Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, July 25, 1993 TAG: 9309030395
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Joe Kennedy Staff Writer
DATELINE: BRANSON, MO. LENGTH: Long
Pardon them while they try to remember who all they had on their list. There was Mel Tillis, of course. There was Buck Trent and his breakfast show. Cristy Lane, if she was in town. Ray Stevens. Shoji Tabuchi, who has the theater with the much-talked-about bathrooms. And Barbara Fairchild, who does a gospel show.
Claude and Bertha looked at each other, trying to decide if that covered it. They agreed that the lineup was complete, and Claude, a retired mortician, seemed satisfied - at least, as satisfied as you can be in Branson, which has 32 indoor theaters full of big-name entertainers from the country and pop fields to choose from.
No matter how careful your choices, in Branson, it is natural to worry about what you're f-b f+inoto seeing - and how soon you can return to rectify the situation. Oh, and the traffic. Everybody talks about the traffic.
\ Perhaps you've heard about Branson. The tiny city in the Ozark lake country that since the turn of the century has drawn boaters, campers and fishermen. The place where little family bands like the Presleys and the Baldknobbers put on music jubilees at night to entertain the tourists. The rolling countryside where ``The Shepherd of the Hills'' outdoor drama and homestead recount the bestselling story, published in 1907, of the same name, and Silver Dollar City, a craft-rich theme park that draws hundreds of thousands of people each year.
The place where Roy Clark, the quick-picking host of the ``Hee-Haw'' television show, put his name on a theater in 1983 and made it a sort of entertaining base. The place where Mel Tillis opened a theater in 1990.
The place that CBS-TV's news magazine show, ``60 Minutes,'' visited a couple of years ago and really set the ball to rolling. The place whose biggest star may be a Japanese violinist whose name no one can pronounce. The place where older, Vegas-style singers like Andy Williams and Wayne Newton have set up shop in fancy theaters bearing their names, and country music mega-stars like Kenny Rogers, Barbara Mandrell and Loretta Lynn have come to get in on the act.
Branson. The Tour Bus Capital of the World, as the Chamber of Commerce likes to say. The Country Music Performance Capital of the World, as the chamber also likes to say.
The place where, for a modest nightly room fee of $60, on average, and $12 to $22 for tickets, you can sit down to hour upon hour of first-rate, top-notch, state -of-the-art, big-name entertainment. Not just concerts, where some guy strums a guitar and croons for an hour. But full, two-hour extravaganzas of singing, dancing, joke-telling, pickin', grinnin', spoofin' and fun, followed by autograph sessions with the people you just enjoyed on stage. Without gambling. Without drinking (in the theaters, anyway). With plenty of opportunities to buy T-shirts, mugs and lunchboxes bearing your favorite stars' faces. And with no trace of Vegas-style blue humor or nudity.
People who've been to Branson have seen the future. It looks much like the past - like television variety shows of the '50s and early '60s, in many ways. And if you ask 'em, they'll tell you: It never looked better.
\ ``I was thinking of writing to the chamber and telling them it's real good,'' said Earl Foster, a retired service representative for John Deere from Plainview, Neb., a town of 1,500.
He was sitting in a lobby before Mel's (everybody calls him that) show. ``It's unbelievable ... You stop in the traffic when you're here, but one thing about it - everybody does.''
Two-lane Missouri 76, dubbed 76 Country Boulevard, snakes for five or six miles between theaters, water slides, restaurants, mini-golf and go-kart layouts, shopping centers and motels. Just driving from one end to the other can take two or three hours when the shows are letting out. The hassle of traversing it makes for many a joke from the area's stages, such as the one in which a woman in a car yells to a bystander that she needs help - she's about to have a baby.
``Why did you get in this traffic if you knew you were going to have a baby?'' the pedestrian asks her.
``I didn't know it,'' she replies. ``I wasn't pregnant back then.''
The traffic is really not a problem, said concertgoer Akos Ringler of Chicopee, Mass., ``because you start three hours earlier than the show.''
That's an exaggeration, but not much of one.
Mel's show contained a little bit of everything. He's in the Country Music Songwriters Hall of Fame, so it was no surprise when he came out and sang tunes like ``Right or Wrong'' and his ever-touching, ``Who's Julie.''
The surprises were in his comic storytelling, his 18-piece orchestra, the two big-haired backup singers he calls The Stutterettes, and a second-half tribute to the late Roger Miller that included several scenes from the stage musical ``Big River,'' with a chorus of dancers and singers and Mel himself as Huckleberry Finn doing a pretty good country dance step. He never touched a guitar.
At one point, Mel thanked the audience for coming to his theater. If they'll come back for 15 or 20 more years, he said, he might eventually get it paid for. That was a joke, of course. Mel was quoted awhile back as saying he was grossing $1 million a month in Branson.
``I don't want you all believin' everything you hear on `60 Minutes,' '' he told the crowd, ``even if I did say it.''
When Mel uttered that startling figure, he was performing in his old theater, which is half the size of his current, 2,100-seat venue, which will be replaced with an even larger one in 1994. The new complex will have 400 more seats, a recording studio and a television and movie sound stage. Price: $18 million, at least. Not bad for a 60-year-old guy who might never have another hit record.
Like several others, Mel's operation is a family enterprise. His wife, Judy, sells popcorn in the lobby. His daughter, Connie Lynn, sings a couple of solos. Her husband runs the stage-side souvenir stand you have to pass by to get his autograph after the show.
And Mel's daughter, Hannah, who is 6, comes out to tell a couple of jokes and sing a song. (A favorite pastime of audience members during the intermission is speculating as to how many times stars like Mel have been married.)
After soaking up his standing ovation and spending a fair amount of time backstage, Mel took up a position at a lectern by the souvenir stand to meet his fans. He wore boots, jeans and a western shirt, signed autographs, posed for pictures and thanked everyone for coming. Then, in an interview, he expounded on the hopes for his new complex and his fondness for Roger Miller, the composer of ``King of the Road'' and other humorous hits, who died last October. He and Miller started out playing in Minnie Pearl's band.
He reminisced about tours he had made to Roanoke, said he knew somebody from Galax while he was in the service and recalled a fiddle player from Christiansburg. He allowed that it would take a pile of money to get him to go out on the road again. And he said he hardly ever picks up his guitar anymore. One-nighters are not his thing, and neither are concerts.
``In Branson,'' he said, ``you've got to do shows.''
\ There are so many theaters and shows in Branson that some of the established performers worry about the ones who plan to come. The pie, they say, might get sliced too small.
So far, that hasn't been a problem. In the past four years, visitors to Branson have grown to 5 million annually and they spend an estimated $1.5 billion per year.
The area has absorbed them - if not their cars - with ease. Area promoters claim that Branson has more theater seats, indoors and out, than Broadway - a total of 65,000, and rising. Hotels and motels ring the strip and the feeder roads. And the lakes - Table Rock, Bull Shoals and Taneycomo - offer campgrounds, lodges and motels, too.
About the only real-estate problem in Branson is housing the people who move there to participate in the boom. Land and homes don't come easily to tourism industry workers earning $6 or so per hour.
In Branson you can go to a show at practically any hour of the day. Jennifer in the Morning is one. The Brumley Music Show at 76 Music Hall, in a shopping mall, is another. It features Tom and Todd Brumley, grandsons of the late Albert E. Brumley, who wrote hundreds of gospel songs, including ``Turn Your Radio On.''
Their show is a low-budget mix of hot country, cool harmonies from the three Davis Sisters, gospel tunes and goofy comedy from the overall-wearing Chester Drawers. He is portrayed by Eddie Bowman, an ordained minister who winds up the show with an inspirational reading.
At the other extreme is Shoji Tabuchi's revue, a dazzling banquet of fiddle music, a big band, bright costumes and vigorous young singers and dancers. Shoji's neon pink, purple and white theater has boutiques on two levels where you can buy fashion clothing, toys for your kids, antique fishing lures, violins or a hand-painted men's wardrobe priced at $7,250.
If you're a male, you can you can head toward the restroom, stopping off to use a $38,000 table in the billiard parlor supervised by Ricky Huff, the bow-tied billiards master. You can relieve yourself in black porcelain urinals, wash your hands beneath shiny gold fixtures and use toilets with bases shaped like lion's heads.
Across the lobby, the women's restroom has, among other touches, a lavendar teardrop crystal chandelier, fresh flowers and ferns and a white marble fireplace (the one in the men's room is black).
And the show?
``I heard this is the one to see,'' said Nathan Denning of Danville, Va., who was standing in the lobby with his friend Leon Yates and wondering where their wives had gotten to.
Shoji's revue starts with patriotic music, country love songs and dancing from his chorus. Then the star turns up in a storm of laser lights. He's wearing black tuxedo pants and a purple jacket, and he's playing a country hoedown on his fiddle. The Suzuki-trained violinist then goes into Hank Williams and Bob Wills numbers, singing in a not-very-musical voice.
Before flying off on a Cajun piece, he haltingly tells the crowd that he lived for 11 years in Bossier City, La., adding, ``That's why I talk like this.''
He's pretty hard to understand. But the audience loves him.
Shoji and Mel are good friends. Shoji says they have a deal - he's teaching Mel to fish, and Mel is teaching him to talk. Tillis is famed for his stuttering. Shoji stutters when he finishes the joke.
Mel says the first time he and Shoji went fishing, Shoji ate the bait.
On Shoji plays, through polkas, music from the 1939 film, ``Intermezzo,'' and then into ``Rocky Top.''
The second half features rock from the '50s and '60s, bluegrass, ``In the Mood'' and a Caribbean segment in which several of his band members perform on steel drums.
The big patriotic number at the end climaxes with real fireworks exploding on stage. People stand to cheer and Shoji waves farewell, hustling outside to say good-bye to the passengers on the tour buses.
Some people in Nashville are jealous of Branson because its live entertainment outshines what you can find in the recording capital of country music, according to Bruce Cook, author of ``The Town that Country Built.'' They used to say Branson was just a place where older country singers went when their records stopped selling. That's less true than it used to be, because Randy Travis and other big names now play Branson, and Vegas stars like Wayne Newton have built theaters, too.
Shoji Tabuchi is different. Branson is the only place he has ever really been famous. He's the king of the showmen, making a fortune. But he'd like to be even bigger.
He wants to take his show to Las Vegas and prove that family entertainment can succeed there. He'd like to take it to Japan, where his countrymen thirst for American talent.
And he'd like to expand his 2,000-seat theater, which is 4 years old and nearly always packed.
``I'm lucky, without any hit record, to make it to where I am,'' he said in his upstairs office after the show, ``so I don''t have any complaints. But I'm still young, and in business I do like to pursue. To become a household name - that would be wonderful. My shortfall is that people don''t know my name.''
He has been in Branson for 12 years, before the big names got there. The competition is keen, but he is confident that the splendor of his shows - produced by Dorothy, his wife - will keep him on top.
``When a town gets big, then some succeed, some fail,'' he said. ``That''s just the world.''
\ How greatly has Branson changed? Here's one small indication. Until this year, the Presley Family put on a music and comedy show called the Mountain Music Jubilee. This year, they dropped the Mountain Music from the title. The three generation of Presleys, plus a cast of full-voiced singers, just do a Jubilee now. No sense discouraging people with no interest in mountain music. It's only a small part of the show, anyway.
Theirs is a lively, homey revue of high energy, low comedy and pretty girls like Lori Locke of nearby Springfield. The laughs come from Gary Presley as Herkimer, a gap-toothed bumpkin, stockbroker Perry Edenburn as the equally hapless Harley Worthit, and Windy Luttrell as the indescribable Sid Sharp.
Their theater is older than most. After five expansions, it resembles an airplane hangar. But the acoustics are good, the sight lines from the 1,900 seats are fine and the crowds are large.
Lloyd Presley was the first musical performer to open a place on the strip, in 1967. The Baldknobbers set up across the street a year later, and they are still there, doggedly reminding people that they were the first family group to perform regularly in the area, down on the lake.
The Presleys' show may lack the high-tech effects of some, but it's as good as any on the strip, and funnier than most. Steve and Gary Presley, who run the operation, are anything but rubes.
Evidence of that lies in their plans to join developers in building a 1.6 million-square-foot retail, entertainment and resort complex on the 53 acres surrounding their theater. Called Heartland America, it will include two Radisson hotels with 575 rooms and suites, plus Country Suites by Carlson, with 150 more units; a 265,000-square-foot mall with 30 specialty shops, seven restaurants, a food court and movie complex; a two-acre atrium with mini-golf, a carousel and glass-enclosed elevators; a 3,300-seat live-performance theater, a three-story office complex and 3,800 parking spaces. It will be up the street from the 4,000-seat Grand Palace, on land occupied by the Presley family's campground, a throwback to a simpler time.
The managing general partners will be Talentino, Horn & Co. of Indianapolis, who most recently developed the Mall of America for Melvin Simon & Associates. It's in Minnesota, and it's the largest mall in the country.
Steve Presley, 37, said older acts like his family's had two choices when the big boys started building theaters in Branson. They could withdraw from the scene, or they could join it. They've joined it.
Now they play golf with Andy Williams. Tony Orlando wants to be on their softball team. They know the Osmonds, Moe Bandy, Boxcar Willie and Jim Stafford, among many other stars. And yet they say they haven''t been changed by the exposure. If anyone has changed, it's the newcomers, who have taken to the area's friendliness and casual pace.
``We call it Bransonizing them,'' Steve Presley says.
\ Wayne Newton was out of town. Andy Williams doesn't do Sunday afternoon performances. The best example of a mainstream performer in Branson appeared to be Tony Orlando, who had hits in the '70s with songs like ``Tie a Yellow Ribbon 'Round the Old Oak Tree'' and ``Candida.''
``We chose Tony Orlando at random,'' said Charles Boyajian of Belmont, Mass., who was standing beneath the atrium in the lobby with his wife, Queenie. ``We've known him for many years from TV. He disappeared when his friend died.''
They were referring to the tough times Orlando experienced after his friend, the young comedian Freddie Prinze, committed suicide. In recent years, the singer has been performing in Las Vegas, Reno and Atlantic City; otherwise, he's been out of the limelight.
Orlando's Yellow Ribbon Theatre, at the Falls development on the road to Table Rock Lake, was in its sixth day of operation. Its lobby was white and blue, with plenty of glass overhead, including a large yellow ribbon in stained glass.
Orlando had been filling only about 40 percent of its 2,000 seats, but on this day, some 1,200 people, mostly in their 50s and older, showed up. They saw a heavier Orlando, but one whose voice sounded sure and whose manner was gracious and grateful. Songs ranged from patriotic (``Coming to America'') to emotional and inspirational (a medley, sung from the middle of the theater, that included ``Auld Lang Syne,'' ``Amen'' and ``Let It Be''). Typically, Orlando hauled a man up on stage to join him in a song, and his family played a role: His son, John, opened the show with a few jokes. Of course, Orlando sang his hits. Dawn, the two women who used to be part of his act, is gone.
The effect of it all was moving. Orlando repeatedly thanked God for the opportunity to have the theater and talked, indirectly, about spiritual matters. Afterward, sitting on stage and signing autographs, he recollected that he was 12 when he met Andy Williams, in 1958; 16 when he met Ray Stevens, in 1961. He and Stevens headlined a traveling show that year, and Bobby Vinton was their bandleader. Halfway through the tour, Vinton's song, ``Roses Are Red,'' became a smash hit. He became the headliner; they became the supporting acts.
Now they''re all together. Vinton''s Blue Velvet Theatre will open on the strip in the fall.
\ Jim Stafford calls himself a little name who is trying to make a living in one of the smaller theaters, with 1,100 seats. But he has had his moments in the sun, as host of a summer television variety show, as a frequent guest on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour and as composer and singer of such hit records as ``Spiders and Snakes'' and ``Wildwood Weed.''
Still, many in Branson's throngs of senior citizens don't know him. They take in his show because they've been told it's terrific, and it is. It may be the most consistently funny two hours you can spend in Branson, with Stafford and his cast serving up country, gospel and nonsense songs and engaging in a smorgasbord of offbeat jokes.
At one point, a 14-foot-long blimp cruises by remote control over the heads of the audience. At another, Stafford goes through a series of acrobatics with his guitar and ends by balancing it on the tip of his finger. Suddenly, a hand reaches down from above the stage and lifts it away. Moments later, Stafford looks up and sees the guitar plummeting toward him. It breaks into a dozen pieces. A band member sweeps it into a pile. Stafford turns his back to the audience, kneels toward the pieces, then rises and spins around, holding a guitar that''s intact.
``I'd have been quicker,'' he explains, ``but I had to tune it.''
Stafford is assisted in this madness by a crack, six-piece band led by Rodney Dillard and harmonies from the ubiquitous Davis Sisters. He has other young talent, too. But it works because of his sly, manic way of looking at the world.
``I believe everyone who comes to this town, if they're serious about it, works harder than they ever did on the road,'' he said in his office backstage a few minutes before the curtain rose. ``But they're also happier. To me, it's the best game in the entertainment business. There''s nothing as exciting as this.''
Sure, he has worries he never had before, like filling the seats and paying the bills. But he also has time to experiment with new bits for the show.
Television, with its deadline pressures and technical fixes, was a drag, he said. And the road?
``The road was so hard. I was out there for 30 years.''
When he toured, he worried about getting to the next town on time, about teaching his show to new bands every night, about finishing in time to go do the same thing somewhere else.
``It was all career maintenance,'' he said, ``and not a single step forward.''
Now he is free to add new things whenever he wants. If they work, they stay. If not, they don't. The immediate feedback is thrilling.
And personally, his life is grand. Stafford lives at the lake. His son, Tyler, l2, sells souvenirs. His wife, Annie, helps run the theater, and he brings his 4-month-old adopted son, Sheaffer James, on stage each night. Sheaffer has been appearing since he was 10 days old, Stafford said, and he'll continue to do so every day from now on, ``unless he asks for money.''
That's Branson, a family place where you can see the stars and chat with them, as well. Sure, the traffic is bad, and sure, people worry that there might soon be too many theaters and too many shows. But meanwhile, Jim Stafford said, ``this little run is the most exciting thing in American entertainment, plain and simple.''
by CNB