‘Bright Star’ over-eager show – Whishaw revists an old classic, this time on B’way

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NEW YORK, March 25, (AP): The new Broadway musical “Bright Star” starts with a bit of bluster, maybe even some swagger. “If you knew my story, you’d have a good story to tell,” the leading lady sings. But after 2 hours of this down-home hokum, the answer is clear: No, we don’t.

Comedian and banjo enthusiast Steve Martin has teamed up with singer-songwriter Edie Brickell to write a cliche-ridden, foot-pounding, over-eager Southern Gothic romance that ill serves a wonderful Broadway debut in Carmen Cusack.

The show that opened Thursday at the Cort Theatre never hits an honest note and seems to have been written by two people who adore classic Broadway musicals but who have intentionally decided to make a third-rate version.

The music, with a few exceptions, is weak, with few of the songs fully fleshed out and some having been recycled from the pair’s previous CDs. It takes five songs until the audience is finally roused with “Whoa, Mama.”

Act One ends with an unspeakable act made worse by one of the lousiest special effects in Broadway history. (And while we’re at it, can we scrap the pathetic toy train that makes three appearances, huffing and puffing?)

The book and lyrics are even more feeble, with graceless lines like “I’m ready for my life to begin!” and “I knew this day would come” and weird characters, like a sexed-up assistant at a literary journal who dreams of one day censoring writers. Director Walter Bobbie gets everything out of his cast and keeps a frenetic pace going but for no clear payoff.

The story, set in small-town North Carolina, switches between the mid-1920s and the mid-1940s to tell the tale of two sets of lovers entwined by a secret. Except the secret is obvious. No one in the audience is gasping at the end during the big reveal. Even the actors seem to shrug.

This is a weird sort of South that only exists in the daydreams of other musicals. This is a South with overalls and suspenders, moonshine, stolen kisses by the river and where pretty dresses in boxes are a reason to stop everything and gasp gleefully. Everyone is white. Everyone.

Story

Cusack plays Alice Murphy, the heart of the story. She is strong and pours everything she has into an odd role. As a teen, Alice is bright, articulate and reads F. Scott Fitzgerald for fun, but yet is apparently the black sheep of the family. (“You ever think you might be too smart for this town?” someone asks her in dialogue that is violently unnecessary.)

At 16, she falls in love with the son of a rich man. And guess what? He loves her back. And he’s pretty smart and great, too. (Paul Alexander Nolan, absolutely charming). Their parents try to separate them and so she, naturally, moves away and becomes the editor of an important Southern literary magazine.

The other relationship is between a young writer (a strong A.J. Shively) and a bookshop owner (adorably goofy Hannah Elless). There are also loads of quirky folk at the journal and the bookstore. (One farmer who goes frog gigging at night also confesses to enjoying a good literary journal.) It seems like everyone in this musical is bookish and smart, like everyone we guess in Steve Martin’s world.

The show, so long exploring lost love, then descends into virtual farce before ending on such a forced happy note and with such swiftness that it’ll knock the corndog out of your hand.

An attempt to make sense of it all is fumbled: “I understood that truth seeks us out — then walks beside us like a shadow, and one day it merges with us,” one character says. One preview audience wasn’t sure if this wasn’t a joke and laughed. In any case, the joke is on us.

Also:

NEW YORK: British actor Ben Whishaw has found himself to be a magnet for important roles. They even come back every few years.

He did his first Hamlet at 16 as a schoolboy and then again at age 23 to critical acclaim in London. He played John Proctor from “The Crucible” at 15 — and now it has come calling again.

Whishaw, considered one of the best stage actors of his generation, makes his Broadway debut this spring in Arthur Miller’s classic tale about the Salem witch trials. He’s 20 years older and sees the work differently.

“What has occurred to me is that I didn’t understand the play very much,” he said in his cramped dressing room in the Walter Kerr Theatre, where he makes a cup of tea.

“It’s a masterpiece so you can understand one element of it but not another. So I think I understood one element of it as a 15-year-old and now as a 35-year-old you see things very differently. It’s way more complicated than I remember it.”

Whishaw joins an impressive cast that features Saoirse Ronan, Sophie Okonedo, Ciaran Hinds, Tavi Gevinson and Jim Norton. Dutch visionary Ivo van Hove, known for stripping down a work to its essence and using minimal props, is directing the revival.

Gevinson, who plays Mary Warren, said cast members have been challenged to rethink the Miller play and have leaned on Whishaw. “I couldn’t be working with an actor more attentive or thoughtful,” she said.

Miller wrote the play during the witch-hunting McCarthy era, but set it during the Salem witch trials of 17th-century Massachusetts.

It’s about mass hysteria that begins when the daughter of the local minister falls mysteriously ill. The cause, rumor says, is witchcraft. And before the gossip has run its course, just about everyone in town is tainted.

Whishaw said that as a 15-year-old, he was absorbed by the witches and the bullying. As a 35-year-old, he’s exploring the gray among the black and white. “We want to explore the mush that we all live in. John Proctor is good and bad and everything else.”

It’s been a busy 2 years for Whishaw. He’s starred in “In the Heart of the Sea” as Herman Melville, the latest 007 film “Spectre” as the gadget whiz Q, and had smaller parts in the films “The Danish Girl” and “Suffragette.” He even voiced Paddington the bear on film.

Whishaw’s star began to rise after he was picked to play the melancholy Danish prince in Trevor Nunn’s production of “Hamlet” at the Old Vic, just six months out of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Critics said his performance deserved to be put alongside Hamlets by Sir Laurence Olivier and Mark Rylance.

“I’m not being modest or downplaying it, but it was a lot to do with luck. I was in the right place at the right time,” Whishaw said. “It’s a very big thing to undertake when you’re 23. I didn’t really know what I was doing but it was a wonderful time.”

He grew up north of London with a twin brother and parents unconnected to show business. A trip to the London Palladium to see “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat” was his first taste of theater. He left forever changed.

“It’s everything: It’s the theater itself that you’re in. It’s the orchestra and the colors and the smell of the place,” he said. “It’s so unguarded, naked, real, isn’t it? That’s the thing that’s magical.”

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