It isn’t the fault of actor/writer Lori Fischer that I walked out of Barbara’s Blue Kitchen a whole lot more blue than when I walked in. In her 80-minute one-act musical, Fischer portrays half a dozen characters that slip and tumble through a small-town diner in Watertown, Tenn., and it offers enough sincerity and down-home, warmhearted brio to crack the most stolid and stone-faced among us. No, what turned me deep indigo was the century-old Lamb’s Theatre, which is soon to be razed to satisfy New York City’s apparently insatiable craving for boutique hotels. So please, a silent moment for another loss to history.
Curiously, at the conclusion of Barbara’s Blue Kitchen, it looks like Barbara Jean, the fortyish eponymous proprietor that Fischer chiefly plays, may be lost to history as well. She must decide whether she should close her eatery in order to travel with the town’s hairstylist, Lombardo, a suave Italian immigrant whose European notions of monogamy have long unsettled her. We never learn what Barbara Jean decides, which is perhaps just as well: The evening has consisted of watching her quietly decide how seriously to take Lombardo’s gift of a promise ring, intermingled with the stories of other locals amid the occasional interjections and ditties of an onstage radio DJ (played by Kurt Zischke)—so it’s pretty clear what she’ll do.
It’s also clear what the other locals are all about—Jeanette, Barbara Jean’s pen pal since the sixth grade, who is pinch-hitting as a waitress at the diner while hoping her Tupperware business will burp into the big time. There’s Barbara Jean’s sister, Melissa, an angry harridan who proves a bitch of a mother to sons Troy and Trey, and even worse in her care of the littlest, Tommy Lee, who suffered a nasty bite from the family dog (called Killer) that she almost left untreated. Tommy Lee, whose favorite hiding spot is under one of the tables in the diner, turns out to be one of Fischer’s most acute and cathartic characterizations. And the song she sings as Tommy Lee—about a little boy carefully concealing a photo of his father in his shoe—is purest in its expression, resulting in a poignant moment of theater.
Just as not all cornbreads are alike, not all characters in the show are equally deep. The seen-it-all nurse Miss Morris, who very foolishly offers to take Melissa’s kids off her hands, isn’t as sassy as she should be, although the interplay between Miss Morris and Melissa, as Fischer smoothly slides in and out of character with the aid of a single prop, is especially well done. Similarly, I liked elderly Miss Tessie—who recently lost the love of her life to vegetarianism and is thus ordering Barbara Jean’s meatloaf—but she’s underwritten. Least believable is the appearance of Lombardo himself, with Fischer stretching mightily to play a strutting Italian Lothario who has adopted all the accoutrements of a crooning Ozark cowboy—a little green, white and red at the Blue Kitchen, if you like.
