Shreveport Little Theatre’s Summer Musical, Memphis, was a fun and high-energy ride for 2 hours and 20 minutes Sunday afternoon.

I’d never seen it and didn’t know much about this 2011 award-winning Broadway musical, set in the 1950s in the Tennessee town that gave birth to rock ‘n’ roll and rhythm and blues, true “soul” music.

Memphis begins when Huey Calhoun walks into a Beale Street club and is “different” than everyone else there, “different” meaning “much, MUCH whiter.” Huey becomes a deejay, plays a record from the club’s star (the fetching Felicia) on the “white” radio station, and here we go. Love, good music and dancing, and a culture beginning to change for the better follows

Perry Como makes an appearance, which sort of wraps up the ”white” side of things. But I’ll see you a Perry Como and raise you a Ray Charles. That’s sort of how Memphis goes, only with a talented, energetic, well-coached, and having-fun ensemble thrown in.

Highlights:

Well, Dillon Dixon as Gator was my favorite. He’s one of the SLT newcomers, which speaks well for the future of this special venue. His solo is dramatic for a couple of reasons, one being that…well, he hasn’t said a word in years.

Delray Farrell’s effort on “She’s My Sister” was powerful, and his character has some of the musical’s best lines; Delray, the Beale Street club owner and big brother/protector of Felicia, is played by Donnovan Roe. Serdalyer Darden as Bobby was funny in his nervous-in-front-of-a-TV-audience performance of “Big Love.”

Gotta have a gospel choir performance at some point; this one hit the mark. As did “Everybody Wants To Be Black On A Saturday Night,” if for nothing else than song title along. (The trio of Tre Gay, Marcus Thomas and Christopher Mason nailed it. Wish I could have heard them better, and also the leads on some of the full-cast numbers; production might have to go with mics on the principals at least?)

This the kind of moving entertainment you expect when Laura Beeman Nugent directs and Adam Philley handles the music. Designated Writers gives it a strong four baseball gloves out of five.

Eight Dates Remain: July 19, 20, 21, 26, 27, 28 at 7:30 p.m. and July 22 and 29 at 2 p.m.

If you don’t see it, you’ll be singing the blues. So go. When it’s over, stick around and encourage these actors to keep getting on stage; they have a lot to offer, and they left it all out there in a demanding musical.

-30-

(This first appeared in The Times and The News-Star July 20, 2006, and runs now because the Annual Allen Family Reunion was last week in Shelby, N.C. No one was injured in the making of this reunion…)

Like home, family reunions are a place where, when you’ve got nowhere else to go, they have to take you in. They might say something bad about you, but at least it’s to your face, and there’s almost always free cake.

My family isn’t quite weird enough to get on “Jerry Springer,” and we don’t stay up late enough to get on “COPS.”

We’re lovers, not fighters.

But we won’t be asked to the green room of the “700 Club” either. Not unless they want to hear about Uncle Chad, who once during a layover in Charlotte, N.C., drank a High-Energy Tab and leg pressed Pat Robertson, who weighed about 2,000 pounds at the time because he was carrying several crates of pledge cards. This is a leg press record, if not in the world then for sure in Concourse C of the Charlotte airport.

What I’m saying is my family swims in that same deep-water ocean as most of the rest of humanity. You need a family that’s “dysfunctional,” whatever that means? Let me suggest my team. We’ve got black sheep, white sheep, goats, foxes, hens, hawks and doves. We went through a name-change deal a few years ago and had to issue a new roster every few months as partners came and went and went and came. What’s my family got that yours hasn’t got? Probably a bigger prescription medicine bill.

If you’re looking for screwed up, call in the dogs; we’ve got it all! I really don’t think you could ask for more.

What we’ve always had and still have is a beautiful mix of wild and woolly, Cadillacs and pickups, gravel road and Wall Street, stock boy and stock market. Excluding the Kennedys, the Vanderbilts and the other end of the spectrum — people who still don’t have running water — we reflect something my mother said to me a long time ago, to hold me in check: “Always remember, Teddy: You’re unique, just like everybody else.”

The more you’re around family, the more you realize we’re all alike. Your family, my family, families we’ll never meet. Alike, but special by experience and blood. It’s a beautiful thing, something money can’t buy and something only luck and years and time together can create. My small investment has paid big dividends. Honestly, I can’t believe I got this lucky.

My family is entirely functional. We might have an odd way of getting out of the starting gate now and then, but I’d bet on anybody in my family. They know how to have fun and how to circle the wagons. Sometimes life requires both at the same time.

During the reunion golf tournament, in which concentration wasn’t what it probably could have been because we were too busy talking and smoking cigars, one of my cousins whom I can’t name because that would be indiscreet (Randy — Randy Allen) said to me that he’d concluded you just need to love family: aunts, uncles, dads, moms, sisters, brothers, cousins, nieces, nephews, grandmommas, granddaddys, all the usual suspects. Holding a grudge, it’s not worth it. Loving them is easier, whether they love you back or not. In my experience, thinking otherwise costs you a whole lot of fun, peace and happiness. And free cake.

-30-