In a souvenir shop I am given, with the most pure-hearted of intent, the least helpful directions I have ever received. “The post office?” says the woman behind the counter. “Round the corner, three blocks, it’s the building with the big American flag out front.” But in Branson, Missouri, everything has a big American flag out front.
To Europeans who’ve heard of it and to many Americans, Branson is a punchline: a chintzy, cheesy, corny, downmarket destination, an above-ground cemetery for has-been and never-will-be entertainers.
It is worth visiting, though. It’s a glimpse of an America generally disdained or misunderstood by foreign visitors, who gravitate to the coasts. It’s a place unburdened by irony, a place where someone has opened a theatre bar called God Country, knowing that nobody will think this gauche, a place where all the applause is sincere. It’s also great fun, so long as your idea of fun includes jungle-themed indoor mini-golf, four-storey go-kart tracks, and listening to lesser Osmond brothers singing Christmas carols on a Friday morning.
Though home to just 7,435 people, Branson boasts 53 theatres, 207 hotels and 458 restaurants. Most are arranged along Route 76, known locally as the Strip. A drive along the Strip offers sights including a museum in the shape of the Titanic, a motel resembling a riverboat, a souvenir barn painted in the black and white patchwork of a Friesian cow, a Veterans’ Memorial Garden festooned with yellow ribbons, and a theatre (the Dolly Parton-owned Dixie Stampede) whose digital billboard promises a dinner show including ostrich- and pig-racing (to my profound sorrow, if not surprise, the show was sold out).
Two things are essential to proper enjoyment of Branson. One is the resolve to appreciate the place on its own merits – Branson is so disarmingly guileless that adopting an attitude of lofty superiority would be as hollow a triumph as riffing wittily on the sandiness of the Sahara. The other is sharing it with someone else: seeing three of Branson’s Christmas shows in one day is not something that should be undertaken without moral support.
Branson theatres keep odd hours, to accommodate tourist buses and the bedtimes of the city’s visitors (roughly half are 65 and older). It is unusual for much to be happening past 10pm and common for venues to stage three shows a day. At 10am one Friday, we join the silver- and blue-haired throng at the Branson Variety Theatre for the Spirit of Christmas show, with star attractions Wayne, Jay and Jimmy Osmond. The latter may clang a chime with British readers recalling his 1972 hit “Long-Haired Lover From Liverpool”. Released when Jimmy was just nine years old, it remains plausibly the worst number one single ever.
Most of the show, in which members of the chorus line caper to Christmas favourites, is merely competent. The Osmonds, though, who appear in intermittent cameos, are great. They sing beautifully and Jimmy is an effortlessly charming host. He is a man utterly at peace with his place in the world, even if that place is a remote Ozark town where he sells memories at inconvenient hours.
The same cannot quite be said of the next act we see – Roy Rogers Jr, at the Roy Rogers Museum theatre – but it is, nevertheless, a compelling spectacle. Roy Rogers Sr made movies, television shows and records and was, during the 1940s and 1950s, one of the most famous men in America. The show Rogers Jr performs is substantially a memorial service to his father, to his mother (Grace Arlene Wilkins), and to Rogers Sr’s third wife and co-star (Dale Evans). In a theatre adjoining the museum housing Rogers Sr’s guns, clothes and cars, Rogers Jr croons cowboy ballads and tells stories about an upbringing plagued by the death and misfortune that stalked his siblings. It’s rather odd. Rogers owns a pleasant, Jim Reeves-ish baritone, and his a capella version of the ancient spiritual “Wayfaring Stranger” is terrific. But it’s hard to separate from the knowledge that it was, as he has told us in forensic detail, the last thing he sang to Dale Evans before she died in 2001 and that he’s still singing it twice a day, five days a week, in what is essentially his family mausoleum. He wishes his audience a “happy Branson cowboy Christmas” as artificial snow descends from the ceiling and we leave thinking Jimmy Osmond should take him for a drink.
Neither the Osmonds nor Rogers would deny that we saved the best for last: indefatigable crooner Andy Williams, at his own theatre. His timing in comic set-pieces is faultless, his supporting cast brilliant, especially the astonishing mimic Bob Anderson, whose peculiar genius is for channelling the voices and mannerisms of lounge singers, including Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Tom Jones, Ray Charles and, for one memorably surreal duet, Andy Williams. Williams looks, sounds and seems five decades short of the 80 years he racked up the previous birthday. When he signs off with a sumptuous “Moon River”, the few hairs remaining on the heads of his audience are thrilled upright, quite rightly.
We spend Saturday at Silver Dollar City theme park and that night, we attend a show by Kirby Van Burch, a magician with a Dutch pop star’s accent and haircut. He’s fantastic: he cavorts with tigers, teleports a motorcycle, and causes a helicopter to appear from thin air. His performance is also noteworthy for two defining moments, one very Branson, one not. The extremely Branson act is Van Burch’s solemn presentation of one young assistant from the crowd with a dogtag inscribed with Isaiah 54:17. The jarringly un-Branson thing is one reflexive mis-step into sarcasm. Introducing a trick, he mentions Houdini. The crowd applaud. “Clap all you want, he’s not coming out,” smiles Van Burch. “Not at these prices.” It’s a good joke but it dies, crushed by the truth it is bearing: that maybe we’d all rather be in Vegas but realise that Sin City is just too brash, too cynical, too much for us.
Near my hotel, in the new Branson Landing shopping complex by Lake Taneycomo, an American flag flies above a fountain fitted with a battery of 10 flamethrowers. Every night at sunset, Branson Landing’s speakers desist from their muzak and blast out “The Star Spangled Banner” as jets of water and eruptions of flame roar towards the pinking sky. Everybody stops and holds their baseball caps over their hearts.
Andrew Mueller is the author of ‘I Wouldn’t Start from Here: The 21st Century and Where it All Went Wrong’
This is about all I can say for to-day... Fortunately most people round about have the majority of their hay in (any farmers in the group?) so a day working indoors might be a welcome change. Had a pint at the local Wednesday afternoon; just lovely. I trust that means I really am on the mend. 
feelings known to man-kind to leave a place where you are surrounded by sick people, some of whom will be there a lot longer than I was. Got a new appreciation of how fortunate we are sometimes.
