Dollywood
Country star’s ‘Lumberjack Adventure,’ a mountain version of ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ is response to area competitionompetition
Dolly Parton serves up country-style dinner show at Tennessee theme park.
PIGEON FORGE, Tenn. — As usual in these parts, everything’s coming up Dolly.
That impression certainly is confirmed as you motor down the Dolly Parton Parkway, through Parton’s Smoky Mountains hometown of Sevierville, on the way to Dollywood, the sprawling music and thrill-ride park nearby that forms the nexus of her butterflies-and-dreams-themed entertainment empire. Over yonder, past Dollywood’s 300-room DreamMore Resort, you come upon Dollywood’s Splash Country, her 35-acre water park, and tucked in the surrounding hills are the Smoky Mountain Cabins, Dollywood’s rustic rentals. The area’s theme song might as well be: “Here a Dolly, there a Dolly, everywhere a Dolly, Dolly.”
“We Dolly-ize everything,” the eternally exuberant 70-year-old Parton exclaims with a laugh, sitting in a blaze of hot lights on the stage of her latest venture, a $20 million dinner theater — yes, you read right — on a busy commercial strip here. It is this new enterprise that has prompted a city slicker to make a pilgrimage to the Land of Dolly, to see firsthand what it means when a celebrity of Parton’s popularity builds a virtual city of attractions — all contoured to take advantage of her fame, her history, her personality — and incorporates a theater for the masses.
It truly is astounding and possibly without parallel in American pop culture, the kingdom that one singer and her partners have managed to develop in an out-of-the-way locale such as the wonderfully named Pigeon Forge, with a network of attractions that bring upwards of 4.5 millionn people a year to a onetime depressed coalmining region of East Tennessee.
Graceland, d, Disney World, Branson, the themed hotels in Las Vegas are variations on this idea. . But the marriage between this place and this star still feels unique. Parton’s identity has become such an integral economic engine for the area that the opening of a dinner theater draws TV crews from 30 miles away in Knoxville, and merits reports on the 5, 6 and 11 p.m. broadcasts.
“Dolly Parton’s Lumberjack Adventure Dinner and Show” is the showplace whosee doors are being thrown open on this evening in late spring, and if it’s as successful as, say, “Dolly Parton’s Dixie Stampede,” a show with live horses that’s been running here since the late 1980s (and in Branson since 1995), then it will become yet another permanent fixture in Parton’s portfolio.
If not, well, it’s no small stand of trees that the potentially year-round “Lumberjack Adventure” has to cut. The hope here is that this new 90-minute show, complete with a belly-busting fried-chicken dinner, will be able to fill 750 seats twice a night, at 5:30 and 8:30 p.m., at prices ranging from $35$45 per adult and $20-$25 per kid. That’s a whole lot of coleslaw to sling.
The sound system alone for the renovated space costs in the neighborhood of $10 million, says Ken McCabe, Dollywood’s corporate director of entertainment. The public that swarms the parks is looking for nighttime diversion in the increasingly competitive Pigeon Forge market: Jimmy Buffet, Paula Deen and Cal Ripken have venues here, too. So if the crowds don’t swallow the “Lumberjack Adventure,” which Parton says was created in direct response to the challenge from the likes of Buffet and Deen, her creative and technical teams and the cast of 18 dancers, actors and acrobats will have to deal with a heck of a lot of pricey leftovers.
“She’s a hard worker and wanted it all to be just right,” McCabe says of the star’s involvement in the planning of the new show. Parton, of course, does not appear in the “Lumberjack Adventure,” a highly athletic, music-infused mountain version of “Romeo and Juliet,” a sort of Cirque du Soleil meets the Hatfields and the McCoys. Parton’s touring schedule and other commitments permit her to be only an occasional visitor to Pigeon Forge. But she’s more than a front woman for “Lumberjack,” having written and recorded the evening’s signature ballad: “Something More” it’s called, and it has some easy listenin’ spice to it as its lyrics add a dash of feminist mountain-woman aspiration to the proceedings.
“I love to be able to see people entertained, whether I’m up here or not,” Parton says, as she encourages a reporter to pull up a chair next to her and get out from under the forest of lighting equipment set up for her TV promotional shots on the “Lumberjack” set. (She’s an exceptionally fit septuagenarian.) “So we try to build all the things we do that are true to me, that really have something to do with my music, things that the audience can relate to. They expect certain things from me. They expect quality. And I try to give them that.”
The story goes that Parton gazed up years ago at the famous Hollywood sign that looms over Los Angeles and wondered aloud why there couldn’t be a Dollywood, too. For an entertainer who’s made her name in movies, songwriting, records and television as a star exuding down-home charm, the anecdote suggests a level of gritty ambition that’s anything but humble. “I’ve been out there in the big old world,” she allows. But she is also inordinately careful about couching her success as an achieve--
ment inspired by the people who love what she does and how she does it.
“They need to have someone they trust, and they’ve known me for years,” Parton says, noting that she began singing on the radio and TV in Nashville five decades ago and was performing locally even before that. After so long, she seems to feel that her audiences — and those include, remarkably, evangelical Christian fans and an enthusiastic gay following — know her so well they could all sit down together for a big raucous Thanksgiving dinner. “I’ve been in the business for 60 years,” she observes. “I think I’m kind of like a relative. I’m like an older sister. I’m like somebody’s aunt.”
Aunt Dolly got her start in theme-park entertainment in 1986, when she went into business with the Herschend brothers, Jack and Pete, buying a piece of their Pigeon Forge amusement park, Silver Dollar City Tennessee. They renamed it Dollywood and, in time, turned it into a 150-acre escape into backwoods nostalgia and Parton devotion. It boasts more than 40 rides and attractions, 30 dining spots, a bald-eagle sanctuary and seven theaters. The Back Porch Theatre replicates an actual porch on which Parton and other family members sang; the Showstreet section of the park features a full-scale model of her tour bus; and the Dreamsong Theatre houses “My People,” a biographical music show about Parton’s life and career.
Dollywood claims, in fact, to have more performances per day than any theme park in the nation. “We have what we call our core entertainment shows,” says Dollywood’s entertainment director, Paige Bales, a longtime employee who worked her way up from singer in the park’s many shows. Productions such as the 1950s-flavored “Dreamland Drive-In,” “Live at the Back Porch” and “Country Crossroads” are among the park staples. The performers “work five days a week and do three to five shows a day,” Bales says, and they are supplemented year-round by bluegrass, gospel and Christmastime festivals.
Dinner theater is a peculiar entertainment niche that has been fading away in much of the country, although some popular spots successfully soldier on. In Pigeon Forge, it seems, it’s viewed as a growth industry, even if the fare diverges vastly from the traditional menu of roast beef and “My Fair Lady.”
The “Lumberjack Adventure,” a couple of miles from Dollywood, brings dancers and gymnasts onto the stage for lively entertainment that will never be confused with the work of Stephen Sondheim. That’s not at all what it’s meant for, anyway: This is breezy, middle-of-the-road escap- ism, packaging the Smokies as a haven of moonshine and hootenannies. On opening night, Parton herself makes a few welcoming remarks: “Hope you like it!” she says with trademark aw-shucks modesty. The recorded music kicks in, and the story of the love between, as McCabe calls them, “a highland boy and a holler girl” unfolds as a series of deft acrobatic acts and some cringe-inducing good ol’ boy slapstick.
The climax comes when the stage floor recedes to reveal a pool, in which members of the warring mountain clans engage in log-rolling contests. A pair of highly motivated yellow Labrador retrievers enters from doors behind the pool to compete in jumping and fetching games. It’s all mindless and harmless and goes down as easily as the chicken and biscuits and fried corn on the cob.
Imbued with familiar aspects of Appalachian culture, this variation on dinner theater certainly adheres to the Dollywood ethos. Corny, for sure, but mindful, too, of the spirit of Parton’s own values. She has woven an entire leisure-time universe and brought thousands of jobs here, too, by successfully curating her own homespun image.
Asked how she defines her role in Dollywood, she says, with what sounds like total sincerity: “I’m the CEO of Dreams.”
“It’s just like a tree,” she says of her Pigeon Forge domain. “You have great roots, and then you get your tree, then you get a lot of limbs. Then, if you’re lucky, there’s a lot of leaves. So it’s like one thing just kind of adds to something else. One dream adds to another.”