‘Bright Star’ a refreshing change of pace
The first striking image in Steve Martin and Edie Brickell’s musical “Bright Star” is a model train chugging across the top of the stage, as if the audience were in a Manhattan toy store. It makes you look up, either to roll your eyes or to gaze in childlike glee, depending on your affinity toward stories so innocent and syrupy they could be a made into Hallmark cards.
The musical, after all, has the mild, pattering pace of rainwater rolling over pebbles. It takes place in the postwar North Carolina of the 1940s, though we’re spared most of the evangelicalism, PTSD, domestic violence and racism that comes with the territory. This is not the South of “The Color Purple.”
But it is the South one might imagine when hearing the blubbering of a banjo, over which a fiddle strikes a melody that’s both happy and sad. So it’s like that choo-choo train rolling above our heads — synthetic and twee, yet wondrously nostalgic. “Bright Star” knows a child’s toy can be a weapon against cynicism.
After all, in the world of “Bright Star,” people are folks and folks are humble. A bluegrass band stations itself inside a house in the center of the stage, a moving wooden structure that functions as a prop, a stage and a backdrop to the personal drama unfolding to the sounds of early American country. It’s a refreshing choice for a theatrical convention otherwise overpopulated with music that sounds, well, like “Les Misérables” — nervy, enunciated, dazzling.
Instead, Martin and Brickell’s compositions refuse to exert. That’s not the North Carolinian way. Yet it still reaches those heights. “I Had a Vision” marks an emotional climax between Alice (the darkly ebullient Audrey Cardwell), a literary editor, and Jimmy Ray (the fetching Patrick Cummings), a mayor’s son, who used to love one another but were cleaved apart for two decades by a tragedy they could neither prevent nor salvage. The two sing in unison, but they sing the same words for different reasons. That’s one lyric pulling twice its weight by manifesting in the mouths of two people.
And consider “At Long Last,” a deceptive musical flourish that changes the genre of “Bright Star” from bluegrass to gospel. It’s a stylistic choice you don’t need to notice. But if you do, and you recognize the origins of gospel and how it relates to why Alice needs a choir and not a band for this song, “Bright Star” becomes much more than a white Appalachian myth.
In other words, the musical places the saccharine romance, domestic melodrama and brighteyed innocence of the story into a vehicle where such qualities are better suited: song lyrics. Even if “Bright Star,” about the connection between Alice and an upstart writer, Billy (an affable Henry Gottfried), is not a work of narrative genius, it’s nearly perfect as a poem — a musical fable of white America’s attempt to reclaim a sense of virtue and order after World War II and before the civil rights movement.
It’s impressive to witness Martin, a celebrity comic, and Brickell, a celebrity pop star, compose a musical that tries to be neither virtuosic nor clever. “Bright Star” is an intergenerational love story that resolves like a minor chord ending up in major. I wouldn’t call “Bright Star” unambitious. But it’s happy with what it is. In an era filled with art trying too hard to be deep, edgy or political, that feels like a refreshing change of pace.