Theatre in Review: Bright Star (Cort Theatre)

	Carmen Cusack. Photo: Nick Stokes

If you're going to hang an entire show on a single major plot twist, you had better tend to it carefully; otherwise you're going to give away the whole game. That's the main problem with Bright Star; the new musical, which establishes two narratives in separate time frames, intrigues us and has us wondering how they will come together -- but not for long enough. Instead, it practically semaphores its intentions, leaving us in the odd position of waiting for the authors to get around to telling us what we already know.

Billy Cane, back home in the American South after service in World War II, has a passel of short stories he wrote while on active duty. His hopes pinned on becoming a writer, he decides to submit them to The Asheville Southern Journal, a prestigious literary magazine. Not content to mail the stories in, he storms the offices himself, hand-delivering his work for posterity. On arrival, he meets Alice Murphy, the publication's fierce, exacting editor. Not only did she turn down The New Yorker when it came calling, Alice once made Ernest Hemingway break down sobbing. His crime? "He used the word 'their' as a singular pronoun."

Surprisingly, Alice takes an interest in this young stranger, having been charmed by his obviously fake letter of recommendation from Thomas Wolfe -- who, as she sharply notes, has been dead for seven years. Still, she says, "He's a liar and liars sometimes make very good storytellers," so she takes him on, paying him enough money to stay in Asheville and start work on some new pieces.

At this point, the action jumps back 20 years, to when Alice was young, headstrong, and too ambitious for her home town of Zebulon. (Among other things, she has dreams of college, worrying her Bible-toting daddy, who wishes she would attend to women's work in the kitchen.) Alice also has eyes for Jimmy Ray Dobbs, a local boy, who returns the favor; before long, they are slipping off to the forest together. However, Jimmy Ray is the son of the mayor, Josiah, and his father is reserving him for a young lady with a pedigree and a bankroll to go along with it. His objections go unheeded, and soon Alice is pregnant. Jimmy Ray wants to do the right thing and call the minister, but both fathers convince Alice that the prudent thing to do is to slip away to a cabin in the woods and have the child; she agrees, unaware that Josiah has nefarious plans for disposing of it.

By now, it's pretty clear only one thing can possibly connect the two narratives; even so, the book's author, Steve Martin, working from an idea by Edie Brickell, is forced to put the story through all sorts of contortions to get the big secret revealed. By then, he has such a crowd of characters to deal with that many of them get lost in the shuffle. This is especially true of Jimmy Ray, who vanishes when plans are being laid for the disposal of his son, coming back just long enough to sing a ballad called "Heartbreaker." (He reappears 20 years later, when, for the purposes of the plot, he is still conveniently unmarried.) Bright Star is filled with people busily coming and going, but not acquiring any interest or complexity. Near the end, when the big secret is out, there should be plenty of displacement and upset to go around; instead, everyone is hustled into a happy-ending tableau that feels almost comically unearned.

What allure Bright Star has comes from Martin and Brickell's music, which has the melancholy pull of a great country ballad; in the show's best moments, it gets carried away on a tide of powerful melody. Brickell's lyrics are another matter; once they hit upon an idea they like, they tend to repeat it ad infinitum, allowing one to notice how much they rely on false and/or mundane rhymes. The best numbers are the opening, "If You Knew My Story," which introduces Alice; "Sun's Gonna Shine," the Act II opener and the one number to cut across the two time frames; and "At Long Last," when Alice realizes that her years of mourning are over.

This last number is pulled off largely because it is sung by Carmen Cusack, the sun that shines on this not-always-elegant show. One of the theatre's naturally radiant performers, she commands the stage by entering, removing her hat, and revealing a smile bright enough to reach the last row of the Cort's second balcony. Equally convincing as both a frightened young mother and a fearless member of the literary set, she holds the evening together through sheer force of personality. (The moment when she first becomes, in full audience view, her coltish younger self is a moment of stage magic.) The others in the cast mostly have to settle for making pleasant impressions as they pass by. A. J. Shively has little to do as earnest Billy Cane and his romance with a young bookseller (an appealing Hannah Elless) gets pushed to the sidelines. Paul Alexander Nolan comes on strong as Jimmy Ray, then has little to do for far too long. As Billy's daddy, Stephen Bogardus is little more than a messenger, delivering bombshells in each act. As Alice's father, Stephen Lee Anderson is tough and remorseless in Act I and sweet and tender in Act II. Dee Hoty, usually cast as glamour-pusses, at least gets a nice change of pace as Alice's gingham-clad mother. Michael Mulheren's Josiah -- a kind of road company version of Tennessee Williams' Big Daddy -- is an eminently hissable villain. Jeff Blumenkrantz and Emily Padgett amuse as Alice's wisecracking associates.

Walter Bobbie's constantly-in-motion staging, aided by Josh Rhodes' appealingly countrified choreography, features an unfinished on-stage cabin housing some of the musicians -- others are confined to galleries at stage right and stage left -- that whirls around the stage, moving us back and forth between 1923 and 1945. Eugene Lee's skeletal design also features a railroad trestle built into the proscenium, across which passes a toy train. (There is also a moment of enchantment at the end of Act I, when a valise thrown from a train hovers, magically, in midair.) Japhy Weideman's endlessly inventive lighting combines several ideas -- sidelight, single-source effects, and colorful sky looks projected on a wavily-edged white drop -- to often stunning effect. Jane Greenwood's costumes unroll bolt after bolt of period-accurate patterns, providing a fine study in contrasts of the styles of two eras. What with the musicians here, there, and everywhere, it can't have been easy to design the production's sound, but Nevin Steinberg has given it both a pleasing transparency and the necessary intelligibility.

Everyone involved seems have set out to spin a musical yarn with the sweet simplicity of a folk tale, but Bright Star sometimes strays into the simple-minded, and we spend too much of the show one step ahead of its authors. "You never know what life will bring," everyone sings at the curtain; in this case, I beg to differ. -- David Barbour