BRIGHT STAR: Old Fashioned Musical With A Big Heart and a Shining New Star At Its Center

Dear Broadway theatergoer, please set aside your cynicism and let me tell you about the sweet and tender new musical at the Cort Theatre called Bright Star that is as embraceable as the lovely spring weather.

You probably already know that Bright Star is the result of a collaboration between two celebrities with no prior experience writing a musical: singer-songwriter Edie Brickell and comic, actor, and occasional story and play writer Steve Martin.

If you need reminding, Mr. Martin’s most famous brush with songwriting fame came in 1978 with the novelty number “King Tut,” while Ms. Brickell’s biggest hit, “What I Am,” dates to a decade later when she sang with a group called The New Bohemians.  So some initial cynicism about their capacity to write a Broadway musical is understandable. 

But bear with me.   

For in the ensuing years, Mr. Martin began to delve most seriously into his lifelong love of banjo music. He began touring with a bluegrass group, the Steep Canyon Rangers, picking up the top award of the International Bluegrass Music Association in 2011. Eventually, he joined up with Ms. Brickell, and together they produced a couple of bluegrass albums. 

So it comes as no surprise that Bright Star boasts a lively and lovely bluegrass score, performed here by a gifted orchestra under the baton of Rob Berman, an accomplished theatrical musical director possibly best known to New Yorkers for his stellar work with City Center’s Encores! productions. If you like the toe tapping sounds of banjos, fiddles, and guitars, there’s plenty of that on hand, and it’s all good. 

Of course, there is more to a musical than the music. The story Brickell and Martin tell falls in tone somewhere between realism and folk tale, a mix that doesn’t always blend smoothly (possibly director Walter Bobbie could have done a better job joining the seams) but one that gets the job done and opens the way for the excellent cast to win our hearts as they take us back and forth in time between the 1920s and the year 1945-46, immediately following the end of World War II and the homecoming of the troops.  

With Bright Star, the “home” in homecoming is in rural North Carolina, with side trips to the city of Asheville. We follow the lives of two separate but ultimately intersecting couples, whose connection becomes clearer as the show progresses.  (You’ll probably have your own “aha” moment well before the big reveal, but that won’t stop you from appreciating its impact on the characters when they work it out for themselves).     

At the center of Bright Star is the show’s own bright star, Carmen Cusack, making a most impressive Broadway debut as Alice Murphy, the strong-willed editor of a major literary magazine, whose story of loss and redemption this is. Hers is one of those magical debuts that can launch a performer to stardom, and you will know it from the moment she opens her mouth to deliver the opening song, “If You Knew My Story,” through to the show-stopping 11 o’clock number, “At Long Last.” That song, one of two with both music and lyrics by Ms. Brickell, is a real highlight and nearly redeems her overreliance on generally (and probably intentionally) folksy and repetitive lyrics that can get under your skin. 

As good as she is, Ms. Cusack does not carry the show alone. A. J. Shively exudes down-home charm as Billy, the young man back from the war and eager to make a name for himself as a writer. Paul Alexander Nolan is excellent, as well, as Alice’s great love Jimmy Ray. Hannah Elless does nicely as Billy’s love interest, though she does have do a lot of waiting around while he figures things out. Every good show needs its villain, of course, and Michael Mulheron amply fills the bill as Jimmy Ray’s controlling and heartless father. 

By some confluence of coincidences, New York theatergoers have been treated to three different bluegrass musicals of late. There was Southern Comfort, which just closed at the Public Theater, and The Robber Bridegroom, still going strong at the Laura Pels Theater.  But Bright Star, despite a few structural flaws, decidedly outshines the rest.  

Feel free to share this blog with your friends, and to offer up your own theater stories by posting a comment. I also invite you to check out the new website Show-Score.Com, where you will find capsule reviews of current plays from Yours Truly and many other New York critics.  

‘Irma La Douce’: Encores! Production of Frothy Musical Fails To Froth

Irma La Douce is a French cream puff of a musical that should float and dance and soar like a kite caught in a rambling breeze. Unfortunately, despite the best efforts of the two charming stars at its center, the Encores! production rarely breaks loose from the tug of gravity and remains earthbound. 

There have not been very many revivals of this show, which dates to 1956 and a highly successful run in Paris (4 years) and then London (3 years). It landed on Broadway in 1960 in a production that was helmed by renowned director Peter Brook and choreographed by Oona White. Starring Elizabeth Seal, Keith Michell, and Clive Revill, Irma La Douce was a moderate hit here, running a little over a year on Broadway before making the rounds of summer stock (which is where I happened to see it for the first time) before more-or-less disappearing, save for the original cast album (still in print).

The plot is really just an excuse to pull off a lot of silliness, dependent on a pretense that gets out of hand. Nestor le Fripé (Nestor “the disheveled”), a poor law student, falls in love with Irma, a highly successful prostitute.  But he quickly decides he no longer is comfortable with her career (which pays the bills for both of them), so he invents a rich older man, “Oscar,” who will become her only client, while Nestor will be her “mec” (pimp). The gag of the show is that “Oscar” is actually Nestor, donning a two-bit fake beard that somehow manages to fool everyone.

Things work out for awhile, but all that flip-flopping between  “Oscar” and Nestor is getting to be an exhausting enterprise for our hero, so he decides to get rid of “Oscar” by drowning him in the Seine. Immediately, Nestor is arrested for murder, is convicted, and is packed off to Devil’s Island, along with most of the rest of the cast. The show wraps up with a sequence of events worthy of the Marx Brothers that eventually reunites the two lovers once more.       

I mention the Marx Brothers because that’s the level of wackiness it would take to pull off a winning production of Irma La Douce.  I envision actors swinging on ropes, falling from the rafters, and running up and down the aisles of the theater.  Alas, there is precious little of this kind of zany staging in the Encores! production, and, unfortunately, scenic designer John Lee Beatty, who is retiring after two-decades with Encores!, has chosen this time to build a solid fixed set, when sparse, fly-away pieces would better serve the style of the show. 

Under John Doyle’s less-than-inspired direction, Jennifer Bowles exudes a great deal of charm as Irma, and shows lovely loose-limbed skill as a dancer in the two numbers that give choreographer Chase Brock the opportunity to let loose his imagination (the exuberant “Dis Donc” in Act I, and the absurdly improbable “Arctic Ballet” in Act II).

Rob McClure—a very gifted comic actor—tries his best to raise the level of fun as he manically switches between Nestor and “Oscar.” But truthfully he did something similar and with far greater success in the Encores! production of Where’s Charley three years ago, in which he transformed frenetically between the roles of the title character and his “aunt.”   

What Irma La Douce has going for it is the original music by French composer Marguerite Monnot, including “Valse Milieu,” “Our Language of Love,” the Piaf-like title song, and the bouncy “Dis Donc.”  The always reliable Rob Berman conducts the small (10 players) orchestra performing the original score, allowing the delectable music to come shining through. The English language lyrics by Julian More, David Heneker, and Monty Norman are generally not much more than serviceable, though, and sometimes are forced to the breaking point in order to push a rhyming line.  Example:

                        It's clear to you, it's clear to me

                        This precious moment had to be

                        Other moments outclassing,

                        Guardian angels are passing.   

I do believe a production in French (with supertitles if necessary) might do a better job of capturing the show’s helium-balloon spirit.  

Ah, dis donc!

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‘Little Me’: A Fun-Time Romp from Encores!

Little Me, the 1962 Neil Simon/Cy Coleman/Carolyn Leigh musical, is probably not a rare undervalued masterpiece that needs to be lovingly restored to appreciate its true worth. But the current joyful production by Encores! is as welcome as a cup of hot chocolate laced with whipped cream during these snowy, icy, sleety, bitterly cold days and dreary nights that have been the hallmark of this winter in New York. 

Little Me is a laugh-filled show with TV sketch comedy roots (Simon famously launched his career writing skits for Sid Caesar, who starred in the original Broadway production) and a tuneful score, with music by Coleman and lyrics by Leigh. 

The story unfolds through the frame of depicting the writing of the memoirs of the fictional stage, screen, and television star Belle Poitrine, as told to “Patrick Dennis,” the pen name of the author of the book on which the musical is based (as well as the author of the more highly successful Auntie Mame).   

But even though Belle’s life story provides the shape for the show, the musical rises or falls on the strength of the male lead, who portrays 7 different men in Belle’s life, most of whom die before the end. 

With the Encores! production, we are most fortunate in that the shoulders on whom this task falls belong to Christian Borle, who has a keen and mischievous sense of comic timing reminiscent of Groucho Marx or Charlie Chaplin (this was even truer of Borle’s performance as Black Stache in Peter and the Starcatcher). 

Borle runs on and off the stage, going through quick costume and personality changes throughout the entire show. (This includes the requisite gag where he has to “ad lib” a cover-up for an incomplete change in appearance). The best of these characterizations is that of Fred Poitrine, the terribly nearsighted and socially inept World War I doughboy, who endearingly sings “Real Live Girl” to Belle, and marries her just in time to legitimize the ensuing birth of her daughter before he marches off to his untimely death by paper cut. 

As good as Borle is, this is far from a one-person show, which boasts wonderful performances from the entire cast, including Rachel York as the young Belle; the marvelous Judy Kaye as the older Belle; Tony Yazbeck as George, the boy-next-door turned hotshot nightclub owner (he delivers a terrific “I’ve Got Your Number”); Harriet Harris as the snobbish mother of Noble, Belle’s one true love; and Lee Wilkof and Lewis J. Stadlen as Belle’s agents, the Buchsbaum brothers. Stadlen, who most recently appeared with Nathan Lane in The Nance, is another theatrical stalwart who took the world by storm when he gloriously pulled off the multiple-roles acting feat by playing five characters in the acclaimed 1974 revival of Candide.   

This production also boasts outstanding work by the singers and dancers of the chorus.  And might I add, the choreography by Joshua Bergasse is so creative it is a wonder to me he has not become a major Broadway fixture. 

With Little Me, Encores! is entering its 21^st year of producing short-term revivals of Broadway musicals, and it almost seems to top itself year after year.  Minimalist set designs have become increasingly clever (the sinking of The Gigantic in Little Me could give Titanic: The Musical a run for its money at the concert production at Avery Fisher Hall later this month), and the eschewing of script-in-hand performances by the cast is becoming more and more de rigueur. 

A shout-out to director John Rando and music director Rob Berman, as well as to everyone involved with this production.  They should all join Belle in raising a glass and singing:  Here’s to us, my darling my dear/Here’s to us tonight!

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