Review Roundup: Steve Martin and Edie Brickell's BRIGHT STAR

The Old Globe presents World Premiere of Bright Star, a new American musical featuring music by Edie Brickell and Steve Martin, lyrics by Brickell, and book by Martin, based on an original story by Martin and Brickell. Directed by Walter Bobbie, Bright Star runs now through November 2, 2014 on the Donald and Darlene Shiley Stage in the Old Globe Theatre, part of the Globe's Conrad Prebys Theatre Center.

From award-winning screenwriter and playwright Steve Martin (Picasso at the Lapin Agile, Roxanne) and chart-topping singer-songwriter Edie Brickell comes a world premiere American musical inspired by their Grammy Award-winning collaboration "Love Has Come For You." Bright Star features 25 new songs-Americana with a touch of rock-and tells a beguiling tale that unfolds in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina between 1923 and 1945. Billy Cane, a young soldier just home from World War II, meets Alice Murphy, the brilliant editor of a southern literary journal. Together they discover a powerful secret that alters their lives. Tony Award-winning director Walter Bobbie (Broadway's Chicago) makes his Globe debut with this entertaining musical of enduring love, family ties, and the light of forgiveness that shines from a bright star.

Let's see what the critics had to say...

Charles Isherwood, The New York Times: 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...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...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.

Bob Verini, Variey: Yep, that's the real Steve Martin collaborating with roots-music queen Edie Brickell on the Old Globe premiere "Bright Star," but not the wild and crazy guy with an arrow through his head nor the sophisticated satirist of "Shopgirl." Rather, it's the relaxed banjo-picking talk show guest, fingers pluckin' out a gentle, tuneful, uninflected folk fable of loss and longing. If too rarefied for Gotham's embrace (as the somewhat similar "Violet" was), this lyrical tuner could find ready acceptance regionally. Either way the storytelling would benefit from higher stakes and greater guts.

James Hebert, San Diego Union-Times: The way "Bright Star" endeavors to graft the matter-of-fact onto the mystical (or at least the wildly serendipitous), and takes on touches of melodrama in the process, can feel ungainly, and is likely one of the aspects that Martin, Brickell and director Walter Bobbie (of "Chicago" renown) will need to work on as this one-of-a-kind show continues to develop. And that dynamic has everything to do with a huge mystery at the musical's center - one not to be revealed here (else it wouldn't be much of a surprise). Suffice to say "Bright Star" is based on an actual event, one connected to a song that, as it happens, is not actually in the production.

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