A Prairie Home Reunion : Like His Radio Show, Garrison Keillor’s Tour Is Steeped in Small-Town Sentiment

Garrison Keillor’s traveling variety show, “The 3rd Annual Farewell Tour,” pulls into Symphony Hall tonight with its special blend of folksy music, comedy and droll commentary about the denizens of the fictional Minnesota town of Lake Wobegon.

Based on “A Prairie Home Companion,” the weekly live radio program that Keillor conceived, and wrote and hosted for 13 years, the tour comes complete with the radio show’s stage set, including an 1889 Minnesota frame house.

“We started out (the tour) with vague ideas of a story in Lake Wobegon about the Lutheran minister and his wife, including Bruno the Fishing Dog,” Keillor said in a phone interview from a hotel in Tucson, Ariz. “Somehow, we did a show out of it in Greenville (S. C.), and as we’ve come west it has taken shape.”

Tonight’s performance has been sold out. It is being recorded for broadcast by KPBS (FM-89.5) at noon Sunday.

During the interview, as in his widely cherished radio monologues about “Lake Wobegon, the little town that time forgot and the decades cannot improve,” Keillor’s voice became so soft at times that he sounded like a woman. Then the tone would alter, the sound swell with resonance and force.

He paused frequently. One imagines a freight train of words being uncoupled and sorted. Recoupled, the string of words clinks, stretches out and resumes its journey.

The 13-city tour began May 20 in Greenville and will conclude this weekend in Los Angeles. The program, which Keillor and the other six cast members constantly revise, is old-fashioned “pure radio.” That means it features music, a likely episode from the adventure serial “Buster the Showdog” and plenty of sound effects, as in a new segment, “Great Moments in American History.”

Sound effects wizard Tom Keith will create vignettes such as the stillness at Appomattox, Henry Ford inaugurating the first assembly line and Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg.

Bluegrass musicians Kate MacKenzie and Robin and Linda Williams will be joined by Keillor to harmonize as the Hopeful Gospel Quartet.

“We do a little bit of Gospel music and a few other things,” Keillor said. “We do some from old black country Gospel.

They’re so great to sing, so loose rhythmically. It’s hard to keep from dancing to them.”

Among the music is Bessie Jones’ “Sheep, Sheep, Don’t You Know the Road?” and the Rev. Gary Davis’ “Oh Glory, How Happy I Am.” The other cast members are pianist/composer Richard Dworsky and writer/impersonator Dan Rowles. Pianist Butch Thompson will join the company for its final performances Friday and Saturday at the Universal Amphitheatre.

Like “A Prairie Home Companion,” which had an estimated national audience of 4 million listeners when Keillor folded it in June, 1987, the farewell tour is steeped in the sentiment of small-town America, its virtues and values.

Although often compared to Mark Twain as a humorist and satirist, Keillor steers clear of poking fun at public figures and institutions such as last week’s resignation by House Speaker Jim Wright.

“I think that topical humor plays so much to people’s prejudices,” Keillor said. “Topical humor is so seldom heroic.

“On the Wright resignation, for example, to do jokes about it you would have to play on the public’s revulsion with Congress, and I don’t share that revulsion. I consider it dangerous in a democracy.

“Jokes that play toward public contempt for politics are fascist. The Congress is the most democratic institution in America, and it’s the object of tremendous public contempt.

“It’s the same with the press. If I went on stage and said six sharp, mean things about the press, everybody would clap. I wouldn’t feel very proud of that.”

Keillor does like some topical humor.

“I think Jay Leno does it well,” Keillor said. “I’ve heard him do that--make very sharp comments. Perhaps I agree with his point of view. He’s a very decent comedian.”

Adults provided the humorous influences in Keillor’s childhood.

“The men were large, slow and grumply for all the power they had,” he said in a voice that sounded full of wonder. “They had complete power. They were also very human. They dozed off after Sunday dinner--sat and snored. The harder they tried to maintain their dignity in their adulthood in front of us, the funnier they seemed.

“The women were nervous and full of anxieties, phobias they were.” He paused. “They were always thinking of six disastrous possibilities. For the women in my family, there was always an iron that had been left on somewhere. And the house was on the verge of spontaneous combustion.

“And, to me, this was humorous. And we kids imitated them. Made fun of them. But not to their faces.”

Come fall, Keillor will start a new radio show that will be broadcast from New York City, his new home. It will be similar to and different from “A Prairie Home Companion.” The working title is “The American Radio Company.”

Moving to New York has made this transplanted Midwesterner more comfortable with his roots. In honor of his new home, the new radio show is likely to feature more theater music and jazz, he said. It will also offer Keillor a chance to express “a certain righteous anger” about the Midwest.

In Keillor’s book “Lake Wobegon Days,” an angry son intends to nail 95 complaints about the repressive nature of the town to the door of the Lutheran Church. Keillor says those accusations are still true.

“I think there are some hard things to be said about the Midwest, and one owes it to one’s landsmen to say them. But one is more free to say those things when one moves away.”

The new show will air only 12 times the first and second years, but, in Keillor’s grand scheme, it will become a 52-week proposition. He sees it as a repertory company belonging “to a number of talented people” in which his role will soon be reduced to that of contributor and occasional guest.

Keillor noted that “A Prairie Home Companion” was rooted in Minnesota, and “I have left there. I’ve taken some luggage with me, but I’ve left and moved to New York. That alone makes this new show different.”

“It will originate from a little theater on 34th Street in New York, rather than one in St. Paul. But I still know more about Lake Wobegon than 34th Street--a great deal more.”