Bright Star

A “fresh breeze from the South” is blowing through Broadway, said Charles Isherwood in The New York Times. Bright Star, a “gentle-spirited” bluegrass musical written by Steve Martin and Edie Brickell, “moves with an easygoing grace where others prance and strut.” Set in North Carolina in the 1920s and 1940s, the tale focuses on Alice Murphy (Carmen Cusack), the worldly editor of an Asheville literary journal, and young Billy Cane (A.J. Shively), a World War II vet and aspiring writer Alice takes under her wing. Flashbacks to Alice’s troubled teen years, when a whirlwind romance led to an unwanted pregnancy, suggest that a big revelation will eventually link the two stories. Yes, the show leans toward melodrama. But Cusack makes a “gorgeous Broadway debut” and the show’s “simple but seductive melodies” make it all go down easily.

You could even call it spoon-feeding, said Jesse Green in NYMag.com. Brickell’s libretto “almost always does exactly the opposite of what a story-based musical requires.” Instead of advancing the plot and giving the characters emotional depth, the songs “repeat, in the most clichéd terms, what we already know from the dialogue.” The title number, which follows a scene in which Billy announces his plan to submit his stories to Alice’s journal, has a snappy tune, but the lyric offers only this Hallmark Card sentiment: “Bright star / Keep shining for me / And one day I’ll shine for you.” Most contrived of all is the show’s climax, when a hardly surprising connection between Alice and Billy is revealed, and the tone turns suddenly gothic. Some audience members actually burst out laughing.

“It is, you might say, a red state kind of show,” said Chris Jones in the Chicago Tribune. But perhaps “good ol’ blue state Broadway,” so prone to jaundiced-eyed deconstructions of love and family, could use a dose of sincerity. Bright Star’s tale of redemption “got under my skin despite some resistance,” and Cusack—who’s recognizably the same woman no matter her character’s age—“is a revelation.” Despite its unevenness, Martin and Brickell’s musical “feels like a significant, distinctive, and artful entry into the Broadway repertory.”