As usual in these parts, everything’s coming up Dolly.
That impression certainly is confirmed as you motor down the Dolly Parton Parkway, through Parton’s Smoky Mountains hometown of Sevierville, on the way to Dollywood, the sprawling music and thrill-ride park nearby that forms the nexus of her butterflies-and-dreams-themed entertainment empire. Over yonder, past Dollywood’s 300-room DreamMore Resort, you come upon Dollywood’s Splash Country, her 14-hectre water park, and tucked in the surrounding hills are Dollywood’s rustic rental Smoky Mountain Cabins. The area’s theme song might as well be: “Here a Dolly, there a Dolly, everywhere a Dolly, Dolly.”
“We Dolly-ize everything,” the eternally exuberant 70-year-old Parton exclaims with a laugh, sitting in a blaze of hot lights on the stage of her latest venture, a $20 million (Dh73 million) dinner theatre — yes, you heard right — on a busy commercial strip here. It is this new enterprise that has prompted a city slicker to make a pilgrimage to the Land of Dolly, to see first-hand what it means when a celebrity of Parton’s popularity builds a virtual city of attractions — all contoured to take advantage of her fame, her history, her personality — and incorporates a theatre for the masses.
Dolly Parton’s Lumberjack Adventure Dinner and Show is the showplace whose doors are being thrown open on this evening in late spring, and if it’s as successful as, say, Dolly Parton’s Dixie Stampede, a show with live horses that’s been running here since the late 1980s (and in Branson since 1995), then it will become yet another permanent fixture in Parton’s portfolio.
The hope here is that this new 90-minute show, complete with a belly-busting fried chicken dinner, will be able to fill 750 seats twice a night, at 5.30 and 8.30pm, at prices ranging from $35 to $45 per adult and $20 to $25 per kid. That’s a whole lot of coleslaw to sling.
“She’s a hard worker and wanted it all to be just right,” Ken McCabe, Dollywood’s corporate director of entertainment, says of the star’s involvement in the planning of the new show. Parton of course does not appear in the Lumberjack Adventure, a highly athletic, music-infused mountain version of Romeo and Juliet, a sort of Cirque du Soleil meets the Hatfields and the McCoys. But she’s more than a front woman for Lumberjack, having written and recorded the evening’s signature ballad: Something More it’s called, and it has some easy listenin’ spice to it as its lyrics add a dash of feminist mountain-woman aspiration to the proceedings.
“I love to be able to see people entertained, whether I’m up here or not,” Parton says. “So we try to build all the things we do that are true to me, that really have something to do with my music, things that the audience can relate to. They expect certain things from me. They expect quality. And I try to give them that.”
Aunt Dolly got her start in theme-park entertainment in 1986, when she went into business with the Herschend brothers, Jack and Pete, buying a piece of their Pigeon Forge amusement park, Silver Dollar City Tennessee. They renamed it Dollywood and, in time, turned it into a 60-hectre escape into backwoods nostalgia and Parton devotion. It boasts more than 40 rides and attractions, 30 dining spots, a bald eagle sanctuary and seven theatres.
The Lumberjack Adventure, located a few kilometres from Dollywood, brings dancers and gymnasts onto the stage for a lively entertainment that will never be confused with the work of Stephen Sondheim.
Imbued with familiar aspects of Appalachian culture, this variation on dinner theatre certainly adheres to the Dollywood ethos. Corny for sure, but mindful, too, of the spirit of Parton’s own values. For she has woven an entire leisure-time universe, and brought thousands of jobs here, too, by successfully curating her own homespun image. Asked how she defines her role in Dollywood, she says, with what sounds like total sincerity: “I’m the CEO of Dreams.”
“It’s just like a tree,” she says of her Pigeon Forge domain. “You have great roots, and then you get your tree, then you get a lot of limbs. Then, if you’re lucky, there’s a lot of leaves. So it’s like one thing just kind of adds to something else. One dream adds to another.”
