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A review from 5D Music & Theatre writer Maria Robertson.
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My family are all Dolly Parton fans, my Dad brought me up listening to her songs, and she has some fabulous songs after all! So the chance to see a new musical with her songs seemed too good a chance to miss and we planned a night out together.
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The story is about Kevin, a Dolly fanatic, who has found himself spending lockdown in his parents attic after a failed relationship with Jeremy. He is really struggling mentally and calls on Dolly to help him, at which she magically appears in the attic and they spend time singing and talking together. The set is quite a complicated arrangement of the stuff you would find in the average loft space, mixed with Kevin’s posters of his idol and everything he needs to socially distance from his parents in the house below. Many of these items are used during the show, for example a red scarf becoming Jolene’s headscarf billowing in the wind caused by an electric fan!
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The cast is small, but well put together. Dolly Parton is played by Tricia Paloluccio, who does a marvellous job and has an excellent voice. Unfortunately I have never met Dolly, but I imagine her to be very much as Tricia portrayed. We actually had the understudy for the role of Kevin, an Aidan Cutler and he was very good at playing the part of a homosexual man obsessed with Dolly Parton. Kevin wants to be a comedian and the role came across with a lot of humour, almost to pantomime levels, just a little ridiculous on occasion – it was Kevin playing Jolene after all!
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The musicians supporting Dolly appeared in different spots on the set, the drummer was sometimes in the peak of the attic, the amazing singer Charlotte Elisabeth Yorke sometimes on the roof and sometimes in the room with Kevin and Dolly. She also played the voice, of Kevin’s Mum as she shouted up the stairs. The guitarists moved around as well, also voicing Kevin’s Dad and the ex boyfriend Jeremy.
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Although the story was about a serious topic of dealing with depression in lockdown, it seemed to trivialise it somewhat with its frivolity. Kevin flushing his antidepressants down the toilet certainly is not what the doctors tend to recommend. However the songs, as expected, were wonderful. Dolly’s lyrics were often visualised in a different way to how we would have thought of them before but there were some very clever ways of working them into the story. I had a tear in my eye at God’s Colouring Book, which is maybe not one of her best known songs but was brought to life in such a moving way as Kevin looked out the window and properly took in the wonders of the world outside. Two Doors Down was a fun jaunt when the band members became the imaginary party two doors down and Dolly “went home” with Kevin!
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This musical does not take itself seriously and if you would like to lose yourself in someone else’s imagination for an evening I recommend it. Please do not sing along as it is theatre rather than karaoke, and these singers and musicians definitely deserve to be heard. Today I’m singing them in my head, whilst daydreaming about being stuck in a loft with my idol Shirley Manson – and what’s not to love about that end result?
Further information: https://hereyoucomeagain.co.uk/
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Maria Robertson is the Chief Music & Theatre Writer for the 5D Pop Culture Website and provides reviews & coverage of local Aberdeen music & theatre gigs. She’s an experienced writer for numerous sources and is a self-confessed live gig addict ever since seeing The Counting Crows at the Barrowlands in 1994.
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