Carmen:

Three women, one wig budget, and a theater full of people who already know how this story ends. That’s “Dolly Parton’s Rhinestone Highway,” and before you ask, yes, I know a jukebox tribute musical sounds like a cash grab dressed up in sequins. Sometimes it is. This one, with Marisol Vance, Teegan Cordero, and June Okafor splitting the role across the run, earns more of its stage time than I expected walking in.

Here’s my verdict, early, the way I like it: the device works when the show trusts it, and wobbles when the show panics and tries to explain itself. Vance opens the first act with a honky-tonk number that has the Majestic crowd clapping on two and four before the first chorus is even out, and that’s not nostalgia, mija, that’s a woman who found the actual voice underneath the wig. The audience wasn’t humming along out of politeness. They were leaning forward.

Where it stumbles: director Leonard Pruitt stages the three-Dolly device as a gimmick in Act One, three spotlights, three harmonies, cute, forgettable, instead of the structural idea it becomes by Act Two, when the show finally lets Cordero and Okafor sit in silence while Vance carries the emotional weight alone. That delay costs the first half its urgency.

So does a tribute show earn its own chandelier moment, something people leave talking about instead of just the T-shirt they bought at the merch table? Pero, that’s the real question here, and I think my co-critics have opinions. Estamos aquí.

Priya:

Carmen’s right that the first act hedges, and that’s worth naming formally: “Rhinestone Highway” opens as a jukebox revue before it decides to be a play about performance itself. Those are different contracts with an audience, and the show spends twenty minutes negotiating which one it signed.

Here’s the structural idea buried in the gimmick, once Pruitt finally commits to it. Splitting one woman across three bodies is, at bottom, a device about the gap between a persona and the person performing it, which is the actual subject of any tribute show worth writing. Caryl Churchill solved a version of this problem decades ago by splitting a single character across time and actors in “Top Girls,” and the lesson there was that the device only means something once the show stops explaining the device and starts trusting the audience to feel the seams. “Rhinestone Highway” gets there. It just takes an act longer than it should, and that lag isn’t a pacing note, it’s a structural failure: the show doesn’t yet believe in its own form.

What works, once it works, is the Act Two silence Carmen flagged. That’s the whole argument made physical: two Dollys sitting out, one carrying the weight, no dialogue required to tell you what’s happening to the idea of a legend. I wish the show trusted that image from the overture on instead of making us wait for it.

Worth your Wednesday night. Not for the wig budget, for the twenty minutes in Act Two where the device finally becomes the argument instead of the decoration.

Imani:

Okay here’s where I come in, because both of y’all are circling the thing I actually watch for, which is bodies in space, and neither of you named it by its real name yet. That Act Two silence Carmen flagged and Priya built a whole thesis around? That’s blocking. That’s director Leonard Pruitt finally trusting negative space the way a choreographer would, two women standing in stillness while the third carries weight, and stillness onstage is HARDER to earn than movement. Anybody can fill a stage. Making an audience stare at two women doing nothing and feel the whole history of a persona in that nothing, that’s design.

Here’s my receipt. Watch where Marisol Vance’s hands go during that honky-tonk opener Carmen mentioned. She’s not doing generic Dolly-hands. Choreographer Renata Osei built a specific gesture vocabulary, picking motion, guitar-strum shoulders, that recurs in tiny fragments across all three performers so when Teegan Cordero and June Okafor go still in Act Two, their stillness is built out of the same vocabulary. That’s not three women playing dress-up. That’s one movement language getting passed hand to hand, and when it finally clicks the ensemble behind them holds a formation so tight you can hear the silence.

Should a tribute show get a chandelier moment? Baby, it already built one. It just hid it behind twenty slow minutes.

Go sit through the slow part. The reward is real. Get your tickets and watch Act Two with your whole chest.