Texas Flyer, by music legend Larry Gatlin, is the first of two shows to be held at Hardin-Simmons University, Wednesday, March 20, through Friday, March 22, 2013. Texas Flyer, a musical, is followed by an intimate one-night only concert, An Evening with Larry Gatlin: Unplugged, Saturday, March 23, 2013.
Unplugged features fan favorites as well as selections from his one-man show currently being developed. Both shows will be in HSU’s Van Ellis Theatre.
It was during the 1954 Cavalcade of Talent contest at the old Rose Field House on the Hardin-Simmons University campus that Larry, age six, and brothers Steve, four, and Rudy, two, charmed the audience and took the top prize. The brothers began performing gospel music patterned after the Blackwood Brothers and the Statesmen on Slim Willets’ KRBC radio and TV shows in Abilene that same year.
The Gatlin Brothers went on to a successful country music career that garnered many awards, including a Grammy. Born in Seminole, Texas, Larry, the son of an oil driller, is the oldest of the three performing Gatlin Brothers.
Gatlin returns to Hardin-Simmons University with Texas Flyer, an original musical written by and starring the singer-songwriter-actor himself, and directed by Ronald Dean Nolen, HSU theatre’s artistic director. HSU associate professor of theater and department head, Larry Wheeler, is designing the show and serves as technical director of both shows.
The show also features students studying in the Bachelor of Fine Arts musical theatre and acting tracks at HSU as well as some of Abilene’s finest performing artists, including Barry Smoot, Paige Clinton-Sproles, Elise Pryor-Harden, Laurie McAdams, Gary Varner, and a pit band that includes Mike Shuler (the Piano Man), Larry Toliver, Dave Keown, Patrick Stevenson, Andrew Rodriguez, and long-time Gatlin collaborator Steve Smith on lead guitar.
Gatlin and Nolen have been reshaping and rewriting Texas Flyer for almost a year now in preparation for this co-production with Lyric Stage, a leading regional theatre in the Dallas area known for successful, critically praised productions of both revivals of classic musicals and world premieres of new works.
Set in a 1950s dried-up Texas town where the train no longer stops, Texas Flyer features Gatlin as an unsuccessful singer-songwriter and now a bitter widower who has distanced himself from life, particularly his own son who has left their small town and become the singing sensation his father had always hoped to become. But things start to turn around when a stranger arrives in town and becomes the catalyst for hope and change.
TEXAS FLYER
by Larry Gatlin
Directed by Ronald Dean Nolen
A Co-production with Lyric Stage of Dallas
Wednesday, March 20, 2013 – Friday, March 22, 2013
Van Ellis Theatre, 7:30 p.m.
General Admission, $15
HSU students, faculty, staff, $5
www.hsutx.edu/tickets
Van Ellis Theatre box office at 325-670-1405 from 1-5pm
AN EVENING WITH LARRY GATLIN: Unplugged
Saturday, March 23, 2013
Van Ellis Theatre, 7:30 p.m.
General Admission, $35
www.hsutx.edu/tickets
Van Ellis Theatre box office at 325-670-1405 from 1-5pm
About Gatlin
Over the course of a four-decade career, Gatlin has performed from dusty Texas stages to the White House. He’s performed from Broadway to the Grammy Awards and has been at the top of the country music charts.
Gatlin and his brothers were raised on gospel music and first began entertaining audiences in their hometown church. After high school, Larry went to the University of Houston on a football scholarship. He majored in English and quickly developed “a love affair with the English language” that later served him well in his songwriting.
On the strength of his song-writing talents and exceptional vocal ability, his life was changed by the legendary Dottie West who saw gold just under the unpolished surface of young Gatlin. The early ’70s found Steve and Rudy in college while Larry, aided by West, moved to Nashville to write songs that would be recorded by names like Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson, Barbara Streisand, Tom Jones, and Elvis Presley.
In 1972, Larry landed a solo deal with Monument Records through friend Kris Kristofferson and invited his siblings to Nashville to sing backup on his first two albums—1974's The Pilgrim and 1975's Rain Rainbow.
The release of The Pilgrim landed Gatlin his first hit with “Sweet Becky Walker,” and he then found himself at #1 on the charts the next year with “Broken Lady,” a song that captured for him a Grammy in 1976.
Over the next decade, the Gatlin Brothers scored more than a dozen Top 40 hits, including “Denver,” “Houston,” “Midnight Choir,” and “She Used To Be Somebody’s Baby.” In 1979 Larry Gatlin won the ACM’s Top Male Vocalist, Straight Ahead won Album of the Year, and “All the Gold in California” won Single of the Year.
About Nolen:
Award-winning Broadway actor, singer and West Texas native, Dean Nolen, has originated roles in over a dozen new plays and musicals and has performed on stage and screen for over 20 years from Honolulu to St. Petersburg, Russia.
In New York, Nolen co-starred in the original Broadway cast of Mamma Mia!, creating the role of Harry Bright; he co-starred as Terence in the critically acclaimed, Pulitzer-Prize nominated Omnium Gatherum; and received a 2001 Drama Desk Award for his performance as Jeffrey in Tabletop.
Television audiences might know him for his guest-starring roles on Mercy, Crossing Jordan, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, and as Philip Montrose on Law & Order: SVU.
An accomplished writer, Nolen is editor of The Film Encyclopedia, published annually by HarperCollins. Nolen also produced, with actor Gary Sinise as its narrator, a documentary film on Iowa Honor Flights, which bring World War II veterans to Washington, D. C., to visit memorials built in their honor.
A member of the Screen Actors Guild and Actors’ Equity Association, Nolen holds a Master of Fine Arts degree in acting from Yale University and a Bachelor of Arts degree in theatre and music from Hardin-Simmons University where he serves as Artistic Director and assistant professor of theatre.