Well-Paired Stars Buoy ‘Always’

Before country music was cool, country singers with the seeds of stardom in them had to hoe a long row of backwater gigs. In 1961, singer Patsy Cline was toiling in a series of low-paying gigs when she met and befriended Louise Seger at a one-night engagement in Houston. The two never met again, although they continued corresponding until Cline’s death in a 1963 plane crash.

“Always ... Patsy Cline,” now at the Coronet Theatre, is a two-character musical revue inspired by Seger and Cline’s long-distance friendship--a slender concept indeed, stretched to its utmost length by Ted Swindley, the show’s creator and original director.

The thin plot serves to support a long string of popular Cline hits--if just barely. Widely produced since its 1997 New York debut, “Always” has a built-in appeal for Cline and country music enthusiasts. However, if not handled with care, the show can come across as blatantly amateurish, a “Hee-Haw” retread more appropriate to a Branson, Mo., tourist theater than a commercial urban venue.

The show’s fault lines are visible, although not gaping, at the Coronet. Fortunately, along with wisely compacting the proceedings into one act, director Sharon Rosen strikes a winning combination in her stars, Sally Struthers, who plays Seger, and Christa Jackson, who plays Cline.

The casting for the role of Cline, whose virtuosic voice is difficult to approximate, is pivotal--and obviously problematic. Jackson proves a world-class choice. Although she tends to fade away in the lower registers, Jackson delivers where it counts--in those sliding, soaring yodels that were Cline’s signature.

Jackson, who is familiar to area audiences from her recent stint in the Reprise! production of “Hair” at the Wadsworth Theater, shines in some 22 Cline standards. Clad in Therese Bruck’s stylish period costumes, Jackson’s Cline comes across as a down-to-earth icon, always kept at a careful psychological distance.

That’s intentional, a way of maximizing the piece’s inherent nostalgia.

However, that leaves the heaviest labor of the evening to Struthers, whose narrator/cheerleader/clown character must somehow personalize the proceedings if the show is to succeed.

Not to worry. Warm, embracing and lissome as a snake, Struthers struts, displaying the crisp comic timing that made her the nation’s darling on the watershed series “All in the Family.”

Granted, Struthers needs to further tamp down the blatant upstaging that is part and parcel of Louise. Yet she also brings emotional resonance to a role that could easily degenerate into a cheap regional stereotype, while even managing some tight harmonies, an unexpected treat. Keyboardist and musical director John Randall fronts a toe-tapping five-piece band, which includes Brantley Kearns on fiddle, Vincent Tividad on string bass, Jay Leach on steel guitar and Tom Fillman on drums.

*

“Always ... Patsy Cline,” Coronet Theatre, 366 N. La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles. Tuesdays-Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 5 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 3 and 7 p.m. Indefinite. $25-$49.50. (310) 657-7377. Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes.