WHO: Lue Rennie and Friends

WHAT: Alexander and Nellie: The Arthurs, a musical play, and Lue Rennie�s Butterfly Garden, a ballet

WHERE: The Knoxville Museum of Art Auditorium

WHEN: Thursday, May 7, and Friday, May 8, 7:30

HOW MUCH: $17 Advance, $15 students, $20 door.

Eclectic local writer Lue Rennie presents a new musical and a ballet at the Knoxville Museum of Art

by Jack Neely

Lonas Road is a long residential street in near-West Knoxville, quiet except for the occasional speedster who uses it as a sneaky back way to the big post office. You drive it and picture retired couples with photos of their grandchildren framed and propped on their big TV sets. What you don't picture is Lue Rennie.

She lives in one of those unpretentious ranch-style houses at the foot of Hollywood Hills—but with Rennie, the verb lives seems something of an understatement. Her garage has been converted into a den, as many have, but her den has then been converted into a musical studio. In it there's no big TV but instead a baby grand piano and a Yamaha synthesizer. Knock on the door and she's likely to offer you a glass of Manischewitz and talk about Alexander and Nellie, her latest musical production—which also happens to be her first.

A short, red-haired woman of indeterminate age, she doesn't like to have her picture taken. She smokes Cambridge Lights, smiles a lot, and talks more, with a wide-open bravado you associate with Broadway, Hollywood, and rural Kentucky. It's hard to guess where she found it, because she's spent a lot of years in all those places. Likewise, her accent has both a big-city polish and an Appalachian heedlessness that sometimes from the thin air pulls words that didn't exist before she found them up there.

It's safe to say Lue Rennie has the most remarkable resume on Lonas Road, likely the only one that mentions both Leonard Bernstein and Chet Atkins as references—with Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, Mama Cass, Johnny Mathis, and Janis Joplin on the side (she says she has done writing or arranging for most of those folks). Admitting she never actually performed with Leonard Bernstein, she says she studied with the maestro at Tanglewood in the '60s, and that he called her "a talent that appears once in a lifetime." But trying to get her to talk about her glamorous past is even harder than trying to get her to sit still. She answers questions elliptically, often jumping up to show you something else on the Yamaha. She'd much rather play her past for you, in complex chords on the keyboard. Now, the song she wrote for "Janis" that Joplin didn't live to record; now, a piece of her old routine as Zuba Sparks, Phyllis Diller's wilder cousin. Zuba wore a green lamé turban, red ostrich feathers, and four-inch platform heels with goldfish swimming around inside. "They thought they were big fish in the sea," she says. Zuba's not a character, Rennie insists, but "the other me." You believe her.

She says she worked on Joplin's Pearl album as an apprentice. "I just sat, listened, looked." The producers thought they might make a team. "They figured, she was Southern, I was Southern. We were friends. But they wanted me to know more about rock 'n' roll. I was pop and I was jazz. When I worked for Janis Joplin," she says, "they felt I was writing too much lush music." She plays a piece from a ballet she wrote. It sounds like music from a moody movie in the '40s. It's definitely lush.

She learned to write rock 'n' roll. She plays a song she originally wrote for Joplin, "The Cuckoo Bird," which has a strong R&B roll to it. "They call me cuckoo-koo, cuckoo-koo, a cuckoo bird," she sings. "I love to fly."

"I wrote it for her," she says, adding that Joplin died before she could record it. "But it became my theme song.

"So many of my clients died. Dinah Washington O.D.'d right in front of everybody on the set." She apprenticed on Judy Garland's TV show shortly before Garland's untimely death, and she says she was "very, very fond" of another client, Mama Cass. By the early '70s, she says, "you can see why I was getting a little concerned about my future."

She went into television writing after that, a field she still dabbles in. She says she was a co-writer on scripts for Golden Girls, Love Boat ("I could write those in a coma," she says), and the original Saturday Night Live, a show she says she never liked much. She says she quit when asked to work on a script ridiculing her friend Totie Fields.

For a time, she says, she was both writing TV scripts and touring her Zuba Sparks show. "These shows will burn you out," she says. "But it's business. It's called show business. Talent is 1 percent gift and 99 percent hard work. And you must be the master of rejection."

She sounds almost apologetic when she says that she has led a "very trying, hard life. God gave me the gift of forgetfulness." From an Asheville orphanage, Lue Rennie—originally Mary Lou Rennebaum—bounced through several foster families before winding up with one in Middlesboro, Kentucky. Music was her refuge; a child prodigy, she had gained recognition for her performances and her compositions by the time she was 10. Through the Cincinnati Conservatory, she met Chet Atkins, who encouraged her. She went to Juilliard and onward from there.

Her adoptive father died before she was grown, and just as her career in music was forming. Twice widowed and once divorced, she still leads a dramatic life. An auto accident on Kingston Pike in '95 sent her into physical therapy for two years—and may have allowed her to slow down just enough to write.

"I know life is hard. But life is like a coin: It has two sides. If you just turn the coin of life over, you will find some of the funniest things."

Some of her stories may stretch your credulity. "Truth is so ridiculous," she says, "there's no way you can make it up."

Doing a concert at Berea College in 1966, she arrived too late to try out the equipment. She was playing a jazz improvisation when the high key popped off the piano, flipping out into the audience. "I figured, I have 87 left, don't worry about it." But then, she noticed, the piano was rapidly going out of tune.

"I totally destroyed this piano. You can lose a lot of things in life," she says, from experience. "But lose your pedal, the show's over." For a lesser soul, maybe. She actually finished that show with a guitar. "I now have in my contract that I'm not responsible for any damage I cause to a piano."

She's famously particular about pianos, by the way. "A piano is a human being," she says, without any tones to suggest she's speaking metaphorically. "It has to have a soul. It has to feel right."

Her talent is easier to confirm than some of her stories are. With a gorgeous, eclectic score composed and partially performed by Rennie, her ballet includes a section she calls the Mean Machine, which is "very Hitleristic, evil," some African percussion, and even a Viking funeral march—the eerie voices you hear on the prerecorded track are teenage girls from Middlesboro High. She calls her ballet "the bittersweet and passionate portrayal of the world of the monarch butterfly." Members of Circle Modern Dance will do the honors.

The story she chose for her debut as a composer/director of musicals is almost as remarkable as Rennie herself is.

Rennie grew up in Middlesboro, but was never particularly interested in its history. "I don't even like historical plays," she says. A few years ago she was at a tea room in Cumberland Gap when she happened to notice a framed photograph of a 19th-century man with a mustache, an image that was, to Rennie, strangely "hypnotic. It was like he was calling me over with his eyes to look at him." She heard a little about the man, and learned more.

Alexander and Nellie is the story of a "fabulous guy who dared to dream—only to lose everything in a very short time." Originally from Scotland, Alexander Arthur came to East Tennessee on business for a Scottish-owned lumber company and became fascinated with this part of the country. Living in Knoxville in the 1880s, he proposed building a railroad through the Cumberland Gap to an idyllic spot in Kentucky, which he pictured as an industrial-age utopia that would reach from Middlesboro, Kentucky, to Harrogate, Tennessee, and be populated largely by European immigrants—150,000 of them, Arthur projected. He raised $52 million in 18 months.

The project was ill-starred from the start. In 1889 the grand ceremonial train carrying Arthur and several other Knoxville dignitaries on its inaugural run was only a few miles out of town when it fell through a trestle near Corryton, killing six and injuring dozens; among the dead and seriously injured were several Knoxville business executives and politicians. Arthur himself was painfully injured but survived. The accident was regarded as an isolated tragedy, but later, as the English banking firm Baring Brothers collapsed, Arthur lost his entire investment. This is his story, in musical form.

Among the funniest numbers is also, today, one of the eeriest: an all-male chorus of investors, the "Men Who Play to Win"—who are, temporarily, getting very rich in the stock market.

It promises to be an eclectic show. Rennie was careful to mix it up some, wary of how little patience modern audiences have for an old-fashioned musical. "It's as fast as a movie or a television show. With the attention span changing, you've gotta, every three to five minutes, change everything," she says. She has added a gypsy woman to the Victorian Knoxville investors of the real Arthur story, and she hops up to the keyboard to play a piece about her, making tsk-tsk sounds with her teeth to sound like castanets, playing the piano like a Spanish guitar. "Have you seen the gypsy woman?" she sings. "She'll capture your heart..."

Rennie finished writing the play a few months ago, tried a production of Act I in Middlesboro last fall, and six weeks ago offered a revue of songs from the show at an afternoon tea at Cherokee Country Club, where it elicited bravos and even tears.

She hopes the show will do the same at the Knoxville Museum of Art auditorium this weekend. She chose to premiere it in Knoxville, which she has always considered her "big-sister city" because of the "fabulous" talent pool here. She has big hopes for making Alexander and Nellie a three-act musical a permanent show—and so do some city officials, who see the potential the drama might have for drawing tourists and conventioneers. They've reached a tentative agreement with Bijou Theatre to show the play for "a significant block of time" after its debut. (We won't try to draw parallels between this production and Knoxville officials' ambitions about Arthur's project, 110 years ago.) She says proceeds will go to the Rennebaum Foundation, a Middlesboro-based program to introduce Appalachian children to the performing arts.

The phone rings. It's a TV producer. Then somebody shows up at the door. "You ever been in such a zoo in all your life?" says Rennie.

"If more people had the arts in their lives, they would be less stressful," she says, smoking her Cambridge Light and refilling your glass of Manischewitz. At the moment, you may not be completely convinced about that stress thing, judging by the number of times she's dashed around the house in the past hour, answering phones and doors. "You've got to remember," she says. "We're all in this old canoe going up the rapids together."

It reminds her of a song, as everything does. At the keyboard, she slips into a nightclub persona. "I don't want your money," she sings. "I don't want your fame. I want to live, love, and laugh—and don't make it in vain!"