The World According to Kinky Friedman

Reviewed in Best In Texas Music Magazine

The guy closest to the stage is a Jesse Dayton fan.  He’s here for a rare matinee performance of Becoming Kinky: The World According to Kinky Freidman. In the spirit of the show he’s about to see, he turns and tells me, “It’s too early in the day for Jesse” and makes a joke about “intravenous coffee injections in the parking lot.”

Kinky Friedman himself had recommended that musicians run state government, except that they wouldn’t be very effective before noon. 

Jesse clearly has the chops for an early curtain call, if 3 PM on a Sunday is early.      

Jesse plays “Musician Kinky” along with Ross Bautsch as “Young Kinky,” Alan Lee as “Older Kinky,” and Friedman’s longtime band mate Little Jewford as himself in the revue-style collection of Kinkster-isms, which previewed at McGonigel’s Mucky Duck in Houston.

For most of his life, Kinky Friedman has given us music, mystery novels (an amazing number of them!) and philosophy. Kinky also brought us a memorable, if not successful, gubernatorial campaign, undermined by the one-liners that make Becoming Kinky hearty fun on stage, yet don’t constitute a political platform.   

Ted Swindley, director and writer known best for Always…Patsy Cline captures the essence of the Kinkster. 

You might say that’s easy – look at all the Friedman words to choose. Don’t jump to conclusions.    

Those words have to be put into a cohesive package and rendered more linear than Kinky’s life seems for those of us who aren’t Kinky. Swindley accomplished that and chose actors who keep it fast-paced and Kinky-fied. Props, too, to co-director MJ Emig and to Houston’s most visible enthusiast, Carolyn Farb, the producer.  

Dayton caries himself believably as “Musician Kinky,” taking solo speeches as if he’s done them all his life and leading the sing-alongs to uplifting Friedman favorites like “Assholes from El Paso” and “They Don’t Made Jews Like Jesus Anymore.” 

Bautsch, on the other hand, has done it all his life, and it shows. He approaches “Young Kinky” with confidence and humor combined with the pacing of a stand up comedian.  Bautsch also knows the stage and what an actor in the background of a scene can add with a smile, a nod, or a furrow of the brow.  

As the “last surviving member” of Kinky’s Texas Jewboys, Little Jewford is the show’s piano accompaniment, interlocutor, and over-the-top cartoon announcer who intones “Thank You, Kinky” and other  stage directions to the three Kinkys onstage.   

Lee adds the gravitas of age and perspective without losing the sense of humor and irony woven through Kinky’s text and subtext. It doesn’t hurt that Lee has performed as Will Rogers. He melds the Rogers persona with Kinky’s, adding a dash or Hal Holbrook’s Mark Twain with a George W. Bush squint. 

When Lee recited the story of Kinky’s father using hummingbirds to teach kids at the children’s camp the elder Friedmans operated, eyes moistened in the audience. 

Houston audiences saw Becoming Kinky as a work in progress, tweaked and polished as each performance took the stage. By the second to last curtain call, it was tight and compact, yielding its first rewards: Theaters in California and New York have inquired about performances. 

It captures Kinky Friedman so well, it may as well be called “Being Kinky.”  It is.

-- Ed Shane, Shane Media