THROUGH 9/22: Good – Maybe Even Good Enough: Theatre Raleigh’s BULL DURHAM at Duke’s Reynolds Theatre

DURHAM, NC – Let’s not be disingenuous. Only one critical question really counts when it comes to Theatre Raleigh‘s new musical, Bull Durham – and that question actually isn’t “Is it good?”

The fundamental achievements of the show, a stage adaptation of the famous film, had widely been considered a foregone conclusion for several reasons. The troupe’s critical track record – and its steady achievements in elevating the standards among the region’s independent companies in the selection, design, production (and hosting) of sophisticated and challenging professional-level theater – signaled confidence in advance of the outcome. That was so, even as the company’s conspicuous marketing kept raising expectations about the work since last October, when Theatre Raleigh announced it as the headlining production of its current season, months before its premiere last weekend at Duke University.

Under those entirely self-engineered circumstances, God help them if they weren’t holding aces.

Then there was the show’s own pedigree and provenance, as a largely known commodity since its original production ten years ago.

More than three decades after its release, the 1988 movie on which the show is based, a comic, romantic and gritty look at the underside of baseball’s farm-team structure starring Kevin Costner and Susan Sarandon, remains one of the top five sports films of all time on industry lists from the American Film Institute, IMDB.com, Sports Illustrated and ESPN.

The stage adaptation’s upper-echelon creative team includes Ron Shelton, the original film’s screenwriter and director, who imbued that work with authenticity to spare; expansive, innovative singer/songwriter Susan Werner; and Emmy award-winning choreographer Joshua Bergasse; with lead performers coming from Broadway’s Hamilton and London’s West End premiere of Les Mis.

With all of that going for it, the serious question isn’t if Bull Durham‘s good.

It’s “Is it good enough?” instead.

For Broadway, that is.

That was the destination its creators had in mind when they convinced the New York Times and Variety to cover its 2014 world premiere in Atlanta. And at that time the answer was not quite, due in part to lead performances not entirely calibrated to the material and a score in need of more development.

After substantive rewrites with numbers and characters added and subtracted from the show, the 2024 iteration stood last weekend on the stage of Durham’s Reynolds Theatre, the same launching pad from which earlier shows, including the 2005 musical Little Women, have gone to Broadway.

Its take-off was impressive.

The sanctified opening gospel rave-up, “The Church of Baseball,” conveyed both the power and the grace of lift off. In it, a clearly comfortable lead actor Carmen Cusack held the stage authoritatively as a local junior college English instructor named Annie Savoy, a self-appointed temple priestess who inducts a promising rookie acolyte each year into the mysteries of a body-focused approach to the game.

As she extolled the congregation in the bleachers’ shouts to Josh Kight‘s tight and rocking band, the players in the clubhouse were making desperate supplications of their own: “Lord help me cause I got no money / Only a hundred bucks a week—hello! / Lord Jesus, help me hit .320 / Or Durham’s gonna let me go!” 

Werner’s wit stayed evident in her lyrics throughout the night, long after Bergasse’s high-energy choreography made fetching opening moves out of warm-ups on the field.

We stayed clearly in good musical and theatrical hands during the rueful roadhouse shuffle, “Damn This Game,” Nik Walker‘s smooth first calling card as Crash Davis. Those familiar with the film will recall his character as the rough-edged romantic male lead, a rugged veteran catcher sent down to this Single-A team to develop – and rein in – the volatile newbie “Nuke” LaLoosh (John Behlmann).

That character, a “million-dollar player with a five-cent head,” made his comic entrance at the local watering hole, in the show’s third number, a Southern-fried stud song, “She’s Mine.” That sequence suggested a time machine crash landing, as his egotistic hick from the sticks shook, rattled and rolled through some fly apart Jerry Lee Lewis moves before an ill-advised moonwalk and robot promenade. These and more ridiculous dance floor crimes were committed in a leisure suit from droll designer Alejo Vietti, one that suggested a tribute either to Miami Vice or the teal shade on those kitchen appliances that Sears made so popular during the period.

I am hoping that the couple of momentary vocal cracks and pitch wobbles we heard through his rewarding kinetic time warp were from a temporary illness and won’t reappear again.

Beloved musical antecedents show up in a number of songs throughout these two brisk acts. In Werner’s words to the bad-to-the-bone blues of “Crash at the Plate,” Walker’s Davis succinctly sizes up his new student with cool distaste: “Another rookie phenom / Another pretty face / Another million dollars worth of amateur disgrace.”

Cusack’s sinuous voice dances on its own to the bossa nova-tinged “Works for Me,” before the special syncopated funk from down New Orleans’ way animates the ensemble’s slick, all-singing, all-dancing full stage celebration in “Winning.”

The crazy quilt of roots, rock and vintage R&B continues to unfold in Werner’s score. Ballfield meltdowns are documented in the jam-band yell-out, “(Goddamn it, Nuke) Don’t Think, Just Throw,” and the absurd second-act ballet of “The Brawl.” Later on, Cusack’s Annie gives herself and her women compatriots a good talking to in the Carole King-inflected numbers, “A Little Time to Myself” and “The Damndest Season.”

Between them, the audience roared when the show-stopping 11 o’clock number, “Every Woman Deserves to Wear White,” opened up a channel during a second-act bridal shower for a sharp 60s girl group to cuss out those unwise enough to judge: “Comes a moment,” they decreed, “when your new life starts. / So fuck them all / And bless their hearts!”

Conspicuously less strong was “A Heaven for You,” the dubious romantic opener for the show’s designated odd couple: obsessive uptight Christian Jimmy (Andrew Poston) and freewheeling Millie (Ashlyn Maddox). When material wasn’t as robust, Cusack and Walker still effectively sold songs like the stop-n-start rocker “Still Got It.” Walker even redeemed “I Believe,” the obligatory number that tenderly shoe-horns (and gently paraphrases) the film’s most famous quote: “[I believe] in long slow deep soft / warm wet kisses / that last for three whole / most delicious / days.”

Strong supporting work from Brian Ray Norris as company manager Skip and Greg Laux, who understudied the role of avuncular team announcer Uncle Ray during Ira David Wood III‘s absence on opening night, kept this nimble, tuneful kaleidoscope in easy motion.

As songwriter Jonatha Brooke has deftly paraphrased Wendell Berry, what we are and what we were once are now far estranged. In 1988, the Durham Bulls weren’t a Triple-A team, on the doorstep to the major leagues. They were a half-step at best above a Single-A outfit, buried in the farm team system, in a dying Southern town whose economic heart, cigarette manufacturing, had stopped the year before.

Crash doesn’t recognize that his temporary reassignment here is not a way station, but a terminus. That’s not entirely surprising; racking up the all-time record for home runs in the minor leagues speaks to a player who ignored all of the signs that said a pro career wasn’t going to happen long enough to amass it. Outside the glorious 23 days he actually went to “the show” (as the minor leaguers reverently call the majors), a stubborn catcher with a pretty hot bat spent the rest of the 15 or 20 years he worked in baseball – the script and score cite different numbers –– always knocking on a door that never opened.

I’m tempted to observe here that Bull Durham is in something of a similar spot: looking for a break into the theater’s major leagues after being denied ten years ago. With an obviously stronger score, a pulse that never flags, and evidently stronger casting, perhaps they’ve found it now. I hope so.

Millennials and younger audiences may likely view this work at best as a curious piece of cultural anthropology. But the musical’s obvious target audience – boomers who loved the movie when it came out, now nearing retirement and the final acts of their own careers and lives – will find plenty to embrace, and some bracing music in a faithful missive from the past.

That somehow seems fitting for a show about a game, as Annie reminds us, whose only goal is to get home.

Strongly recommended.

Theatre Raleigh’s production of Bull Durham continues at the Reynolds Theatre through September 22.