Spotlight on the USO

This Thursday, Camelot Theatre premiered its new show, Spotlight on the USO. Camelot’s Spotlights are a recent innovation that, to paraphrase Artistic Director Livia Genise, feature “a little story and a lot of music.” This particular show is a deviation from previous Spotlights in that it doesn’t present the biography of an individual artist through music, but rather that of an artistic organization – the USO.

But I’ll come to all that later, because really the show Thursday night was a captivating 40s and 50s jazz concert by the Southern Oregon Jazz Orchestra. They played two sets of songs that I suppose were played for the service people overseas during the 40s and 50s, but that story was only secondary to what they were doing. They did branch out from their usual fare twice, both in the second set after intermission – once to give an example of the country music that started to appear in USO tours in the second half of last century with “Route 66”, and their final number was a medley of songs from the branches of the armed forces during which narrator Shirley Patton invited veterans of each branch to stand and be recognized during their song.

The meat and bones of the concert, though, were 40s and 50s jazz standards, and were they ever a hit! They had the audience singing along with “Minnie the Moocher” and others, and nearly every soloist got a rousing applause when they sat back down. Dianne Strong, a singer, was the featured soloist of the evening. An alto, she has a powerful focal and stage presence while she stays within her range. And when she takes short-note forays above her comfortable range, she’s riveting! But she certainly should not try to hold those higher notes – her attempt in “I’ve Got You under My Skin” was acoustically uncomfortable. While I’m pointing out weaknesses, the trumpet and saxophone sections could probably use a tune-up for “American Patrol,” but besides those two mistakes the concert was certainly a good night out.

Now let’s move on to the story part of the “little bit of story and a lot of music” equation. Peter Wyckliffe wrote the script, and Shirley Patton said it. Wyckliffe has certainly done his homework and has written a feast of information. This feast, however, lacks consistency: it ranges from history lesson with facts and figures to penetrating insights into what the USO was all about. The USO was and is meant to help the troops stay connected to home, and Wyckliffe illustrates that beautifully with a verbal illustration of the phones and letters and how they were and are often the only way the troops have to connect back to their families and loved ones.

The result of the inconsistent nature of Wyckliffe’s script is that it sinks or swims with the actor saying it, and it did both with narrator Shirley Patton. She got off to a slow start, and it definitely came off as a fairly dry history lesson. After she got into her groove, she came across as more grandmotherly and inviting. But she was always reading the script, and that was always a distraction. I suggest that a script is not necessary: the role of the narrator in this particular Spotlight was that of an MC. Some kind of structural outline that the performer can do from memory is what this part called for, but a word-for-word script is a death-trap. It makes the storytelling seem artificial, and Patton’s mixing up the U.S. Navy and Air Force songs when asking veterans from the different branches to stand at the end didn’t help.

While I’m on about inconsistencies, I have to take issue with the use of projections and backlighting. Designers Bart Grady and Brian O’Connor had three different things going on: pictures of the USO from the 40s and 50s up through the 80s and 90s, cool blue and purple washes, and a warm orange wash. The pictures were my favorite – they set the location for the story that Wyckliffe and Patton were telling. The cool washes gave an atmosphere of a smoky jazz bar and fit in a more general way for the orchestra, but not for the story. Orange is jarring color, but I probably would have forgotten about it if it had remained there the whole time. But the seemingly arbitrary shifts between images, cool washes and orange were, frankly, distracting.

That said, these weak points fall outside the crux of the show: the Southern Oregon Jazz Orchestra and their 40s and 50s jazz standards. If that’s your kind of music (and even if it’s not) it’s worth a listen. But if you’re going for the story of the USO, that part of the show has a few wrinkles it needs to iron out before I can walk away satisfied.

Spotlight on the USO is playing at Camelot Theatre, 101 Talent Ave., Talent, Oregon 97540 from January 12-22. Their box office can be reached at 541-535-5250. Tickets are $22, plus $2 for reserved seating.