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‘I Love Playing Patsy Cline’
Actress Stars In Wayside Performance About the Life of Winchester Singer By: Karl B. Hille The Winchester Star Morgan Duke may not know her way around Winchester very well, but she knows more about one of Winchester’s shining stars than most people who grew up here.
She has visited most of the locales associated with the deep-voiced country singer. While in town rehearsing for “A Closer Walk with Patsy Cline” this week, she got turned around downtown and ran across another stop on the informal Cline tour. “When I was lost, I stopped to ask directions and I was right next to Gaunt’s Drug Store where she (Patsy) used to work,” Duke said. A childhood spent in a community theater and an adult obsession with Cline’s emotion and vocal genius stand Duke in good stead, she said during a recent interview at Wayside. “My mother and father managed a theater in Easthampton,” she said. “So I grew up lurking around a theater.” It took a sort of rebellion against that life by going to journalism school to bring Duke and Cline together. “I went to college because I didn’t want to do theater as a career,” she said. “I thought I wanted to do something that was stable. I was wrong.” She took singing and acting classes in high school and college, but Duke said it took several years as a journalist and magazine editor to realize that a desk job really wasn’t the life for her. Those classes taught her the proper breathing techniques that she would remember when she started reaching toward the stage. It was in college in Montana that she heard Patsy Cline for the first time. “I was introduced to Patsy ... out at a bar,” Duke said. “I heard ‘Walking After Midnight.’ The next day I went out and bought the greatest hits album, and before long I had learned all the songs by heart.” She was intrigued by the emotion Cline put into her music, and the lilting inflections, called scooping that gave the lyrics extra emphasis. Cline’s presence in the music world also impressed her. “She was the most influential woman singer, even in pop,” Duke said. “She invented a new sound that is really unique. Because her voice was so low, and it invokes, such sentiment for me as an actress, it is a big challenge to see if I can repeat it.” She does, said Wayside’s Artistic Director Warner Crocker. “I have seen and heard Morgan doing Patsy Cline before, outside this theater,” Crocker said. “She’s dynamite, absolutely dynamite. “Our band just went gaga” after their first rehearsal with Duke. Her voice registers in the proper octave, and Duke is built like Cline. The Long Islander can also do a passable Virginia accent without exaggeration, due in part to her parent’s upbringing. “With a father from Texas and a Nana from Virginia, I have an ear for that sound,” Duke said. “It doesn’t sound foreign to me.” Her grandmother lived in Falls River. She admits the accent is not perfect, but to Duke it is more important that her inflections don’t become a distraction to the audience. Unlike an impersonator, who would focus on the accent and the way Cline scooped her notes, Duke said she avoids the stereotypes of “what makes Patsy Patsy. “When you are an actor you don’t want to caricature somebody. The wig and the costume are only accessories to help, whereas the research I do really makes the performance.” While she worked as an editor, Duke continued singing along with Cline, and occasionally would sing karaoke, though she stresses that was before she became a professional. Then one day she tried out to perform as Cline. “I had a friend who said to me one day, ‘You know you sound a lot like Patsy Cline. You should audition for one of those Patsy Cline shows’,” Duke said. “To me, because I was such a fan anyway and I listen to the music anyway, and I enjoy it, what could be more fun than to sing those songs I love so much?” Since then she has toured the country, portraying her favorite country singer in a variety of shows. “People ask me all the time if I get bored, and I never do,” Duke said. “I love playing Patsy Cline.” She said this show is one of the better written reviews. “The show is basically a storytelling show. It’s the chronology of her life, and all the songs pretty much appear in the show in the order they occurred in her life, with a little license,” Duke said. “It makes you feel like you were there, more than ‘Always Patsy Cline’,” another show she has acted in. In addition to Duke, Jim Fleming is on stage playing Little Big Man -- part radio announcer, part warm-up comic for Cline's Vegas shows, part narrator. Crocker said the show starts in the year after Cline’s death, and plays like a retrospective. Little Big Man tells the story, Cline sings and the house band plays back up while footage and images from Cline’s life appear on a screen upstage. The show, which opens Sunday, is co-sponsored by Wayside and Celebrating Patsy Cline Inc. “We’re really excited about the ability to partner with the Wayside Theater,” said CPC president Jim Stutzman. “It’s the kind of thing that I love to do.” The CPC will also bring a number of items of Cline memorabilia to the theater the weekend of March 5 for an exhibit commemorating the anniversary of Cline’s death. Despite her extensive experience and research about Cline’s life, Duke is modest when she describes her portrayal. She won’t say she feels like she knows Cline. “I’ve met a lot of people who knew her,” she said. “I feel like I wish I had known her. “I know her as much as any one person could who’s never met her.” When people who did know the singer tell her she seems like Cline on stage, Duke is never sure how much of that is “the magic of theater.” But she said it’s always a pleasure to meet someone who knew or played with Cline. “Especially in this part of the country, so many people were in house bands where she would go and travel and sing with them,” Duke said. “They’ve always been very complimentary of me.” “A Closer Walk with Patsy Cline” starts at the Wayside Theater Sunday and runs through March 28. For information on performance times and ticket prices call the wayside box office at 869-1776. | ||||
Originally Published In The Winchester Star on January 29, 2004
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