Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, October 24, 1995 TAG: 9510240031
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MATT CHITTUM STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
With the windshield wipers on her car cranked up to keep time - a makeshift metronome - she banged out the music on her piano as best she could.
``I'm a terrible piano player," MacBryde said. But she managed to get the songs recorded and sent off to her songwriting friend Roger Bartlett in New York. Bartlett spiffed them up, recorded them and played them for her over the phone.
``I held a phone to each ear, you know, to get it in stereo,'' she said.
About a year and a half later, ``Cowboy Cafe'' has made its way to Roanoke. The musical previews on Wednesday and Thursday nights, and officially opens Friday. Thursday night's performance will be followed by a sort of hoedown - line-dancing and all - in the Center in the Square atrium.
Mill Mountain Director Jere Lee Hodgin says this show is the latest installment in the Mill Mountain tradition of country-flavored musicals begun last year with ``Always ... Patsy Cline.''
``Cowboy Cafe'' is the story of showbiz veteran Billie Joe and her three grown children, each with a showbiz dream of his or her own. Together they run a short-order restaurant in Success, Ark.
Tex, Missi and Louisa are named for the states in which they were conceived.
``That way I can remember the last good time I had with their daddies,'' Billie Joe explains.
The show features a six-piece country band and a pile of what MacBryde says is good, authentic country music.
The whole production, for that matter, reeks of authenticity.
MacBryde's main musical collaborator, Bartlett, used to play in a duo with Jimmy Buffet. His father was the emcee of the old ``Louisianna Hayride'' show that featured a very young Elvis Presley in the 1950s.
The King himself once bounced Bartlett on his knee.
Then there's hearty, bright-eyed Pebble Daniel.
``I play momma,'' she said in a deep, scratchy drawl.
She's the real thing. Born not far from where ``Cowboy Cafe'' is set, she now works in Nashville singing the blues. She's also crooned alongside some big names. Tammy Wynette, for one.
Teresa Williams plays ``Missi.'' She grew up picking cotton in Peckerwood Point, Tenn., not far from where Patsy Cline's plane crashed.
``Tex'' is played by Matthew Alan Smith, who most recently was in the Central Park preview of Disney's ``Pocohontas.''
MacBryde says she wrote the whole story of ``Cafe'' in her head during one 12-hour drive from New York to her home in Boone, N.C.
Her friend and director of the Parkway Playhouse in Boone, Bill Dryer, had told her he was doing a certain musical, and MacBryde told him not to bother.
``I can write you one like that in a week,'' she said. And she did.
MacBryde says this is the first time her vision of it will be fully realized, especially with regard to sets and costumes.
Mill Mountain's production, directed by Dryer, is only the third for the musical, which earned MacBryde the 1995 North Carolina Playwrighting Fellowship. Hodgin and others from Mill Mountain were in on the judging for the fellowship, and decided then that they wanted to produce it in Roanoke.
MacBryde has played ``Louisa'' in each production.
``I'll get out of it eventually,'' she said. Right now, there's not enough money in the coffers for the kind of talent she'd like to have in the role.
``I'd love to have Marie Osmond, but she's not in the budget.''
by CNB