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On the road, shuttling between airports and motels, I sent my daughter an email: "I'm on my way to Branson, Missouri. They say it's like Las Vegas, but for Christians over fifty." She wrote back, "I can't even begin to imagine what that means."
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I could; I imagined it would be laughable and hokey. (You could point out that I am a Christian over fifty and should get off my high horse, but I would only blink at you.) This little town of 6,000 in the southwest corner of Missouri is set in the broad, undulating hills of the Ozark Mountains, where the view is beguiling in every direction. But what draws visitors is "the strip," five miles of theaters that blaze the night with brilliance until around 11:00 pm, when everyone is snug in bed at the Red Roof Inn or the Best Western. Branson's biggest stars are primarily folks you don't hear much about any more, like Yakov Smirnoff—whose mid-'80s shtick was based on comparing America favorably with Russia: "What a country!"—or Andy Williams, who began his solo career in 1952. In 2007, Williams did a month of Branson performances with Glen Campbell, and nearly three months with Charo.
The names may have a hint of mothballs on the page, but it's high-energy on the stage. There is plenty of genuine talent in Branson, and performers work hard, many of them doing three shows a day. Visitors can do many more than that. Someone determined to sample as many as possible could start with the Dixieland Breakfast Show at 8:00 am, leave for Breakfast with Mark Twain at 9:00, drop by Yakov's act at 9:30, get to "Celebrate America" at 10:00, and slide into violinist Shoji Tabuchi's palatial theater at 10:30. When you stumble out two hours later there will still be time to visit the Veteran's Memorial Museum, the Butterfly Palace and Rainforest Adventure, Ripley's Believe it or Not!, the World's Largest Toy Museum, God and Country Inspirational Gardens, the half-scale replica of the Titanic, and to take a whirl around the 60-acre theme park, Silver Dollar City. Refreshed, head into magician Kirby VanBurch's show at 2:00, at 3:00 see the Osmonds (not Donnie and Marie, but there are plenty of other Osmonds), at 4:30 get a big ol' dinner and a show at Dolly Parton's Dixieland Stampede, at 7:00 take in the Penny Gilley show, and at 7:30 see comedian Jim Stafford (surely you remember his 1973 novelty hit, "Spiders and Snakes"). Almost everyone is back onstage for an 8:00 pm performance, as well as Mel Tillis, the Gatlin Brothers, the New Shanghai Circus, American Bandstand Theater, and dozens of other less familiar acts.
Yet Branson itself is constructed on a very modest scale. Like a resort town, it has only as many year-round residents as necessary to meet the tourists' needs, so the infrastructure is slight. For comparison, picture the last time you drove to a theme park like DisneyWorld or Six Flags. When you were approaching the highway exit, how many lanes were there going in each direction? As you approach Silver Dollar City, a theme park that sees up to 20,000 visitors a day in summer, the number of lanes going in each direction is: one. Well, there's a turning lane in the middle. The theater-packed strip is the same. It's congested and slow, but get a couple of blocks off the strip and traffic disappears. There is pretty much nothing in Branson except tourists, shows, and the cast and crew who keep the shows going. It's still a genuinely small town.
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