STAGE REVIEW : ‘White Linen’ Takes Note of the Wild West

Along towards the end of the second act of “White Linen” at the Old Globe, a lot of lines start to drop large hints, like yellow balloons, signaling loudly what this new Wild West musical by Stephen Metcalfe is about.

“Be so easy if it was all like Great Western Tales,” says Wild Bill Longley played as your stereotypical taciturn outlaw-hero by Dann Florek. “Black an’ white. Good guys against bad guys. But it ain’t. It’s a tremblin’ shade o’ gray. . . .” And a little later: “Outlaw or hero, it’s all circumstances. . . .”

Right. Metcalfe even gives Longley and his young protege, John Wesley Hardin (the very appealing Kenneth Marshall) a whole song about things never being all black or all white. It’s pointed (and counterpointed) and called the “Bad Man Song.” But it was not ever thus. Metcalfe (the author of “Strange Snow,” “Emily” and “The Incredibly Famous Willy Rivers,” all staged at the Globe) has trouble headin’ out on the right course.

It takes a few minutes at the start to figure out where we are and why and, for a while, the good-humored “White Linen” looks like nothing so much as a rite-of-passage musical, making the usual fond pass at Wild West violence as benign boys-will-be-boys hooliganism.

That’s if they can’t be men.

In fact, “White Linen” is at once more serious in its intent and (for now) about as shallow in what it actually delivers, though there’s good fun to be had on the way.

It’s a warning and a reminder about such myths. Metcalfe’s musical demystification of the Wild West may begin muddled, but it does straighten itself out--then swings too far to the other side, spelling things out in block letters. The West, he wants us to know, is not what was in those “Dimestore Novels and Two-Penny Dreadfuls” (another song). The West is about cowboys and guns and dying young.

The show is lesson as entertainment. We already know, and Metcalfe knows we know, that the glorification of frontier ruthlessness is sugarcoating for its brutality. So it’s a matter of dissection.

He conveniently sets events in a jail where the young Hardin (depicted here as a boyish innocent trapped into becoming an outlaw in spite of himself) can bounce ideas off the older/wiser Longley. By using flashbacks to show the fugitive Hardin’s peregrinations across three states, his salad days with childhood buddy Simp Dixon (a Huck Finn-ish John Walcutt), his feelings for sweet Maggie Shaw (Alice McMasters as another innocent trapped into becoming a saloon girl), Metcalfe forces a look at the underlying reality. And he does it in a bittersweet musical that’s skillful parody as well.

Jack O’Brien’s direction is at least as skillful in conveying the bluster and the Wild West hoopla in Metcalfe’s often very funny book, and the exuberant cast loves whooping things up. Julian Gamble is memorable as a nearsighted Wild Bill Hickok, sheriff of Abilene, and Patrick O’Brien does a hilarious turn as a fall-down drunk Buffalo Bill, who becomes a resplendent recovering alcoholic at the mere mention of starring in his own Wild West Show (a sure sign of American things to come).

Douglas W. Schmidt has provided a spacious, generic Western set in which designer Robert Peterson has done good suggestive things with lights. Costumes by Steven Rubin run the Western gamut, but fight choreography by Steve Rankin should be more realistic or overtly stylized. At the moment it is not quite either.

While the lyrics are engaging and the music by Metcalfe and Douglas Michilinda is purposefully derivative of country & Western (part of the parody), some songs merely interrupt the story.

An early one, prophetically titled “Ain’t No Song,” isn’t much of one. A late ballad (“Lament”) in which Longley, accompanied by his dead wife, recites a litany of misfortunes that befell them (supposedly to explain his taciturnity and defiance of the law), should be a parody but isn’t. That one could be scrapped now and never be missed.

But a much more fundamental problem to “White Linen” (the title, a lyric from “Streets of Laredo,” underlines the idea of the cowboy as corpse) is its author’s ambiguity about the Wild West. While decrying its ills, Metcalfe clearly is in love with his subject. Nothing accounts more for the show’s confusion. It is, paradoxically, a condonation and a condemnation. Except for its trenchant final moment, “White Linen” doesn’t ever get dark and dirty enough. It’s hard to be a loving tribute and an accusation at once. Something for Metcalfe to be thinking about.

At the Lowell Davies Festival Theatre, Balboa Park, Tuesdays through Sundays, 8:30 p.m., until Sept. 25. Tickets: $23.50-$26.50; (619) 239-2255.