With music and book by Steve Martin and music and lyrics by Edie Brickell, BRIGHT STAR is based on an original story by Martin and Brickell and features direction by Walter Bobbie.
Inspired by an astonishing true event, the wholly original new musical BRIGHT STAR tells a sweeping tale of love and redemption set against the rich backdrop of the American South in the 1920s and 40s. When successful literary editor Alice Murphy meets an ambitious young soldier just home from World War II, their connection inspires Alice to confront a shocking incident from her past. Together they discover a long-buried secret with the power to transform their lives.
If you had any doubt of the formidable polyglot of talent that makes up one Steve Martin, or you were under the misapprehension that his banjo was primarily the accessory of a stand-up or Hollywood comic, the very conception of "Bright Star" should be enough to lay that to rest. In collaboration with the folk-rock musician Edie Brickell, Martin forged score, book and story for this wholly original musical -- a piece that, despite its tonal unevenness and frequent, needless diversions from truth, still feels like a significant, distinctive and artful entry into the Broadway repertory. And it comes replete with a beautiful leading performance from Carmen Cusack, an actress who has worked often in musicals in Chicago but here makes a gorgeously authentic Broadway debut that looks likely to change her life.
Director Walter Bobbie's production in the Cort Theatre, where the musical had its official opening Thursday night, retains the intelligently spare look of the incarnation in the Kennedy Center's Eisenhower Theater. (It's also tauter - about 10 minutes shorter than it was in Washington.) Evoking a bucolic North Carolina of the 1920s and '40s, set designer Eugene Lee deploys a skeletal cabin on wheels as the visual centerpiece, in which the band, expertly conducted by Rob Berman, sits and strums Martin and Brickell's amiable tunes, albeit with some oddly-set lyrics. It's also worth noting that one of the biggest hands of the evening comes for the orchestra's playing of the entr'acte, the purely instrumental interlude that greets us after intermission.
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