Baby blues and blue grass unfold in the Blue Ridge Mountains
“Bright Star” The Arvada Center 666¼
If you are a fan of 1930s films, there is a fine chance that “Bright Star” — created by Steve Martin and Edie Brickell, at the Arvada Center through Sept. 29 — will strike a chord. A banjo chord, a mandolin chord, some double stops on the fiddle and, yes, a strong note of nostalgia. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Heck, you may even cry as the show heads for its tidy conclusion. Although no one person gets all the credit, the show — directed by Rod A. Lansberry — strums the heartstrings, too. The sight of a suitcase on a dirt porch hit hard. Gulp.
The regional premiere of this pretty show — which ran on Broadway and won the Drama Desk Award for outstanding music in 2016 — offers the satisfactions of a Hollywood classic in which you can accurately divine the late reveals and final scene. There’s the vexed love story of a central couple. There’s a younger pair who haven’t quite figured out what they will mean to each other by the tale’s end, though we can bet the farm on their outcome. There are two fathers — one a mayor, the other a religiously righteous farmer — who make their children’s lives hellish.
The book, music and lyrics were co-written by Martin, the famous comedian but also an ace banjo picker; and Brickell, a singer-songwriter who flashed briefly on the pop charts with the hit 1988 album “Shooting Rubberbands at the Stars,” recorded under the name Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians.
In 2013, Martin and Brickell united for the bluegrass album “Love Has Come for You.” Their creative chemistry took. When they found they shared a fondness for musicals, they set out to writing one.
An appealing ensemble and the deft, toe-tapping work of the onstage band (directed by Eric Alsford) plait the stories of a tough-minded female editor and a returning GI with a hankering to be a writer.
“Bright Star” begins in 1945 with editor Alice Murphy. She has a story to share separate from the short fiction she publishes in the Asheville Southern Journal. Merideth Kaye Clark tailors her lovely voice to this no-nonsense character: It’s robust, earthy, the vocal equivalent of good-looking more than pretty. The opening number, “If You Knew My Story,” sets up a flashback to 1923 and Zebulon, N.C., a town about 270 miles east of the Blue Ridge community of Asheville.
As for World War II soldier Billy Cane (Jake Mendes), upon his return to Hayes Creek, N.C., he learns that his beloved mother has died (Mendes and Jeff Roark, as his dad, share the blue notes in “She’s Gone”). After a visit to the bookstore, clerked by his childhood friend and first and best reader, Margo (Steph Holmbo), the aspiring writer sings “Bright Star” an openhearted song of hope and ambition, and heads off to Asheville intent on getting published.
“Bright Star” moves back and forth between the two eras. There’s the one in which Alice runs the show. Her assistants Daryl and Lucy are appropriately reverent; and their portrayers, Elliot Peterson and Rebecca Spence, prove tart with the comedy.
Then there’s the ‘20s in which Alice was a willful young lady (”black sheep” is how her daddy puts it in “Firmer Hand/do Right”). She had a crush on Jimmy Ray Dobbs, the mayor’s only son, that lead to a pregnancy and rending complications. One of the show’s loveliest songs comes as Alice embraces her future child. In “I Can’t Wait,” she’s joined in a rich harmony by three women in white shifts, and Jimmy joins in.
The Asheville Southern Journal and its seasoned editor are fictional but the backstory that spurs Alice’s tale isn’t. There’s a folk song about the “Iron Mountain Baby” — named for the tracks near which a newborn was found in 1902. And Brickell and Martin recorded a nice twang of a thing — “Sarah Jane and the Iron Mountain Baby” — for their 2013 album (“Sarah Jane, sara jane, bea mama to the boy from the train”).
Martin and Brickell have embroidered some fine threads of feminist insight into this story set in the early and mid-20th century. For instance, they do not expect us to rally around Mayor Dobbs’ “A Man’s Gotta Do” number, no matter how vociferously Larry Cahn sings the first instance at son Jimmy Ray (Dieter Bierbrauer). The cleverly tautological lyrics ( “A man’s gotta do, what a man’s gotta do, when a man’s gotta do, what he’s got to”) may have you thinking about Martin’s comedic gifts of silliness but also irony. The mayor’s reprise of the song at the end of the first act, meant to justify the dastardly, is anything but funny.
Lansberry and lighting designer Shannon Mckinney deserve a special shout-out for the indelible image of a valise — thrown from the last car of a train — arching through the night. The entire production is handsome. Clare Henkel’s suits for Alice are particularly fetching. Brian Mallgrave does crafty work evoking Cane’s childhood home and Mayor Dobbs’ house with minimal fuss on a fittingly lean set.
The leads — Clark, Mendes, Bierbrauer — are like the silver screen’s contract players. You want to see them. you want to root for them. And the supporting cast is just as winning.
Alice sang in the opener that if we knew her story — with the heartache, the resilience — we’d “have a good story to tell.” This production makes sure of it.