Performing Arts

IRVING – The Winner treats its audience like grown-ups as it portrays the historical figure of the young Lyndon Baines Johnson in all his complexity. Few plays or movies give us this kind of searching look at our collective past – let alone musicals, which for the last decade have been gyrating almost exclusively between irony and frivolity.

BRANDON THIBODEAUX/Special Contributor

Dean Nolen is a fascinating Lyndon Baines Johnson in The Winner, which is debuting at the Irving Arts Center.

Lyric Stage is giving The Winner its world premiere at the Irving Arts Center with a production that sells itself with the energy of a big-time political campaign. Sunday's performance proved that Dean Nolen, a former Dallas actor now busy in New York and on screen, makes a fascinating LBJ, bigger than life but full of flaws, ruthless and compassionate at the same time.

LBJ's 1948 campaign for the U.S. Senate provides the plot.

Running against the far more conservative Gov. Coke Stevenson, Mr. Johnson starts out idealistic but finds he must make all kinds of unsatisfactory compromises. Unsavory Duvall County political boss George Parr (Ray Gestaut) finally provides the 87-vote margin of victory in a scandal that follows the future president all his life.

The weak spot in a musical is usually the book – an underlying story that doesn't add up or compel attention. Joe Sutton's libretto for The Winner, on the other hand, holds together compactly and, despite a certain didactic quality, builds in excitement. The problem in this show lies in Mr. Sutton's lyrics – repetitive, simplistic and rife with clunky phrases.

Fortunately, Lewis Flinn's music goes a long way to rescue them. While the folk-tinted sound has its own pitfalls of repetition and occasional dullness, the composer throws in enough surprises to keep our ears in the game. The best numbers offer a lot of variety – a moving love song for Lady Bird balanced against a Brechtian ballad warning that people who do politicians favors expect favors in return.

Director Peter Hackett (former artistic director of the Cleveland Playhouse, now a professor at Dartmouth College) manages to integrate the show's disparate techniques and tones into something organic.

Mr. Nolen creates the most three-dimensional figure, but all the cast members make their real-life characters credible. Gigi Cervantes, normally a more humorous type, captures the gravitas of the young Lady Bird Johnson, in this script the embodiment of LBJ's finer impulses. Joshua Doss and Lindsey Holloway show us the tensions the political life generates between John and Nellie Connolly without descending into soap opera.

The Texan cast adds a layer of authenticity that probably couldn't be achieved anywhere else. The Winner isn't a musical that will live on because of its songs. But it's a show that is just right for this place and this time.

•Through March 3 at Irving Arts Center's Dupree Theater, 3333 N. MacArthur Blvd., Irving. Runs 140 mins. $23 to $30. 972-594-1904; www.lyricstage.org.