On a visit to Dollywood
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 14-hectare water park, and tucked in the surrounding hills are Dollywood’s rustic rental Smoky Mountain Cabins. The area’s theme song might as well be: “Here a Dolly, there a Dolly, everywhere a Dolly, Dolly.”
“We Dolly-ize everything,” the 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 (Dh73 million) dinner theatre on a busy commercial strip. It is this new enterprise that has prompted a city slicker to make a pilgrimage to the Land of Dolly, to see first-hand 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 person- ality — and incorporates a theatre for the masses. Dolly Parton’s Lumberjack Adventure Dinner and Show is the showplace whose doors are being thrown open on this evening in late spring. The hope here is that this new 90-minute show, complete with a fried chicken dinner, will be able to fill 750 seats twice a night, at 5.30 and 8.30pm, at prices ranging from $35 to $45 per adult and $20 to $25 per child. That’s a whole lot of coleslaw to sling. “She’s a hard worker and wanted it all to be just right,” Ken McCabe, Dollywood’s corporate director of entertainment, 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. 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...,” Parton says. “So we try to build all the things we do that are true to me ... things that the audience can relate to.” Asked how she defines her role in Dollywood, she says, with what sounds like total sincerity: “I’m the CEO of Dreams.”