STAGE REVIEW : Heehawing ‘Robber Bridegroom’ Plays It Goofy From the Get-Go

Eudora Welty’s novella “The Robber Bridegroom” is a sardonic sashay through a small part of America’s early history, a time when folklore often mingled magically with fact. A tall tale of surprising height, it can’t be called understated. But it still has a subtlety that helps everything go down with a minimum of chortling.

The musical based on Welty’s story is a different beast entirely. Robert Waldman and Alfred Uhry’s Broadway transformation is more a heehawing skedaddle over this mythical Southern Gothic terrain, now painted in the wildest patchwork colors and echoing with the loudest buckboard voices.

At Cal State Fullerton, director Dean Hess takes the stage version of “The Robber Bridegroom” at face value and offers a goofy, unwashed production emphasizing its hootenanny spirit. Things get hectic and come close to veering out of control from the get-go, but his handling does manage to plumb the show’s energized eccentricity.

As does Welty, the musical takes the audience to Mississippi’s saltiest days and plops it down on the Natchez Trace, a settlers’ trail populated by bad men, good men and a lot of folks in between. A lot of folks with lies to tell. Did y’all hear the one about the disembodied talking head? How about the 110-foot-tall cotton? And don’t forget the one about. . . .

One of the favorite tall tales surrounds a handsome highwayman (David Michael Long) and a rich man’s lovely daughter (Arlyn Lynda McDonald), and how they fall in love and even get married amid a whirlwind of mistaken identities, subterfuge and kidnapings, not to mention a little frontier bedroom kinkiness. Like any great fib, it just gets more outrageous as the telling goes on.

Hess is fortunate to have McDonald and Long at the center of all this mischief. Both provide attractive performances ripe with vaudevillian excess that, in this context, doesn’t really seem excessive at all.

McDonald is especially likable, giving the beautiful but braying Rosamund a sexy earthy quality and a self-effacing comic streak that rightfully keep her the center of attention. Her singing needs a little polish (as can be said for most of the cast) but nonetheless has a throaty allure, especially during “Ain’t Nothin’ Up.”

As her main man, Long rightfully turns Jamie the bandit into a mix of boyish bravado and rascally impulsiveness. Jamie’s anthem, “Steal With Style,” has a suitably conceited ring.

‘THE ROBBER BRIDEGROOM’

A Cal State Fullerton production of Alfred Uhry and Robert Waldman’s musical based on Eudora Welty’s story. Directed by Dean Hess. With David Michael Long, Kimberley Anne Swatton, Arlyn Lynda McDonald, Susan Boulanger, Peter L. Estrada, Sean R. MacArthur, Jeff Sudakov, Michael Coleman, Ric Strauss, Susan Rowe, Shannon McCleerey, Laura Meals, Carolyn von Reyn, Jeff Cadwell and Brett ShuemakerCQ. Choreography by Robert Christianson. Set by Kristine Haugan. Costumes by Paul D. Reinhardt. Lighting by Lisa K. Hampton. Makeup/hair by Abel Zeballos. Plays Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m. with a 2:30 p.m. matinee on Saturday and a 5 p.m. showing on Sunday through Oct. 16 at the campus’s Recital Hall, 800 N. State College Blvd., Fullerton. Tickets: $5-$8. (714) 773-3371.