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"The Hallelujah Girls" play review: A feisty southern romantic comedy
Are life’s little stresses making you wish a little too fervently for a holiday? Are your adult children still learning those important lessons about boundaries? Is your love life too cold? Too fictional? Too absent? Is your arch nemesis pounding on the gates with a bulldozer? Ma’am, it sounds like you need a day at the spa. Manicures! Pedicures! Mud packing and deep ego massage! Spa-Dee-Dah is the place to go for comfort and pampering whether you’re an Eden Falls native or a visiting Confederate General. The Community Council on the Performing Arts (CCPA) is proud to bring you to Georgia in “The Hallelujah Girls” by Jones, Hope & Wooten. Directed by a long-time pillar of Nevada’s thespian and literary community Richard Daut.
When five fiery daughters of Georgia bury a life-long friend, inspiration strikes to take life in hand and chase their dreams with a new business bringing pampering and comfort to their small town of Eden Falls. It might be rash, it might be a mid-life crisis, but southern sweet-heart and firebrand Sugar Lee Thompkins, played by Samantha Hartman, has just put every penny of her savings into buying the run-down church of her childhood and she has no fear of failure with her dear friends to help her. Three-time widower Carlene Travis, played by Edi Gragg, has all the dry-wit and level head you could ever want to listen on the other side of a manicure. The heroic Crystal Hart, played by Bobbie Lou Barber, has advertising and fresh southern refreshments in hand. The county clerk Nita Mooney, played by Jane Ann Hancock, can shuffle paperwork and juggle paperbacks like nobody else. Not to forget Mavis Flowers, played by Crystal Bridger, knows just what to do to keep the party going night after night (and how to keep the riff-raff out of the sauna.) Christened ‘the hallelujah girls’ by local lovable momma’s boy Porter Padgett, played by Kenny Jones, these vivacious women have just what it takes turn their lives and this church around.
Of course, churches don’t come with all the amenities needed for a successful spa, and these charmers are about to ruin their manicures putting in the sauna. It’s a good thing the charming (snarky,) generous (backstabbing,) and proud (…) Bunny Sutherland, played by Sheila Guinn-Peters, doesn’t hold a grudge when the quaint church she had her eyes on for her next ‘community development project’ gets bought out from under her nose. She knows Bobby Dwayne, by Jason Fowler, Bunny’s old flame and persona non grata for over 30 years is just the man to get under Bunny’s floorboards and under her skin.
“The Hallelujah Girls” delivers unending snarky southern comedy from the first steps on scene reminiscent of beloved 1980s sitcoms and delivered with love and a message of passion for life. You can catch “The Hallelujah Girls” Thursday, Oct. 10 through Saturday, Oct. 12, at 7:30 p.m., and on Sunday, Oct. 13, at 2 p.m., at Nevada’s Fox Playhouse.