It seems oddly fitting that in the week Dolly Parton died, there’s a play on in London about a blonde country singer. Although Marcy, the central character in Lee Papa’s Midnight in Nashville, couldn’t be more different to Dolly, for Marcy is fresh out of prison, having served twenty years for killing her abusive husband.
We’re in a recording studio in Nashville, and it’s around midnight – although, I guess the clues are in the title – where Marcy (Biz Lyon) is attempting to get back into the record business by recording some new tracks. Her only company is young recording engineer Colleen (Catherine Mieses), who is doing her best to make sure that after two decades away, Marcy’s singing sounds real and authentic.
It’s not going particularly well – Marcy is rusty and doesn’t always get it right. She’s trying, but she comes with a considerable amount of baggage, both emotional and practical, and twenty years in prison has done little for her confidence. As the session progresses and the night wears on, her frustration grows and the relationship between the two women becomes increasingly strained.
There is potentially a good story here, but the major problem with the play is that it doesn’t really go anywhere. There’s plenty of studio talk which, as anyone who saw Stereophonic recently will know, can be surprisingly boring. There’s also a fair amount of exposition, as Marcy tells her tale rather than us discovering it for ourselves. There’s lots of telling and not nearly enough showing.
Some of this is delivered through interviews, including a current one down the line with a journalist in Australia and an earlier interview where we also hear the reporter’s voice (Zaquis Riddick). We learn plenty about Marcy’s past, but despite Lyon’s efforts, we never really get under her skin or into her soul. There is a lovely moment when Marcy struggles to fit into a jacket she hasn’t worn for twenty years, a simple detail that tells us more about her than some of the lengthy explanations; unfortunately, there aren’t enough moments like this. There’s a small twist in the tale, but this was telegraphed before the reveal, so it didn’t land with any great surprise – it should have been delivered with a bang rather than a whimper.
Midnight in Nashville could loosely be classified as gig theatre, with Biz Lyon playing piano and guitar and performing some folk-tinged country songs. She is clearly a talented musician and singer, but sadly none of the three original songs from Kevin Buchmeier, Jeremy Watson and Lyon are likely to be troubling the country music charts any time soon. The dialogue occasionally slips into cliché and Alex Stroming’s direction lacks the energy and drive needed to turn what should be an emotionally charged encounter into something genuinely compelling.
Both Lyon and Mieses give perfectly good performances, but there simply isn’t enough for either of them to get their teeth into. The chemistry between the two is there somewhere, but it never quite catches fire, and the play is left lacking the emotional tension its subject matter is crying out for.
At under sixty minutes, Midnight in Nashville certainly doesn’t outstay its welcome – I just wish it had possessed a little more of Dolly’s passion, warmth and drive – sadly, Midnight in Nashville never quite hits the high notes.
Review by Alan Fitter
Marcy Aurora is a honky-tonk angel who was headed to the heights of country music fame when she committed a murder she doesn’t regret. Out of prison after 20 years, Marcy has one night in a studio in Nashville to lay down the tracks for a new album, even as she gets pissed off at a nosy reporter and fights with the sound engineer about what her real voice is now.
CAST
Biz Lyon as Marcy
Catherine Mieses as Colleen
CREATIVE TEAM
Writer – Lee Papa
Director – Alex Stroming
Lighting and Sound Designer – Janhavi Shivalkar
Set Design – Agathe Williamson
Marketing Consultant – Holly Adomah
MIDNIGHT IN NASHVILLE
The Glitch
26 August to 7 September 2026
