papers behind a portrait of a double-chinned older Elvis. Eventually, those papers will shed light on Della’s relationship with her (perhaps) stepdaughter, the explosive brunette Ramona Juracko (Tammy Lynn Wilkinson). After three years married to a coal miner from West Virginia, Ronnie Frank Flaugher (Darian Sundberg), the two are contemplating divorce, a question that keeps coming to the forefront for two hours. 

Also coming through the snow to the diner is a burly young man of changing identity, Ricky Jim Robinson (J. Brazill), and a tall, willowy clergyman in a flowing black wig, Preacher Larry Finney (Stephfond Brunson). Weaving in and out of the action is the big-hair queen Connie Sue Day (Tamaralee Shutt), sometimes as a commercial announcement for the soap opera and sometimes as part of the action.

Southern humor’s self-mockery is unique among American regions. Consider the 2006 Will Ferrell movie Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby that played both to people who love and who loathe NASCAR. Italians and Jews may love to make gags turning on ignorant views of themselves, but you can’t imagine a comedy set in San Francisco, Boston or New York City taking this approach. 

In teasing Southern diner culture Della’s is five years ahead of Jim Wann’s Pump Boys and Dinettes, a tighter show with all-original music. And it anticipates by nearly a decade the linking of Southern women with too much time, such as the beauty parlor found in Robert Harling’s Steel Magnolias. In contrast, Della’s Diner continues to be performed more often in the South because of its wilder, looser structure, suggestions of improv humor and golden-oldie country hits.

Karis Wiggins, one of the area’s most admired dramatic actresses (Frozen, Agnes of God), gives us a different side of herself as trailer-trash maven Della. She’s just as twangy as the script calls for in some of the standards, like Donna Fargo’s “Happiest Girl in the Whole USA” and Eddy Arnold’s “Make The World Go Away.” But in an abrupt change of pace in the second act she achieves the best moment of the evening by throwing away karaoke and low comedy for the absolutely riveting “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” the Hank Williams classic. It almost feels as though she was in the show primarily for that plangent moment.

Tamaralee Shutt, on the other hand, is well established in both comedies and musicals and once appeared in Pump Boys. Connie Sue’s running gag here turns on tacky sub-Parton big-hair blonde wigs and gaudy gowns, new ones for each scene, that would be sure to deny her entrance to the Skaneateles Country Club. Shutt and costumer Debbie Ritchey surely had a ball trying these on. Her “Stand By Your Man” is white-girl soul music, and the second act’s duet with Della, “Hey Good Lookin,’” a cascade of flirtatiousness.

J. Brazill, remembered fondly for his One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest last winter, can be counted with the necessary surprises. After two numbers in the first act, he navigates a series of impossible changes of character that reveal some completely unsuspected secrets he’s been carrying. It’s like a reverse Superman whereby pulling off his shirt he must become a different person with a new body set. He’s the only performer this year to get mileage from tweaking his bare and hairless chest.

Longtime dancer Stephfond Brunson moves into new territory as Preacher Larry, the sweet-talking man of the cloth. The role was not written for an actor of color, but Brunson makes his casting more plausible by delivering the gospel tune “This Little Light of Mine” as a hand-clapping spiritual. As Della’s choreographer he favors the broadly comic, as in signing the spelling of D-I-V-O-R-C-E rather than giving us warmed-over Bob Fosse.

There are two newcomers to the cast, Tammy Lynn Wilkinson from Oswego as perhaps daughter Ramona and Darian Sundberg as her husband Ronnie Frank. Both stop the show with their numbers, ”These Boots Were Made for Walking,” “Sixteen Tons” and “Take This Job and Shove It,” despite being some of the most familiar music of the evening.

Even though the words in the show keep telling us the diner is in impoverished rural Tennessee, architect Navroz Dabu’s art deco set is gorgeous; eight people built, painted and decorated it. The chromium chairs look like those in the old Hotel Syracuse. Della should revel in the luxury.                  

This production runs through Dec. 19. See Times Table for information.