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Regional Reviews: St. Louis Billy Lemp Tonight
Local actor Tim Callahan is great as William J. "Billy" Lemp Jr., the son who takes over the family's sprawling brewery in the years before Prohibition. Act One feels like a Chautauqua stemwinder, full of Gilded Age bluster, worthy of William Jennings Bryan. But after a break, the family's ghosts begin to populate the tomb-like stage in act two, atop a bluff near the Mississippi River, in a very old part of town that now wails with an interstate highway and where a great gothic brewery towers across from that. Anyway, it turns out that people back then were just as prone to ego and vanity (and self-deception) as we are now, though these toxins emerge slowly and artfully, thanks to playwright Stephen P. Walker. His play runs about once a month, with scheduling information available on the Lemp Mansion Restaurant & Inn Facebook page. Mr. Walker is the author of a book on this same family of Central European emigrants, who made good selling beer just as a wave of Germans and Poles and Italians were all crashing onto our shores in the latter half of the 19th century. His "Lemp: The Haunting History" traces the rise and fall of one of our most famous local beer barons, complete with scandal and tragedy. It's a prideful tale, glittering as a Fabergé egg and hollowed out in the end, in all its fabulous despair. And, as must now be obvious, another German brewer eventually out-competed the Lemps in St. Louis, running them out of business with the help of the 18th Amendment. The Lemp's "Cerva" brand of "near beer" was no match for Anheuser-Busch and it's "Bevo" brand once Carrie Nation had cast her abstemious spell upon a nation. There were lots of breweries in St. Louis before Prohibition. But now, on warm humid nights, it is only AB InBev's tangy fermentation process you smell, when the breeze is just right. The only thing that remains of the Lemps is that elegant mansion, and a very grim (but grandiose) story. Along with their Falstaff beer logo, which they sold to another competitor when things got really rough. There are three suicides in the story, but somehow they feel a bit remote in a narrative bedizened by scandal and opulence. A younger brother's untimely death touches off the first suicide in the mansion, and then a second family death (in the Central West End) is ruled a suicide, even though lots of questions hover over the matter. And then there's the third one, which kind of seems inevitable. Still, it's admirably dramatic in the telling. And normally I'd put a sensitivity warning on the show. But the tale is so well known in these parts, at least in general terms, that it becomes a sort of local "Guernica." Or, in the case of the title character, the final decay of a decadent life. But you get this rich man's paradise all laid out before you, backfilled (in act two) with divorce court revelations and financial ruin that add a lot of dimension. At the final curtain, it seems like there's only one way it could possibly have ended. And yet, the show's puffed-up anti-hero regains our affections all over again in the show's final moments. Billy Lemp Tonight continues on (more or less) a monthly basis at Lemp Mansion Restaurant & Inn, 3322 DeMenil Place, St. Louis MO. For tickets and information, please visit the Lemp Mansion Facebook page. Cast: Production Staff: |
