[My play report on the current Broadway première of Bright Star, the initial musical theater venture of comedian-musician-author Steve Martin and singer-songwriter Edie Brickell, is considerably longer than my usual reports. The extra length—nearly half the post—is attributable to the review survey I always include at the end. Bright Star attracted so much press attention when it came to New York City, more outlets covered it than I commonly find on the ’Net. Rather than reduce the selection or trim the quotations, I decided to let the reporting of the critical reception exceed my self-imposed maximum length. (I have, though, omitted the brief bios of the playwrights that I normally include when I write a report like this on a play composed by a writer I haven’t written about before. Curious readers will have to look the artists up on their own this time.) Though I don’t endorse it, ROTters may chose to stop after my performance evaluation. I recommend you stay with the report, however, and see what the published reviewers had to say about this attention-grabbing musical. ~Rick]
I
probably should admit a few things before launching into my report on the new
Broadway musical Bright Star. You should know a little about where I’m
coming from in this instance. First,
I’ve never been a big fan of Steve Martin—not his stand-up routines in the
’60s, nor his “wild-and-crazy” appearances on Saturday Night Live in the ’70s, nor his movies in the ’80s (I
could tolerate Roxanne, but that was
probably because he cribbed from Edmond Rostand), nor his earlier attempts at
playwriting (I thought very little of The
Underpants), nor his appearances on talk shows like Letterman and Colbert.
Second,
I don’t really like banjo music. I can
take it in small doses, but a whole evening of it drives me bananas. Music that goes plinkety-plink turns me
off—and what else does a banjo do but plink?
Given
number two, it probably won’t surprise anyone when I add that, third, I don’t
care for bluegrass music. I don’t like
country music in general, but bluegrass leaves me ice cold. I went to college in the South and spent the
first months of my military service in that region, but I never acquired a
taste for this music even though it was often hard to find anything else on the
radio. (We listened to the radio back
then. It was a thing.)
Finally,
one thing that I really dislike is to feel my emotions have been deliberately manipulated. If someone wants to tell a story which along
the way generates an emotional response, whether fright, sadness, laughter, or
wonder, that’s terrific. That’s the way
it’s supposed to happen. But when I feel
that the storyteller has set out from the very start to pluck my heart strings
just to show he can do it, I get pissed.
(I do make an exception for horror stories—that’s the function of that
genre.)
So,
now you have all my pertinent biases.
Now,
I also need to confess something else.
In a departure from my customary practice, I read some of the reviews of
Bright Star before starting to write
this report (but after I’d seen the show).
Having read Christopher Isherwood’s New
York Times review, which comes to my home, I wondered if other reviewers
had the same high opinion of this musical that he did. I won’t reveal now what I found—I’ll be doing
the usual review round-up at the end of the report—but readers may find that my
sneak preview has informed, not my opinion of the performance, but my
reportage. Can’t be helped, I guess: I
can’t un-know what I now know.
Let’s
go back to my habitual starting point.
Diana, my regular theater companion, called me a few months back with
some performances she thought she might like to see. We had started going to shows together some
years ago when Diana asked me to be her sort of Baedeker for theater,
particularly the less prominent performances and companies, because I knew more
about the New York theater scene than she did.
But that was years ago, and all I do now is occasionally point out
productions she should consider and offer an opinion on ones she brings to my
attention. Bright Star was one of the latter, and I expressed some doubts
about it, but agreed to give it a try for the novelty of the play (bluegrass
music on Broadway and Martin’s maiden voyage on the Great White Way) and
because it had been a long time since I’d gone to a Broadway production of an original
play (as opposed to a revival like On the
Town, on which I reported on 18 July 2015, or an adaptation like An American in Paris, reported on 2
August 2016). So I didn’t press my
reservations. (Just to be clear: the
Broadway musical Bright Star is in no
way related to the French-British-Australian film about poet John Keats and his
muse Fanny Brawne that was released in 2009 under the same title.) Diana booked seats for Bright Star at the Cort Theatre on West 48th Street for Friday
evening, 1 April. (That’s right: April
Fool’s Day—which turned out to be inauspicious later in the evening! But I’ll get to that.)
Bright Star, which was
workshopped at Vassar & New York Stage and Film’s Powerhouse Theater on the
Vassar College campus in Poughkeepsie, New York, from 12 to 14 July 2013, had
its world première at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego from 13 September to 2
November 2014 with the same creative and design team that took it to New York
City and mostly the same leading performers.
(There was also a staged reading in New York City after the Vassar
workshop.) The performance text was
reworked following the San Diego première: some characters were dropped; some
songs were removed and others, such as the new opening number (“If You Knew My
Story”), added; and the book was adjusted to accommodate these changes. The show reopened for what was considered its
pre-Broadway try-out at the Eisenhower Theater of the John F. Kennedy Center
for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., 2 December 2015 to 10 January
2016; the final Broadway cast was put together for the Washington
production. The transfer to Broadway
began with previews of the two-hour-and-twenty-minute show at the Cort on 25
February and the new musical opened on 24 March for an open-ended run.
As
I said, this is the first entirely original musical play to come to Broadway in
a very long time. (Even Hamilton is based on a book.) The story was conceived by Steve Martin and
his composing partner Edie Brickell. The
pair met through Brickell’s husband of over 20 years, singer-songwriter Paul
Simon (who recently wrote music for John Patrick Shanley’s Prodigal Son, on which I reported on 28 February, and made his own
Broadway attempt in 1998 with The Capeman),
and first collaborated in 2013 on their début album of bluegrass music, Love
Has Come For You. According to Brickell, a tune Martin had
written for the recording reminded her of a train. This prompted her to research actual southern
trains, and she came across one called Iron Mountain (actually the St. Louis,
Iron Mountain and Southern Railway line), connected to which, she discovered, was
a newspaper story, a true account from 1902 about a man named William Helms
(1835-1917), his wife Sarah Jane Helms (1850-1925), and a child called William
Moses Gould Helms (1902-53). (The
tale has become known as The Iron Mountain Baby and gave birth to a folk song,
“The Ballad of the Iron Mountain Baby,” written by Rev. J. T. Barton in 1902 or
’03.) Brickell has recounted the story of
the play’s origin numerous times, most recently on The Late Show with
Stephen Colbert on 15 March; It was also related in a feature in the “Arts
& Leisure” section of the New York Times of 20 March and on CBS News’s
Sunday Morning on the same date.
The composing team, dubbed Steve and Edie (an
allusion to the husband-and-wife singing duo Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormé,
popular in the 1950s and ’60s when they were billed as Steve and Eydie), wrote
the story that became the plot of Bright Star. Martin and Brickell composed a bluegrass-infused
score for the play; Martin, an avid and accomplished banjo-player since his
teens, wrote the music (which he calls the “tunes”) and the book, Brickell the
lyrics (except for two songs for which she wrote both music and lyrics).
The
Southern Gothic story Martin and Brickell wrote and the plot of Bright Star differ almost entirely from
the legend of the Iron Mountain Baby. Just
as Peter Shaffer did with the news story he read about a boy who blinded six
horses from which he built his 1973 play Equus,
Martin and Brickell invented all but the central fact of a baby thrown from a
train. None of the musical’s characters
bear the names of the real people in the story and the play is set in the Blue
Ridge Mountains of North Carolina in 1923 and 1945, not Washington County,
Missouri, in 1902. So we’ll leave the
legend behind now and take up the Martin-Brickell narrative as the play
recounts it.
In
the small town of Hayes Creek, North Carolina, a 23-year-old soldier,
Billy Crane (A. J. Shively), is just returning home from World War II. He arrives at the cabin where he grew up to
find his father (Stephen Bogardus) waiting to greet him and his childhood
friend, Margo Crawford (Hannah Elless), paying a call. Margo, who runs the town bookstore, has
brought Daddy Cane a book—an obvious excuse to be there when Billy arrives
because she has long harbored a crush on him.
Billy asks after his mother, and Daddy Cane has a hard time telling his
son that one night, she just passed away (“She’s Gone”); Daddy Cane takes his
son to see her grave near the cabin.
There,
addressing his beloved mother who had instilled in her son a love of reading
and words, Billy sings the title song, “Bright Star,” and proclaims his
intention of being a writer like Thomas Wolfe or William Faulkner. While overseas, he’d been sending his stories
home to Margo who’d encouraged him—and even retyped all his manuscripts on good
paper so he could submit them for publication when he was ready. So caught up in his hopeful future, Billy has
no idea how hung up on him Margo is; she’s just a good friend and confidante in
his eyes. He tells her he’s not going to
send his stories to Alice Murphy (Carmen
Cusack), the renowned and famously acerbic editor of the Asheville Southern Journal, a prestigious literary journal that
resembles Tennessee’s Sewanee Review. He’s going to travel to Asheville himself and
deliver the typescripts by hand and camp outside the journal’s offices until
he’s published!
In
Asheville, we meet Alice, a dour 38-year-old spinster, complete with eyeglasses
and hair bun, and her assistants Lucy (Emily Padgett) and Daryl (Jeff
Blumenkrantz), who admire her, fear her, and look out for her, all at the same
time. In a flashback to 1923 in Zebulon,
another small town in the Blue Ridge Mountains (“Way Back in the Day,” one of
the songs Brickell wrote on her own), we learn that Alice was an irrepressible
and inquisitive 16-year-old who delights in shocking her parents (Stephen Lee
Anderson and Dee Hoty) with her modern ways, as they preach the Bible to her to
no avail. We also find that she likes to
tease 18-year-old Jimmy Ray Dobbs (Paul Alexander Nolan), who finds excuses to
come out to the Murphy cabin.
Jimmy
Ray’s the scion of the rich family in town and the son of Mayor Josiah Dobbs
(Michael Mulheren), who’d rather he paid greater attention to the more eligible
daughters of North Carolina’s prominent and connected families. (If
you’ve read any of the press on Bright Star or the reviews of the out-of-town productions, you know what’s coming. A warning: I’m going to include some spoilers
if you don’t already know what’s ahead.
The foreshadowing is so obvious, however, that I contend that Martin and
Brickell’s intended shocks are really no surprises.) The relationship between Jimmy Ray and his
father is established when the boy says he’s filling out an application for the
University of North Carolina because he wants to learn more about the world
than he can in Zebulon—and the Mayor quashes his son’s desires by telling him
he can learn everything he needs to know to run the family business right at
his father’s side, as the Mayor did from his father. (Have
you heard this gambit before? I can
think of at least one play from 1916 that used it.)
Billy
arrives at the Asheville office all chipper and enthusiastic, but Lucy and
Daryl, two comic figures in this almost unrelentingly melodramatic plot
(there’s one other: Margo has an unwelcome suitor, Max, played by Max Chernin,
whose advances are childishly inappropriate), warn him that Alice is not kind to
young writers; she once even bought Ernest Hemingway to tears. (Daryl, we learn, has been submitting stories
to the journal under a pen name, each of them rejected.) Billy announces he has a letter of
encouragement from Thomas Wolfe, to whom the tyro author says he sent samples
of his work while overseas. Alice is
intrigued—even though, she observes, Wolfe died seven years earlier. When Billy hands Alice his stories, however,
something makes her decide to take them home to read. She seems to feel some kind of connection to
the young man. (Again, the foreshadowing of something momentous to come. Can you guess yet? Diana and I did.) Her general advice: “You need to find a
sweeping tale of pain and redemption.” (Hint, hint.) She buys a story from him for $10—not to
publish, but just to encourage him.
After
returning briefly to Hayes Creek to tell Margo the news—and show her the check
(the equivalent today of the munificent sum of $130), Billy moves to Asheville
(“Asheville”) to write day and night, taking Alice’s criticism to heart. (“Which words should I cut, Miss Murphy?” asks
Billy. “The superfluous ones,” Alice
replies brusquely.) She begins to act
more like a mentor than the cold-hearted and exacting editor of her reputation. (Hmmm.)
Meanwhile,
back in 1923 Zebulon (there are a lot of meanwhiles
in Bright Star; the show hops back
and forth between 1945-46 and 1923 every few scenes), Jimmy Ray and Alice are
at a big town fête and go off together for a stroll by the river. They soon end up in a passionate kiss, the
culmination of which is left to our imaginations (does it take much to guess?).
Eleven weeks later, Alice sees a doctor (Michael X. Martin) who informs
her she’s pregnant. She knows Jimmy Ray
will marry her and they’ll raise their baby together, and sure enough, Jimmy
Ray steps up (“I Can’t Wait”)—but Mayor Dobbs has a thing or two to say about
this (“A Man’s Gotta Do”). He offers
Alice a secluded cabin in the woods where she can be alone (and, unsaid of
course, have the baby out of everyone’s view).
Alice gives birth to a son, and her mother and father, who’ve made a
rather abrupt shift from their stern disapproval in the face of this situation,
tend Alice and Jimmy Ray visits—until his father sends him off on a “business
errand.” Then the big shock comes: Mayor
Dobbs and Daddy Murphy have colluded in a plan to take the baby boy to Raleigh
for a “private and legal” adoption. With
Alice and Mama Murphy struggling against him, the mayor’s minion (William
Youmans) almost literally tears the newborn from Alice’s arms (“Please, Don’t
Take Him”) and places him in a leather handbag for the train trip to
Raleigh. (Can everyone guess where this is leading?)
Mayor
Dobbs is on the train, which we learn later passes through Hayes Creek on its
way to Raleigh (reprise “A Man’s Gotta Do”), with the leather bag and at the
close of act one, he leaves his seat and walks to the end of the train and
flings the bag off the platform into the river below. It arcs in slow motion until it hangs just
over the front row of the house as act one ends.
At
the start of act two, we’re again in Zebulon in 1923 (“Sun Is Gonna Shine”). Jimmy Ray is about to leave for Chapel Hill
(where Alice has gone now on an anonymously-funded scholarship to UNC—Can you guess where that came from?), but Mayor Dobbs confesses
to his son that there never had been an adoption and tells him the horror story
of the train trip. Completely undone,
Jimmy Ray decides he can never face Alice again, knowing what his father has
just told him (“I Had a Vision”).
Back
in 1945, we find that Alice as been traveling to Raleigh regularly for over two
decades to look through the county records for documents on the adoption of her
son, always to no avail. She asks the
clerk (Alison Briner-Dardenne), who’s staffed the desk for 20 years, if anyone
else has ever come asking about the same baby, but the clerk tells her no one
ever has. On her way to the train back
to Asheville, she passes by the big house in Raleigh where Jimmy Ray now
lives. He just happens to be coming out
the door as she walks by and they greet one another awkwardly. (The big house is his sister’s; Jimmy Ray
tells Alice he never married.) Alice
asks if Jimmy Ray ever tried to find their son, and Jimmy Ray finally tells
Alice the awful truth.
After
Alice returns to Asheville, she tells the office that she’s going to make a
trip back to Zebulon to see her parents.
Billy arrives at just that moment and suggests that since Hayes Creek is
on the way (See how that train line
works? Any guesses what that suggests?),
wouldn’t Alice like to stop and meet his father and see where he came from? Alice agrees, but must go to Zebulon first
and will stop in Hayes Creek in the way back.
Alice also announces that she’s buying one of Billy’s new stories for
publication in the next issue.
In
Zebulon, Alice has a reunion with her father while her mother is off at a
neighbors. He takes advantage of being
alone with her to ask her forgiveness for his action the night he and Mayor
Dobbs took her baby away from her. He’s
regretted that act ever since; his wife, who’s returned quietly, stops just
within earshot and hears her husband’s confession. Though he’s never forgiven himself, Alice
tells him she forgave him long ago.
Billy
rushes back to Hayes Creek and Margo to share the great news about his story. Almost by accident, he finds himself engaged
to the woman who’s stood by him for so long (“Always Will”). Then he goes to his father’s cabin, and Alice
shows up as Billy and his father are sipping a little moonshine Daddy Cane
keeps under the porch. As Alice and
Daddy Cane get acquainted, Billy goes into the cabin to get some of his old
clothes to take to his own home, now that he’s going to be married, and his
father offers him an old satchel he’s had put away. Of course, Alice recognizes the bag at once,
and then, to clinch the revelation, Billy comes out onto the porch with an old
sweater from his childhood he’d found. (There were actually gasps in the
audience—from those who hadn’t figured this part out already.) It’s the very sweater Alice made for her son
and which he was wearing the night he was taken from her (“At Long Last,”
Brickell’s other solo composition).
When
Alice tells the Canes that she knows the bag and the sweater, Daddy Cane comes
out with the whole story of that night.
He’d gone off to the river to look for good, fat frogs for the night’s
supper. In the evening darkness, he
hears the train go by above him and then finds the leather satchel and the
crying infant boy inside, a little banged up but otherwise fine. He and his wife aren’t young and they never
had children so he sees this little Moses from the rushes as a gift from
heaven. (That bit’s true, by the way—except that the bag was apparently a
cardboard suitcase.) Well, of
course, no one has any doubt that Billy is Alice’s son and that they’ve found
each other after 20 years. (In real life, William Helms never learned
who his birth parents were.)
Back
in Asheville, Billy brings Margo to the office to introduce everyone to his
fiancée. Who else shows up but Jimmy
Ray, who, after greeting his son, promptly proposes to Alice. The show ends with the prospect of a double
wedding of mother and son to their long-enduring loves. (What
an incredibly neat bow! Pause for
handkerchief break.)
Diana
and I felt the show was pretty bad overall; most of the rest of the audience—the
house was fairly full—seemed to have loved it. The production was okay
(with some reservations, which I’ll get to), but the book and lyrics were mediocre
and the music uninteresting and repetitive. I kept thinking how my friend
Kirk, who’s from Kentucky (one state up and one over from North Carolina),
would react to the book, which is almost a travesty of Southern life and
characters. (Think Hee-Haw lite.) If this show
goes on tour in the South, I predict picket lines.
In
a March New York Times feature
article drawn from an interview with the co-creators of Bright Star, Dave Iztkoff reported that Martin and Brickell
affirmed that the musical’s “overall sensibility . . . is earnest, unironic and
absent of cynicism,” which strikes me as antithetical to humor or even
lightness of touch. Nevertheless, on
NPR’s Morning Edition last year,
interviewer Vince Pearson, referring to “that Steve Martin sense of humor,”
remarked that the comedian-librettist “says he worked really hard to get the
funny parts just right.” Martin’s book
is, in fact, relentlessly melodramatic and cliché-ridden. It’s actually two clichés: the abandoned-baby
story and the wannabe-writer tale. They’re both contrived and set-up, but
nevertheless completely predictable, especially if you’ve heard the story
of what inspired the play. (After all, it’s all over the media.) What
little humor there is is forced, brittle, and artificial.
Furthermore,
the narrative bounces back and forth between 1945 and 1923 so much that it’s
hard to keep the story straight—which characters belong in ’23 and which in ’45
and which in both. There are scenes in about four North Carolina towns,
but the main stories take place largely in the two small towns of Zebulon and
Hayes Creek, one which exists mostly in ’23 (at the end we see it in ’45) and
the other in ’45 (with one flashback to ’23). It’s just as hard to
keep the towns straight, too—which one we’re supposed to be in.
The
characters are stereotypes, written as Southern caricatures. Both Martin
and Brickell were born in Texas, though Martin grew up in California. But the lyricist stated, “I grew up in the
country a lot as a little girl so I know all these different characters and it’s
easy for me to remember them and let them spark my imagination.” How did she let them get so stereotypical,
then? They’re so flat and shallow that
none really stands out, so even the good performances are wasted. The reviews
seem to be declaring Carmen Cusack a new star (her character is the bridge between
’23 and ’45), but what she has to do so hamstrings the quality of her
work that only theater pros would be able to see that she’s more than just
competent. The other cast members who
are good don’t even have her platform to shine from. (Dee Hoty, a
three-time Tony-nominee, is totally wasted as Mama Murphy she’s so
underused.)
In
the NPR interview, Martin revealed that he and his partner “grew up on musicals
and . . . we’d loved them.” Then on
CBS-TV’s Sunday Morning last month,
the collaborators explained “that they deliberately created a more traditional
musical, like the ones they grew up loving,” having earlier identified The Music Man (Martin) and The Sound of Music (Brickell) as
favorites. Unlike those Golden Age classics,
however, Martin’s music, arranged by August Eriksmoen and conducted by Rob
Berman, seems repetitious to me
(some reviewers tried to argue that that’s the reaction of someone who
doesn’t understand bluegrass—but I say repetitive is repetitive, no matter
the genre) and Brickell’s lyrics are trite and also repeat themselves—not just
between songs, but within them as well. One important song (it even gets
a reprise) is called “A Man’s Gotta Do”—a great example of triteness
in its own right—and the opening words are: “A man’s gotta do what a man’s
gotta do / When a man’s gotta do what he’s gotta.” Really? (That’s the refrain; it
comes up at least twice in each rendition of the song. So the line’s
repetitive, and then the repetition is repeated! Got it?)
There’s
a title song, “Bright Star” (which originally was the opening number until director
Walter Bobbie got Martin and Brickell to write a new one—which essentially
gives away the whole plot!), but I still don’t get why that’s the title of the
play—except as some ethereal symbol of hope and inspiration. That seems a
flimsy reason to make it the name of the play. They had to write a
song just to justify the play’s title—it has no connection to anything
concrete in the play.
Many
of the notices praised Eugene Lee’s set, which is principally a mobile,
open-sided cabin that doubles as the homes of the Murphys and the Canes and the
bandstand for the 10-piece bluegrass combo. It’s rolled (by members of
the ensemble) all around the stage at times. I found it way too busy and giddy.
There’s also other moving scenery, including a sky drop that transforms
the brick rear wall of the set into the silhouette of a mountain range and a
toy train that runs above the set as a symbol of the central plot element, to
add to the whirligig set. It’s all too
much for this slight play to support; something simpler would have suited Bright Star better.
Despite
my comments about the characters, I don’t put any of the blame on the
actors. The company of 22 is, like the
overdesigned set, more than Bright Star
can manage, however. Director Bobbie
seems to like large ensemble numbers and brings out all the chorus members
(there are 12, plus the 10 principals) for many of the songs as if they were
just waiting in the shadows to pop out and sing and dance up a hootenanny,
choreographed by Josh Rhodes. (There was
a sketch on the old Carol Burnett Show, a spoof of a soap opera
scene, in which Carol and her lover are in a stall shower having a heavy
melodramatic conversation as the background music swells to impossible
heights. The camera pans around to
reveal that the musicians are actually in the shower with the two lovers. Bright
Star’s chorus, appearing without rationale, reminded me of this kind of
incongruity—except, of course, the Burnett
sketch was meant to be silly—and hardly “unironic.”) Perhaps this, along with the moving scenery, is
intended to stand in for the action the play otherwise lacks.
The
principals all seem creditable, however, though it’s hard to be more explicit
because the roles they have to play are so one-dimensional and hackneyed. Billy is all puppyish enthusiasm and hope,
and Shively pulls it off with sincerity and commitment—but the script gives him
nowhere to take it; as Margo, Elless, in a part so underwritten as to seem like
an afterthought, is his distaff counterpart.
Jimmy Ray is adolescent earnestness and determination personified, but Nolan,
too, has no outlet for his character’s apparent strength. Martin never reconciled Jimmy Ray’s apparent
fortitude as a young stalwart, with the way he’s constantly cowed by his
father, and poor Nolan had no way to paper that hole over. Daddy Murphy has to sublime from stern
religiosity to unfeeling hardness to abject self-blame—but Anderson manages to
make him seem at least as real as a soap opera character. Mulheren’s Mayor Dobbs is a dyed-in-the-wool
heartless businessman/family patriarch, a predictable villain right out of 19th-century
meller-drammer—but there’s nothing the actor can do about that except embody it
wholly, and Mulheren does. Only Alice
has any chance to show some dimension, but even she gets only two: the unruly
and unrulable precocious teen of 1923 Zebulon and the cold, humorless editor of
1945 Asheville—and Cusack handles both well enough, but it’s like two actors,
one for the spirited girl and another for the damaged woman, and they don’t
feel connected to one another except that we’re told they are. Even Alice’s final transformation, at the
discovery of Billy’s real identity, is too pat and artificial to be truly
plausible despite Cusack’s honest effort to pull it off.
I
have to add a word here about Blumenkrantz’s Daryl. He plays Alice’s officious editorial assistant
so fey (Talkin’ Broadway’s Matthew
Murray aptly called Daryl a “Paul Lynde part”), the implication is that he must
be gay (not a word, much less a lifestyle, anyone tossed around in 1945,
especially in the conservative South). I
presume Bobbie had a hand in this characterization, and also in the rather
obvious and cheap double-entendres that adhere to some of the lines in one
office scene. The chuckles from the
audience were out of place, and if they were intentionally generated by Martin
or Bobbie, someone should be ashamed of himself.
Because
this is a Broadway première and the creators are simultaneously known cultural
figures and novice musical-theater artists, Bright
Star attracted a lot of coverage. In
addition to pre-Broadway interviews and features in newspapers and magazines
and on TV and radio, there have been reviews of the New York production in
papers from Los Angeles, Chicago, and several other cities. (This is on top of the published notices for
the San Diego début and the Washington outing.)
I won’t include the out-of-town press in my round-up of reviews—it would
just be too much to cover; I will include the national papers like USA Today. Most reviewers liked the play with
reservations, but almost all of them praised Martin’s music and Brickell’s
lyrics. The production, including the
acting, also received plaudits in most outlets.
Diana and I weren’t alone in our disappointment, but we were decidedly
outvoted by both that night’s fellow theatergoers and the press.
No
one was higher on Bright Star than
the Times’ Christopher
Isherwood. Calling the play “a fresh
breeze from the South,” he contrasted it with the more usual fare on Broadway,
saying, “The musical is gentle-spirited, not gaudy, and moves with an easygoing
grace where others prance and strut.”
The Timesman continued his
compliment: “And it tells a sentiment-spritzed story . . . that you might be
more likely to encounter in black and white, flickering from your flat-screen
on Turner Classic Movies.” Isherwood
posited that Alice’s prescription for what Billy should be writing, “a sweeping
tale of pain and redemption,” is “a fitting description . . . of the story the
musical proceeds to unfold.” Bright Star’s plot, he asserted, “involves
events more likely to be found in radio serials and movies of yore,” but counted
“among the pleasures of ‘Bright Star’ . . . the sheer yarniness of the yarn
that unspools.” While Isherwood warned
that “the story certainly skirts (if not embraces) sentimentality and the
overripeness of melodrama,” he added that “the production’s soft-hued style—and
the sometimes wry tone of Mr. Martin’s book—keeps it from curdling into
treacle.” He found that Martin and
Brickell’s songs, “beautifully played” under Rob Berman’s direction, “boast
simple but seductive melodies, and lyrics that have a sweet, homespun quality.” The Times
reviewer labeled the performances “superb” and singled out Cusack, Shively, and
Nolan for special praise. Isherwood’s
one complaint was that the play “untangles all the knots in its story in
something of a rush,” but even the double wedding at the end, while it may
“strain credulity,” is a plot conclusion also used by “a celebrated writer.” “This would be William Shakespeare,”
Isherwood made sure we knew.
(Shakespeare also wrote that “comparisons are odorous,” and I don’t
think this one’s deserved.)
In
amNewYork, Matt Windman, labeling Bright Star “a total anomaly” in
comparison to other Broadway musicals because it’s “wholly original,” described
the new play as “unashamedly sentimental and romantic.” Windman found Bright Star “a heartwarming
and crowd-pleasing musical” because of its
“many pleasant country songs . . ., a sunny disposition and a Southern Gothic
flavor,” despite a plot that “can be jumbled, improbable and sappy, and the
characters [that] are undeveloped.” The
“attractive” production “is marked by vibrant performances, brisk movement . .
. and a backwoods visual design” and Windman singled out Cusack, Shively,
Nolan, Mulheren, and Blumenkrantz among the “winning cast.” Newsday’s
Linda Winer’s “Bottom Line” was: “Wonderful bluegrass show”; she reported, “It
doesn’t shy away from the cornball or the unapologetically sentimental. And, yes, the plot is implausibly romantic and
hinged on coincidence.” Nonetheless, Bright Star’s “downright wonderful—a
multichambered sweetheart of an original.”
The Newsday reviewer added
that “all the characters . . . are richly developed without a hint of big-city
patronization,” specifying, “There’s not a bumpkin or cardboard villain in the
lot.” “This is a show that creeps up on
you,” said Winer, though some of the songs “seem awfully simple and
self-explanatory” and the mobile cabin “gets lugged around until we worry about
motion sickness.” But “the relationships
deepen and darken” as the plot “grows with the complexity of a juicy short
story.” The cast “is uniformly appealing”
and the “choreography . . . brings a haunting moodiness.” Winer concluded by lauding the score, “which
builds with rhythmic surprises, melodic complexity and the deep satisfaction of
humming and plucking strings.”
In
the Daily News, Joe Dziemianowicz declared
that Bright Star’s creators “aim
straight for the heart,” even if it “isn’t a bullseye.” Nevertheless, “it’s sweet and tender and
boasts a fine cast.” The “bluegrassy
score is mellow and pretty,” Dziemianowicz felt. “But it’s also repetitive—melodically and
lyrically.” Like Alice’s advice to Billy
about cutting “superfluous words,” the Newsman
pointed out, “The show could have cut some too,” and observed, “A big reveal is
seen coming a mile away.” The reviewer
wound up by noting that director Bobbie and choreographer Josh Rhodes “keep the
show chugging along.” The New York Post’s Elisabeth Vincentelli characterized
Bright Star as “a Broadway oddity”
because it “juxtaposes an over-the-top plot with a low-key production and
mild-tempered music.” “The show,”
Vincentelli wrote, “ambles along, alternating between lively hootenannies and
lovely ditties” and the “show’s droll, earnest tone does have its appeal,” with
evidence of Martin’s sense of humor in occasional lines. The Post
review-writer summed up: “As a gentle fable, ‘Bright Star’ has a quirky charm,
but its stubborn refusal to face up to its dark side diminishes it.”
In
a brief review in the Wall Street Journal,
Terry Teachout noted that Martin is “a good banjo player who writes
not-so-great plays,” and added, “Now he’s branched out by writing a really bad
bluegrass-pop musical.” The rest of Teachout’s
short notice dismissed the whole enterprise:
In “Bright Star,” directed by Walter Bobbie,
Mr. Martin and Edie Brickell, a singer-songwriter with whom he has made two
albums, tell the story of a painfully earnest young writer from the hills of North
Carolina (A. J. Shively) who comes home from World War II and sells a painfully
earnest short story to a prestigious Asheville quarterly edited by an unhappy
woman (Carmen Cusack) with a terrible secret—or, rather, a Terrible Secret,
this being the kind of show that is constructed exclusively out of uppercase
clichés. The best thing about “Bright Star” is the music, which is bland and
undramatic but competently wrought. The plot is trite, the dialogue humorless
and stiff, the lyrics stupefyingly banal (one song actually starts with the
line “A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do”).
The cast and onstage band work hard and Mr.
Bobbie does his best to breathe life into “Bright Star,” but if Mr. Martin’s
name weren’t on the marquee, it wouldn’t have gotten anywhere near Broadway.
Teachout’s
WSJ review summed up precisely
Diana’s and my opinion; it was the rare notice that did. In USA
Today, Elysa Gardner asserted that Martin and Brickell “have set a
high bar for themselves,” aspiring “to the kind of emotional sweep and
folksy wit we associate with Golden Age musicals.” Martin, however, “captures some of that
old-school spirit with a book that’s as forthright as it is
smart, funny and charming.” Gardner felt
that “Martin and Brickell refuse to condescend to their own characters,” and
director Bobbie “culls spirited, endearing performances from the actors.” The “score poses a few challenges,” noted the
USA Today reviewer, “though not to
the performers, or the superb bluegrass band accompanying them,” while the “production
numbers are exuberantly served by the musicians, and by Josh Rhodes’
vibrant choreography,” though “some of the more delicate ballads seem to
strain for theatricality; you sense they’d be more at home in a coffeehouse
than driving an ambitious story on a Broadway stage.” Gardner concluded, “The tone in which that
story is delivered can also wobble a bit,” but nevertheless, “this gently
shining Star holds its own.”
“Finally,
that all-singing, all-dancing John Keats musical has arrived on
Broadway!” quipped Alexis Soloski in the U.S. edition of the Guardian, a joking reference to the 2009
film that shares a title with this musical.
“No. Wait. Sorry,” Soloski continued. This one’s “a bluegrass tuner” that recounts a
“sweet and occasionally sugary tale.” Following several out-of-town try-outs, the
review-writer of the Guardian noted,
“Bright Star is still suffering some issues of scale. The story it tells is a small and tender one
and the staging and the music, playful and lovely, sometimes struggle to fill
the house.” (As an example, she found
the little train “that trundles on a trestle above the stage . . . both
charming and chintzy.”) Soloski had
problems with the book, showing only “occasional flashes of Martin’s wit,”
which tells a story that “is poignant, yet somehow less than consequential, in
part because the great and ostensibly astonishing reveal is telegraphed from
the beginning, but mainly because the music never quite rises to the emotive
crescendos the tale would seem to demand.”
The song’s lyrics she compared to “Hallmark Card-ish aphorism the chorus
often repeats.” With compliments for the
acting of Cusack, Nolan, Shively, and Elless, as well as Eriksmoen’s
orchestrations (“appealing”) and Rhodes’s choreography (“spirited and graceful”),
Soloski concluded, however, that “Bright Star doesn’t fully shine.” Like the Wall
Street Journal, the Village Voice
gave the production short shrift, commenting only in an omnibus article. Heather Baysa wrote only that Bright Star “is the kind of production
Broadway was made for—and also the kind of production that was made for
Broadway. That’s not necessarily a bad thing: There’s something charming about
soaring ballads, unrestrained emotion, unapologetic spectacle, and aggressively
feel-good storytelling.”
In
its capsule review in “Goings On About Town,” the New Yorker described Bright
Star as a “bighearted musical” whose “two plots converge in a soapy twist
you can see coming acres away, with a weepy ending as implausible as one of
Shakespeare’s quadruple weddings.” The anonymous reviewer concluded, “But
the show sings and swings to the sound of its lovingly and furiously played
fiddle, banjo, and mandolin.” In New York magazine, Jesse Green
acknowledged, “There’s a lot to like in Bright Star and a lot to
admire in the way it was made,” specifying its originality. Green went on,
however, to report that of the two intertwined stories, the one about Billy and
Margo is “awkwardly sandwiched within” the tale of Alice and Jimmy Ray. He found “that it doesn’t take a wizard to
figure out how these stories eventually intersect,” partly because, he reported
that the opening song, “If You Knew My Story,” “does its ‘show the audience
what to expect’ job too well. With
banal, self-cancelling, upbeat lyrics like ‘If you knew my story you’d have a
good story to tell,’ it mostly shows us that we are going to have . . . a
banal, self-cancelling, upbeat musical, the kind that wants to demonstrate a
lot of heart without actually having one.”
The man from New York had a
problem with how “the stories intersect with the songs”: while the score
“sounds great,” it “almost always does exactly the opposite of what a
story-based musical requires.” Green
explained: “Instead of deepening and specifying the emotional situations they
arise from, the songs repeat, in the most clichéd terms, what we already know
from the dialogue.” He added, “It’s not
that the words don’t fit the tune. Rather,
they lack the granularity, the fingerprint, of lived experience” and went on in
a little detail:
Pop music rarely works as theater music
exactly because it’s rarely so specific: It is most often told in the
songwriter’s voice, not a character’s, and is designed to reach everyone, not
someone. [I note here that ROT contributor Kirk Woodward has
discussed this very problem in “Theatrical and Popular Songs,” 2 October 2011.]
So the fact that Martin and Brickell, in
their songwriting at least, are so broadly unironic—a rare thing in musical theater
today—turns out to be not a boon but a boondoggle. Their sincerity keeps collapsing on itself; in
compensation we get plenty of that all-purpose Broadway grout known as charm.
“Charm
is what Cusack . . . uses to produce . . . a marvelous, dense performance from
obvious, thin information,” applauded Green, though he added that “the rest of
the cast, having even less to build from, overdo it.” He also found Lee’s set “charming” quipping
that it “looks like it escaped from his set for Sweeney Todd.” The direction is “unusually handsome,
integrating the choreography . . . into the storytelling more successfully than
the songs.” In the end, Green concluded,
“Still, all this charm undermines the tone of what is, au fond, a sad and almost gothic story.”
Although
complaining that there are more than enough bluegrass musicals on Broadway just
now (The Robber Bridegroom and Southern
Comfort in addition to Bright Star),
Variety’s Marilyn Stasio wrote, “‘Bright
Star’ is Broadway-slick under Walter Bobbie’s direction, with top-rung
creatives involved in the production . . . and an appealing lead performance
from Carmen Cusack,” adding the caveat: “But the sheer scale of the package
overwhelms this sweet but slender homespun material.” The production’s “versatile” set is “properly
rustic,” and the rolling cabin-bandstand is a “neat trick”; Martin’s music “sounds
completely authentic,” however, the songs “also sound repetitive.” “The big drawback to the chatty lyrics,” reported
Stasio, “is that they re-hash the plot’s melodramatic content, but neglect to
deepen or explore the characters, who all speak in such exaggerated twangs they
sound dimwitted.”
In
the Hollywood Reporter, David Rooney’s
“Bottom Line” was simply “Hokey but
heartwarming”; he went on to say that “the plot contrivances” of the play “are
so fanciful that only Shakespeare could have gotten away with them. Still,” continued Rooney, “there’s a
disarming sweetness and sincerity to this folksy Americana bluegrass musical .
. . which makes the tuneful melodrama a pleasurable experience.” Martin’s book, felt the HR reviewer, “is
stuffed with corn and with as many improbable coincidences as plot holes. But the show’s prime asset is the duo’s lovely
score,” and “the pretty ballads and jaunty square-dance tunes generally are
easy on the ear, richly evoking a time and place while amplifying the earnest
and affecting sentiments of this proudly uncynical musical.” Brickell’s lyrics, however, “lack imagination
and specificity, and can seem awkwardly pasted onto gentle melodies that at
times become a little samey.” Rooney
also cautioned that “it’s not intended as a dig to say that the show has the
comfort-food appeal of an emotionally uplifting basic-cable movie,” and he
predicted, “That means many mainstream audiences will find it satisfying
entertainment, though probably more so on tour in the regions than in the
crowded marketplace of New York.” In the
end, however, Rooney allowed that when Cusack sings her final number, “it’s
easy to overlook the shortcomings of the musical’s craft and go with its
sweet-natured optimism.”
Time
Out New York’s Adam Feldman dubbed Bright Star a “gawky
tall tale” and declared that Martin and Brickell “fall short” in the telling of
it. The show “aspires to be . . . ‘a
sweeping tale of pain and redemption,’” instead, Feldman complained, it “trudges
inexorably toward a second-act twist that is at once preposterous and
head-smackingly predictable.” What it
needs, the man from TONY asserted, is “an editor’s sharp blue pencil.” The reviewer ticked off some of the
production’s faults:
Sweeping? In lieu of the color that the story seems to
call for, Walter Bobbie’s production is often actively plain, as though trying
to hide its central bathos in beige. Painful?
For the audience, perhaps, thanks to
shoddy craftsmanship that saddles likable, plucky bluegrass music with lyrics
that run from workmanlike to egregious.
With praise for Cusack’s Alice, both in the writing
and the playing, Feldman concluded, “If not much else, the musical does right
by its star, the bright spot in a sky of murk.”
Stressing that “it’s Martin and Brickell’s music that’s the brightest
star in Bright Star,” Jessica Derschowitz declared in Entertainment
Weekly that “the heart of this new musical [is] the sweeping songs that
elevate the show above the melodramatic pair of Southern love stories that form
its plot.” The play’s narratives
conclude, objected the EW reviewer, “with a twist that seems all too
convenient and end with a bow that’s perhaps too neat” and it “often verges on
corny,” but “Cusack is a revelation” and the rest of the cast “also do fine
work.” In the end, the “story’s fine,
sure. But the music is much better.”
On NBC television in New York, Robert Kahn said, “There’s
much to admire in the final product: The musical is twangy and tightly performed,
with a sweeping score,” but he lamented, “My enjoyment was muted only by the
mostly modest character development.” The
music, Kahn reported, “is rootsy and most often joyful,” however, of the book,
the TV reviewer “felt that too often I was being told what to feel, without
being given opportunity to feel it. Connective
tissue between the storylines, probably intended to sneak up on us at the end,
seemed obvious halfway through the first act.”
Director Bobbie, Kahn continued, “might’ve tightened the screws on the
musical’s climax,” and he had problems with the play’s “borderline-humorous
tone” in some scenes as well as some of the attempts at character
development. The WNBC reporter “loved
the onstage band,” but summed up with: “It’s not a perfect musical; this ‘Star’
doesn’t always guide the way, but at times it beams brightly enough.”
AP’s drama reviewer, Mark Kennedy, began his notice,
the most negative I found, with: “‘If you knew my story, you’d have a good
story to tell,’ the leading lady sings. But
after 2½ hours of this down-home hokum, the answer is clear: No, we don’t.” Martin and Brickell have written, affirmed
Kennedy, “a cliche-ridden, foot-pounding, over-eager Southern Gothic romance
that ill serves a wonderful Broadway debut in Carmen Cusack.” The AP reviewer lambasted Bright Star
by asserting that it “never hits an honest note and seems to have been written
by two people who adore classic Broadway musicals but who have intentionally
decided to make a third-rate version.” He
called the music “weak, with few of the songs fully fleshed out and some having
been recycled from the pair’s previous CDs.”
Kennedy went on: “The book and lyrics are even more feeble, with
graceless lines like ‘I’m ready for my life to begin!’ and ‘I knew this day
would come’ and weird characters,” reporting that director Bobbie “gets
everything out of his cast and keeps a frenetic pace going but for no clear
payoff.” The secret at the center of the
plot, Kennedy announced, is “obvious”; the act one climax contains “one of the
lousiest special effects in Broadway history”; the play’s ending is “a forced
happy note”; Cusack, the stand-out of the cast, commits to “an odd role”; the
denizens of the bookshop and the journal office are “quirky folk” in a story
where “everyone . . . is bookish and smart”; and, finally, the “attempt to make
sense of it all is fumbled.” Even the
setting suffers Kennedy’s derision (the rationale for my prediction of pickets
at Southern theaters):
This is a weird
sort of South that only exists in the daydreams of other musicals. This is a South with overalls and suspenders,
moonshine, stolen kisses by the river and where pretty dresses in boxes are a
reason to stop everything and gasp gleefully. Everyone is white. Everyone.
On the website Broadway World, Michael Dale declared
of Bright Star, “Despite all of its pleasant earnestness and the genuine
talent behind its creation, the new Southern Gothic musical . . . shows all the
signs of being written by a pair who have not quite grasped some of the basics
of the genre’s craft.” Dale admonished, “It’s
never a good idea to have a secondary character with a secret mutter, ‘I knew
this day would come,’ near the end of act two, especially when the audience was
ready for it to come seven or eight songs ago.”
Furthermore, the BWW reviewer warned that “it’s a crime against
the theatre gods to give your star a lot of stage time, but no real chance for
her character to connect with the audience.”
Though he found Berman’s musical ensemble “terrific,” Dale felt that some
of “the music and lyrics are embarrassingly heavy-handed” and the lyrics lack “specificity.” Like the AP’s Kennedy,
Dale also found the stage effect at the end of act one “such a letdown.” “For a musical about literary folk,”
concluded Dale, “Bright Star’s words never approach the stimulating
freshness and intelligence of other current musicals about writers” and the
cyber reviewer’s final word was: “Nice music, fine performances, but other than
that, barely a twinkle.”
Talkin’
Broadway’s Matthew Murray asked, “Who would have thought
that something this fresh could seem so stale?”
Murray asserted that “the overwhelming feeling” generated by Bright
Star “is the exhaustion of cliché,” a feeling that the “other, better
elements” can’t “fully mask.” The
problem, Murray explained, is that “there's nothing new in either the story or
the telling of it,” and however “openhearted” it is, it’s also
“empty-headed.” Fundamentally, the TB
blogger insisted, there isn’t “much meat here” and he cautioned, “If you don’t
like always being smarter than the characters you’re watching or always keeping
eight steps ahead of the plot, Bright Star is not remotely
your kind of show.” The play’s structure
is “a genuine organizational mess” and “it’s rarely possible to know which”
story to follow “or why.” The lyrics,
Murray affirmed, are “generic” or “trite”; the result is “a musical that never
comes alive emotionally.” Even the
“twangy and authentic” sound can’t overcome “the overall meaningless of their
words and presentation,” and even as “good” as the “supporting players are . .
. their characters don't make firm impressions.” The one exception Murray singled out is
Cusack, “making the kind of thunder-clapping Broadway debut we see too rarely.” Unfortunately, the TB reviewer
lamented, “It's not enough to elevate the evening above the pedestrian.”
Declaring that Bright Star is “chockablock
with assets to make for an enjoyable, feel good two hours” on CurtainUp,
Elyse Sommer nevertheless predicted that the play “is unlikely to [b]ecome part
of the canon of ground breaking musicals.”
Still, the CU reviewer suggested, “So give in to Bright
Star’s charms, as [I] did, and let the nitpickers complain.” Nonetheless, Sommer presented a list of
deficiencies to be overlooked: “an inevitably happy ending that relies on some
pretty far-fetched contrivances,” a situation “patterned after an eventually
flourishing pulp magazine . . . called I Confess,” and a “Southern
gothic twist [that] can be guessed at even before” the start of act two.” But Cusack’s Alice, Sommer assured
theatergoers, “is your chance to see a-star-is-born Broadway debut,” as well as
the work of the rest of the ensemble. She
described the work of director Bobbie and the designers as “skillful” and
“fluid,” with special mention of Lee’s moving cabin. The band’s accompaniment “is very much a show
highlight” and Rhodes’s choreography is “ superb, often poetic.”
On New York Theatre Guide, Tulis McCall warned,
“There is a lot of yarn being spun in Bright Star,” which she described as “a
sprawling tale” and “as hokey a tale as you would find in any black and white
movie from the 40’s.” Predicting a Tony
nomination for Cusack, McCall recommended “we let go of the reins and let these
folks take us for a ride,” even though “it takes a while for the story to
reveal a clear direction.” “Although the
sweet quotient on this production is through the [roof]—diabetics be forewarned,”
the NYTG reviewer noted, “—there is still the honest facts of pain and
disappointment.” “There’s more content
than [is] needed” and “[s]ongs go on a little long,” and she warned, “You can see
the conclusion coming a mile away like a train light in a tunnel, but the show
is so exquisite in every way that you don’t mind watching everything unfold.”
McCall dubs the cast “a marvel of ensemble work” and Bobbie’s putting the
musicians on stage “was a wonderful choice”; in the end, Bright Star “is
an evening that will take you out of the city and off to the mysterious magic
of the” Southern mountains.
On Theatre Reviews Limited, David Roberts,
calling Bright Star “an old fashioned Broadway musical” and “a
celebration of storytelling,” pronounced it “a welcomed infusion of
optimism “ and “a delightful breath of fresh air.” The play’s characters “are well-rounded and
have universal conflicts” and so the story “is also universal and engaging”;
what’s more, Roberts said, “Its themes are important and life affirming.” Furthermore, the Theatre Reviews
writer felt that “the stories develop in interesting ways with wonderful
surprises.” He described the cast as “uniformly
magnificent” and Bobbie’s direction as “careful”; as did other reviewers,
Roberts gave special praise to Cusack and complimented the work of others such
as Nolan, Bogardus, Padgett, and all of the principal players. Rhodes’s choreography is “exquisite . . .
with a superb gracefulness and energy,” the review-writer acknowledged, though
he found Lee’s moving cabin “sometimes . . . intrusive.” Roberts felt that “some of the story seems
contrived and sometimes predictable,” but the musical was directed “with an
intensity and freshness that is remarkable and noteworthy.” Sandi Durell of Theatre Pizzazz
perceived “a feeling of corn” at the start of Bright Star, but “you just
learn to accept and truly enjoy much of the music, lyrics and storytelling” of
the play. Rhodes’s choreography is “lively
hootenanny, hand and thigh slapping,” Bobbie’s direction “makes magic,” and Lee’s
scenery is “simple, yet effective.” Durell’s bottom line is: “Bright Star has a
down home warmth that draws the audience into its glow.”
[Diana and I had a
really lousy night after we left the theater as well. As usual, Diana was
running late and then when she got to the theater district, her usual parking
area was blocked by some kind of police action. So she grabbed what she thought was a legal
spot near a fire plug, thinking she’d left enough room to make it safe.
Guess what. When we got to where she left her car after the show,
it was gone—towed. April Fools! Diana had to call 311 to find out where it
was (it turned out to have been taken less than five minutes before we got to
the parking spot!) and then catch a cab to the pier that's the police impound
lot for Manhattan.
[I had offered to go
with her for moral support, but when we got to the facility, Diana couldn't
find her credit card to pay the fare.
(It turned out she’d dropped her wallet at the theater; the Cort house
manager called her the next day.) I ponied up, but I would also have to
cover the towing charge as well so Diana could reclaim her car. Fortunately, the retrieval process is very efficient
and the whole mess took about an hour—including the time to walk to where Diana
left her car, and then look around because, in her rush to get to the theater
on time, she wasn't absolutely certain where she parked.
[What I said to Diana
when we found that the car had been towed was that it was a good thing the show wasn't
good. If we'd had this experience after a good show, it would have
ruined it. The way it was, there was nothing to detract from!
[Irony may be dead—but
cynicism isn’t!]
On Monday, 9 May, the Outer Critics Circle announced its annual award winners for this season. 'Bright Star' took two awards: the production won for Outstanding New Broadway Musical and Steve Martin and Edie Brickell won for Outstanding New Score.
ReplyDeleteThe musical also garnered nominations for its book (Martin), direction (Walter Bobbie), choreography (Josh Rhodes), actress (Carmen Cusack), and costume design (Jane Greenwood).
~Rick
Steve Martin and Edie Brickell's bluegrass musical, 'Bright Star,' on which I report above, will open at the Ahmanson Theatre at the Los Angeles Music Center for a run from 11 October to 19 November 2017. The Broadway début's star, Carmen Cusack, will reprise her Tony-nominated role as Alice Murphy. (The rest of the cast has not yet been announced.)
ReplyDeleteIn other news of Steve Martin, his new play, 'Meteor Shower,' is scheduled to open at the Booth Theatre on Broadway on 29 November 2017 for an open-ended run. The marital comedy will also be comedian Amy Schumer's Broadway début. The rest of the cast will include Laura Benanti, Keegan-Michael Key, and Alan Tudyk; Jerry Zaks will direct.
~Rick