nothin Bright Star Shines At Shubert | New Haven Independent

Bright Star Shines At Shubert

A young man is leaving his home in rural North Carolina, heading for the town of Asheville. He’s stopped in a bookstore before he goes. A young woman works there. There’s something between them that they’ve never really talked about, but they both feel it. He dances out the door.

She reaches out a hand and stops time. Reverses it. The young man sashays back into the bookstore, in reverse. His hat leaps from his head, as if by magic. He’s back where he was, right before he said his goodbye. She stops time again, and sings in that frozen moment, a song full of hope that the young man finds what he’s looking for. She wants the best for him. But she wants him, too, and she doesn’t quite know how to reconcile the two.

Bright Star, written by Steve Martin and Edie Brickell and playing at the Shubert Theatre through Sunday, is full of moments like this, when acting, singing, just the right amount of clever technical wizardry, and a good song come together in the way that only live theater can, infusing a story of Southern melodrama with winning charm.

At the beginning of the play, Billy Cane (Henry Gottfried) returns home from World War II with ambitions to become a writer. His father (David Atkinson) believes in him, as does old friend and possibly new flame Margo (Liana Hunt), who works in a bookstore in their small town. Cane goes to Asheville to make his name with a literary journal based there, where he crosses paths with hard-edged, frosty editor Alice Murphy (Audrey Campbell) and her staff Daryl (Jeff Blumenkrantz) and Lucy (Kaitlyn Davidson). Alice sees promise in Billy. She connects to his developing talent and his lofty ambitions.

Billy awakens memories of Alice’s own youth more than two decades ago, when she was anything but frosty — a fiercely intelligent and outspoken young woman in another rural North Carolina town. We follow Alice’s story for a time, in which, as a teenager, she and the heir to a wealthy business in town, Jimmy Ray Dobbs (Patrick Cummings) fall hard for each other over their love of books and an obvious chemistry between them — much to the disapproval of both Alice’s father (John Leslie Wolfe) and Mayor Josiah Dobbs (Jeff Austin). A surprise pregnancy follows. The young couple are determined to stay together. The families are determined to make sure they don’t. We see in the future that Alice has no husband, and no child. What happened? How are the two stories connected?

Bright Star answers those questions in due time, and in doing so, puts most of the weight on Campbell’s more than able shoulders. A gifted singer and sparkling actor who morphs from late teenager to middle-aged and back again with ease, Campbell anchors the entire show with her performance. This allows her cast to bloom around her like a bouquet of flowers. Gottfried gives his confident Billy Cane just a hint of gawkiness that makes him that much more real, while Cummings’s Jimmy Ray Dobbs is a young man already in his prime, the only one who’s a match for the youthful Alice. Hunt’s Margo is sweetly hesitant; you see what she and Billy see in each other. Blumenkrantz and Davidson are an extremely winning peanut gallery who, the night I saw it, got the most laughs of anyone through impeccable comedic timing and a couple moves straight out of a Charlie Chaplin movie.

But the play is largely driven by the songs themselves, and here the production amplifies Martin’s and Brickell’s strong material — a deft mix of elements of country music and musical theater that works a lot more often than it doesn’t — with a lot of good staging decisions. For starters, most of the band is on stage for the duration of the show, housed in a cabin that the ensemble can position and reposition to use its attached porch as a piece of scenery when needed. It makes the musical feel lived in, and as much like a good concert as a storytelling exercise. And if the voices are pitched somewhere between the country and musical traditions, the musicians in the orchestra do an extremely admirable job of sticking straight to the cleaner side of country, which gives the entire show a certain bounce it might not otherwise have. Like good country songs, the lyrics are at their best when they’re also at their most straightforward. The ensemble piece in which the young Alice implores the ensemble around her not to take her baby is heartwrenching; moments of reunion that I will not ruin by being more specific make you feel good like a musical should.

So if some might find the plot itself — reportedly based partly on a true story — maybe a little melodramatic, so what? With its excellent cast, terrific musicianship, and wonderful use of the Shubert’s big stage to move seamlessly from scene to scene with a few of the right props and clever use of a few set pieces, the touring show of Bright Star is a crowd pleaser with a lot of heart. And you can tap your foot to it.

Bright Star runs at the Shubert Theatre, 247 College St., through April 29. Click here for tickets and more information.

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