In a Hilarious and Stirring Revival of ‘Hold On to Me Darling,’ Adam Driver Portrays a Mid-Career Elvis Type Dealing With 21st Century Issues
Driver’s lanky, often sullen country music crossover star, Strings McCrane, is by turns laugh-out-loud funny and deeply moving, while scrupulously avoiding either caricature or sentimentality.
Existential crises don’t get much funnier than the one suffered by Strings McCrane, the internationally renowned country music crossover star at the center of Kenneth Lonergan’s 2016 play “Hold On to Me Darling.” It would seem Strings has it all — money, women, a big movie career — but when we meet him, this ladykiller has been brought low by the actual death of his best girl: his mama.
Imagine a mid-career Elvis, only transported to the 21st century, where he’s forced to contend with social media gossip and his old-school, Southern-bred values are affronted not by hippies, but by latter-day liberals who have been flourishing since “the GOP done merged with the g-ddamn World Wide Wrestlin’ Federation.”
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