This may not be the first time the Telluride Repertory Theater has performed a musical dealing wi... Dancing Texans and Whores.

This may not be the first time the Telluride Repertory Theater has performed a musical dealing with the more risqué side of sex – 2001’s musical was the alternative-sexuality extravaganza The Rocky Horror Show – but this is the first time it has treated the subject with such down-home country twang.

The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas opens officially tonight at 8 p.m. – last night saw its preview performance – and will run all this weekend and the next.

With a thirty person cast, Whorehouse is one of Telluride Rep’s largest productions, and there are some stunning ensemble numbers and impressive solos.

Sarah M. Dockray as the ingénue addition to the whorehouse and Clint Viebrock as the embattled, tragic Sheriff Ed Earl Dodd give particularly sympathetic performances.

The show’s director, Robin McKee, who is the producing artistic director of Telluride Rep, says this is the largest all-adult cast she has directed for the company, with the most extravagant set – which the large stage at the Michael D. Palm Theater allowed.

“When we chose this show, we were very concerned that we wouldn’t have enough dancers – male and female,” McKee says, but with enthusiastic players and Jane Fields’s capable and sensitive choreography, it call came together, and it all looks good.

Particular kudos goes to the “Aggies” – a victorious college football team that dances all the way to the whorehouse. “There’s just testosterone all over the stage there,” says McKee, though the most memorable moment in their routine may be their hilarious (and touching) swoon.

McKee gave them “little vignettes of how she sees the characters,” Reed says, and with that and their memories and research of the 1970s, in which the play is set, they picked through the costume stock at University of Colorado at Boulder, several stores – including Pip’s Fine and Funky Consignment right here in Telluride – and the actors’ personal collections for costumes.

The demagogic television reporter, for example, moral “watchdog” Melvin P. Thorpe – brilliantly overacted by Jesse James Martin –is more Texan than Texas, peacock-like in his bright, shiny TV-cowboy uniforms.

Television, of course, is what the show is largely about – how it gives a bully pulpit to unthinking, destructive egotists, and how it brings a blunt, uncomprehending focus onto the subtleties of a small community in which everyone has found his or her own way to get along.

Getting along is another great theme. The whores have found a way to make a family for each other in their little country whorehouse, and even to empower themselves through their sexual allure, in contrast to poor Doatsy Mai, who runs a coffee shop and dreams of dancing a striptease, but never could break free of respectability. Debbie Madaris singing Doatsy’s song of yearning is a showstopper.

One of the interesting parts of theater in a small town is watching people you know, people you may talk to or do business with every day, presenting a character on the stage – especially when the character is a slinky woman-of-the-night with a costume to match. I’m not sure which was more fun, however: willingly suspending my disbelief and losing myself in the plot of whores with hearts of gold fighting television-fueled moral hysteria, or willingly suspending my belief and watching people I know and like having the time of their lives letting loose and cavorting on the stage.

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