Gosh, there are so many ways to distress a damsel! You can lock her in a tower with only her long hair as a rope. You can have her abducted and carried to the top of a skyscraper by an irritated gorilla. But if youre really looking to warm the frozen hearts of the villains in your life this summer, dont forget that old standby tying her to the tracks.
Its really the most democratic form of hostage-taking, when you think about it. Nearly every community in America possesses at least one length of train track. And the other ingredients rope, damsel can easily be retrieved from most any big-box store.
Thats not to say that just anyone can do it. Dont think that. It does take some skill. First of all, you have to have a decent knowledge of knot theory. And then, of course, people are great wrigglers, particularly when they dont want their hands and feet bound. You might get an arm tied, but then, whoops, a leg slips free. While youre not looking she could bite you on the mustache.
And then of course theres the dubious sexual politics of plunging a woman into a scenario in which her only salvation depends on male fortitude. Not good.
OK, change of plans: dont tie anyone to the tracks. Not this summer, not ever. Not in real life.
Better plan: you should go see a comic musical about it! Heres one…
ALLEN Community College Summer Theatre presents its own hilarious version of Rogue of the Railway or…Should He Free Her or Knot? Friday and Saturday at 7:30 p.m. at the ACC Theatre. Admission is free.
It wont ruin anything to tell you that the penultimate scene in this fast-paced musical melodrama involves a bound blonde and an onrushing locomotive. It wont ruin anything, because thats not the good part; truth is, the entire ACC production is 60 minutes of unbroken bliss.
ITS SUMMER in the Dakota Territory. Sometime in the mid-1880s. The setting is the Melody Hotel.
Sheriff Billy Bold, the lovesick law enforcer in the little town of Buffalo Bend, and Dakota Melody, his objet damour, the rootinest-tootinest hotel operator in all of the Badlands, are in a desperate struggle to thwart the corrupt intentions of itinerant snake-oil salesman and all-round fiend Professor Silias Scavenger.
The mercenary Scavenger black hat, black heart, black mustache is the textbook villain of Victorian melodrama. Think Snidely Whiplash from The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show.
Now, here is the part where we gush. It would be impossible to overstate how charming and how dependably hilarious River Hess is as the murderous mountebank, Silias Scavenger.
Hesss acting, here and in earlier roles, operates at a level of intelligence beyond his years. There is, in his affect, something of the young Peter Sellers. Hess is primarily a comic actor but even at his most slapstick or most broadly comedic, theres something wonderfully superior in his disposition. (Peter Cook and Steve Martin come to mind, too). His speech is unblurred, his timing impeccable, his instincts absolute. And, were told, he hasnt yet cracked the 12th grade.
However, if what youre after is a good song: go for Clara Boyd and her golden voice. The joyful noise that bursts from the lungs of that incoming college freshman, and the expert control she wields in her phrasing, threatens, at least during the big numbers, to steal the show.
So good is it that its almost enough to erase any notice of the massive, blonde poodle wig that makes a series of minute journeys across her scalp for most of the show. (The shows costumes, across the board, are pretty great.)
Billy Bold, the cowboy sheriff and ultimate knight-errant, is played with believable goodness by Parker Smith. The gun-slinging, bad-girl appeal of Prairie Rose a fly-by-night enchantress and Sheriff Bolds second potential paramour is embodied by Carolyn Appleton, who injects the sexpot desperado with plenty of Old West charisma.
