Brightstar

[edjames]

Finally raring on Broadway after stops at San Diego's Globe theater and The Kennedy Center in Washington comes this county/blurgrass musical from "funny man' Steve Martin and his collaborator Edie Brickell. Steve is a very multi-talented guy and he wrote the book and music for this production.

Led by a talented cast, this play is a bittersweet story of two couples whose lives are intwined by a horrific event 20 years prior. The play takes place in 1923, in and around Asheville, NC., when Alice falls in love with Jimmy, son of the mayor and town's leading businessman. Trouble ensues when Alice becomes pregnant and the infant is forcibly taken from her to be given up for adoption. The young couple are broken apart by the tragic event and go on to lead separate lives without ever maintaining contact.

20 years later a young aspiring author, Bully, arrives home from the war. He moves away from his small town, and the young women, Margo, who is in love with him, to Asheville and becomes a protege of Alice who is now the editor of a prominent literary magazine. (see review below for full plot details).

The music is very good. Again, the cast is excellent. The modest band is onstage in a moving A-frame structure which the cast moves around the stage at various points. The set is extremely sparse.

Personally, I liked it very much. In a season where Hamilton is going to with the Tony, new musicals don't have much chance of denting the Hamilton powerhouse. Good luck to Brightstar. Opens March 24.

 

The audience I saw it with loved it and gave it a rousing ovation.

 

 

Mr. Isherwood's NYTimes review of an earlier performance in San Diego:

 

Love, Loss and Local Color Make a Bluegrass Musical

‘Bright Star’ Is Steve Martin and Edie Brickell’s New Show

 

By CHARLES ISHERWOODSEPT. 29, 2014

http://static01.nyt.com/images/2014/09/30/arts/BRIGHT/BRIGHT-master675.jpg

• SAN DIEGO — Darkness and light are blended in even proportions in “Bright Star,” a sepia-toned new musical by Steve Martin and Edie Brickell making its premiere at the Old Globe theater here. The characters in this musically vibrant if overstuffed show, set in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina during two separate decades of the 20th century, endure hardship, heartache and almost melodramatic loss. But, as the title suggests, their eyes remain fixed not on the black canopy of night but on the beacons of hope that pierce it. A telling song from the second act reminds us that no matter how gray the future seems, the “sun is gonna shine again.”
   
  The shining achievement of the musical is its winsome country and bluegrass score, with music by Mr. Martin and Ms. Brickell, and lyrics by Ms. Brickell. The complicated plot, divided between two love stories that turn out to have an unusual connection, threatens to get a little too diffuse and unravel like a ball of yarn rolling off a knitter’s lap. But the songs — yearning ballads and square-dance romps rich with fiddle, piano and banjo, beautifully played by a nine-person band — provide a buoyancy that keeps the momentum from stalling.
   
  Photo
  http://static01.nyt.com/images/2014/09/30/arts/jpbright/jpbright-articleLarge.jpg
  Carmen Cusack, center, in “Bright Star,” a new musical by Steve Martin and Edie Brickell.CreditJoan Marcus
  Mr. Martin, by the way, is indeed the Steve Martin who began his career as a banjo-strumming standup comic in the 1970s. He has since become one of the most fascinating polymaths in American culture as actor, novelist and noted art collector. But he never put down that instrument. Mr. Martin has won a Grammy for best bluegrass recording, and established a bluegrass and banjo prize in his name. Last year he collaborated with Ms. Brickell — the retro-folk singer who had a pop hit back in 1986 with “What I Am” — on a collection of songs called “Love Has Come for You.” That led to a desire to create a musical, and “Bright Star” is the result, although initial plans to use music from that album were largely abandoned, with only two songs remaining.
   
  Together they fashioned the original story, and Mr. Martin wrote the book. The beaming title tune sets a hopeful tone. World War II has ended, and the boys are coming home. Among them is Billy Cane (the winning, rich-voiced A. J. Shively), whose eagerness to see his hometown again receives a jolt when he learns from his father (Stephen Bogardus) that his beloved mother has died. She had encouraged his ambitions to become a writer, and he has soon fixed his desire on being published in the region’s most respected magazine, The Asheville Southern Journal.
   
  In Asheville we meet the editor, the tart but warm Alice Murphy (a wonderful Carmen Cusack), the show’s other principal character. A 38-year-old single woman, she oversees two assistants, the snarky Daryl Ames (Jeff Hiller), who’s also (anachronistically?) obviously gay, and the wisecracking, sexy Lucy Grant (Kate Loprest). The chipper atmosphere of this office is established in one of the show’s weaker songs. (“How I love my wonderful career,” Alice trills. “I’m so engaged, such a pleasant working atmosphere.” Show us, don’t tell us, Alice.)
   
  We are soon swept back to Alice’s youth, where much of the drama takes place. Some 22 years earlier, she was an outspoken small-town lass from a farming family who fell in love with Jimmy Ray Dobbs (Wayne Alan Wilcox), the scion of the town’s leading family and the son of the mayor, Josiah Dobbs (Wayne Duvall, exuding chicken-fried menace from every pore). Trouble comes when Alice gets pregnant and Josiah hatches a plan to separate the two, despite Jimmy Ray and Alice’s plan to marry.
   
  Here the musical’s story line begins to pant and throb, as Josiah yanks the newborn babe from Alice’s arms as she pleads with her father (Stephen Lee Anderson) and sister, Dora (Libby Winters), to stop him. Jimmy Ray rather mysteriously disappears from the narrative during this interlude, and Josiah’s obsessive need to erase the potential blot on the family escutcheon leads him to an appalling act I shouldn’t divulge. Although it is apparently based on a real incident, the musical still begins to resemble a softer-hued throwback to old Hollywood movies like “Stella Dallas,” featuring cruelly used young women forging on despite the dirty deeds done to them.
   
  When we pick up the story again in the 1940s, Billy moves to Asheville and becomes a protégé of Alice, leaving behind his own true love, Margo Crawford (Hannah Elless), an underdeveloped character who pines for him in one of the show’s most beautiful ballads, “Asheville” (a retooled song from the album).
   
  the crowded contours of the plot are the production’s chief problem, with Mr. Martin and Ms. Brickell spreading stage time and songs too thinly among the show’s many characters. “Another Round,” a roadhouse hoedown led by Dora, whose culpability in the tragedy of her sister’s loss has turned her into an alcoholic, is fun but unnecessary, and the comic relief provided by Daryl and Lucy seems a forced attempt to lend the material a contemporary edge. Engaging though the principal characters are, we don’t have time to delve deeply into their hearts, since there are so many lives to keep track of — all of which are ushered rather briskly toward dovetailing happy endings. (One really would have been enough.)
   
  Nonetheless, the director, Walter Bobbie, does a smooth job twining together the narrative. Five members of the band remain onstage throughout, usually settled in a handsome, skeletal A-frame cottage that moves as nimbly as any of the performers; they sometimes step out to join the action, bringing along their instruments. Under the musical direction of Rob Berman, the songs are treated with lovely, lucid orchestrations, which have not, thankfully, been supersized to Broadway dimensions. (The veteran record producer Peter Asher is the musical supervisor.)
   
  At its best, “Bright Star” seduces with its retro roots score and its sincerity in telling an old-fashioned story of love betrayed and redeemed. It has the forthright and, yes, sentimental appeal of a Norman Rockwell painting (he’s respectable again, you know), as well as a plain-spoken charm similar to that of the Jeanine Tesori-Brian Crawley musical “Violet,” revived to acclaim on Broadway last season.
   
  Still, clearing out some of the thick underbrush would be helpful if the musical moves forward. So would refashioning the dramatic climax. In a trio for Alice, Billy and Billy’s father that reveals, in flashback, the truth about their history, Mr. Martin and Ms. Brickell’s ears suddenly turn to tin, as they concoct a histrionic number that sounds more like a standard-issue show tune than anything else in the musical. This crucial moment should be treated more gently, in keeping with the rest of the alluring music in “Bright Star,” which never pushes too hard to achieve its effects.
   
   
   
  

[Cooper]

Enjoyed "Bright Star". Good acting & singing. Plot is interesting but rather predictable, you'll probably figure out the ending before the 1st act ends. There are some very funny 1 liners.

 

At this performance, the 2nd Act started with Steve Martin (writer) on stage playing his banjo & jamming with the band. He brought the house to its feet. Certainly made this show more memorable.

 

It's worth seeing. Tickets are available on TDF & @ TKTS.