A ‘Bright’ conversation with a pair of stars
Two Texas expats found themselves in two very different environments.
Steve Martin was on the line from New York, where he was attending an art festival. Edie Brickell was in Maui, 5,000 miles away.
“We couldn’t be further apart, Edie,” Martin says. “We’re about to get this blizzard, and you’re in Hawaii.”
“We just saw some whales,” Brickell says. “Beautiful.” Despite the distance, the pair are represented this week by “Bright Star,” the musical they wrote together that reached Broadway in 2016. Theatre Under the Stars brings “Bright Star” to Houston this week.
“Bright Star” sprung from seeds planted in 2012, when the two began composing and recording together, first on the album “Love Has Come for You,” which was released in 2013. A second album, “So Familiar,” followed two years later, with some material that found its way into “Bright Star,” which splits its narrative about love and longing and a mystery baby between
1923 and 1945.
Despite the great distance, Waco native Martin and Dallas native Brickell talked about their joyful collaboration.
Q: Did “Bright Star” get its start during your first album together? Because writing for a musical seems like a very different exercise.
Brickell: We were really inspired by that first record, writing those songs. So a lot of it started there.
Martin: I remember when Edie and I were touring with the Steep Canyon Rangers, we’d sit around and play songs. And we started talking about how much we loved musicals in our youth and how we still loved them. And we thought some of our songs seemed to be very narrative, like songs from musicals had to be. So it inspired us to think about it and write.
Q: Were there challenges in the writing?
Martin: (Laughs.) Talk about challenges. I can’t think of anything more challenging than writing a musical. There’s such a great tradition in it. It’s high art, in my opinion and Edie’s, too. Then there’s the great expense of it, too. It can’t just be a work of art. You’ve got to appeal to people.
Q: Did you find you had to edit yourselves differently? Typically songs don’t rely as much on dialogue as much as they do in a musical. There are matters of character.
Brickell: I really thought it was a lot of fun slipping into character, trying to feel what they feel and articulate it within that time frame.
Martin: We always had to think and determine when to tell the story through scenes and when to tell it through the music. But Edie has a real gift for character and dialogue in music. It was interesting working out which scenes to cut down or which ones to set to music as part of telling the story. … Edie especially was not afraid to tell the story simply. Sometimes it’s best to play something very straightforward.
Q: I wanted to ask about “Asheville” because it was the song that stuck with me the longest. Did it feel thematically like a key piece to you? That idea that you can try to correct decisions you’ve made, but there are always repercussions.
Brickell: People do seem to react strongly to that song. We nearly dropped it. Remember, Steve? Martin: That is true. Brickell: We had another song we thought was more useful. But Steve saw a whole world in that song, and it sparked some of these characters. Just a beautiful leap in imagination to see this whole world.
Martin: It was fun to work with a song like “Asheville.” It existed before the musical and made me wonder what it would be like in a musical. What does it mean to the musical? You start with this idea: You need someone to leave town. So you have someone go to Asheville. You need someone to lament that. It can guide the story and the settings.
Q: Could you talk about “If You Knew My Story”? On one hand, it has to have certain lyrical information to set the story into motion. But musically it’s pretty rich, with a strong gospel feel, which reminded me that the banjo has a history that predates bluegrass players in the ’50s.
Brickell: If you could emphasize that, I think it’s really important. It’s important to me to show how much more musical Steve’s writing sounds than what people expect from somebody with a banjo. People always pigeonhole it into a genre. But Steve plays the banjo with every kind of music I’ve ever heard. You can feel it and hear it in the melodies. So it’s frustrating to me for him to be pigeonholed as bluegrass. He’s way more musical than that.
Martin: To a strict bluegrass person, this show is not bluegrass at all. It’s more folkie, clawhammer banjo Americana. Maybe there’s one song that’s bluegrass-ish in the entire musical.
Brickell: You sing those melodies, and they’re bigger; the way they open up goes way beyond bluegrass. The bluegrass people will probably be disappointed, like you watered down their moonshine.
Q: “Big Star” came out around the same time as another notable musical that riffed on the idea of “who lives, who dies, who tells your story?” But it struck me as asking some of the same questions where the line between fact and personal mythology is a little fuzzy.
Martin: Well, it came from a true story that Edie discovered on the internet. It took place in 1904. That gave it some shape, though there a lot of missing facts in the story. Like where the baby came from. Our job was to kind of construct it backwards from that, to be more about what could happen. We didn’t set out to tell a true story. It was more what could’ve happened. But the actual true story is a mystery: where this baby came from and where it went. Was it murdered?
Q: You get a very different musical with a dead baby.
Martin: Yes. Not a happy story.
Brickell: Could’ve been dropped … .
Q: Would you do such a big project again?
Brickell: It’s the most fun I’ve ever had. Martin: It was really fun. Brickell: It just never felt like work to me. It was more like waking up and working on a puzzle every day. And working with all these great people, and I was made to feel so confident by Steve. It was a joy through and through.
Martin: When you’re actually working on it, it’s really not work. It’s kind of this interesting thing where your senses are on alert at all times. It’s a great place to be.
Brickell: And could I please add something? We really made this hoping it would be something beautiful, and also something for all ages.