Bright Star
4.5/5 stars
Cape Fear Regional Theatre
1707 Owen Drive, Fayetteville
Showing through September 27
As the true lovers among us already know, no matter how humble or absurd the circumstances, there’s magic to be found in intimacy. That goes for theater as well as relationships, and the proof is on display in Cape Fear Regional Theatre’s current production of Bright Star.
The company’s present, provisional home on the second floor of a shared building at 1707 Owen Drive is conspicuously more modest than its historic (and now, nearly renovated) digs on Hay Street. Taped paper signs point the way down unevenly lit corridors to an ad hoc vestibule tucked off to the side, whose golden walls and rococo carpet disclose the space’s former life as a hotel ballroom. Rough, hand-made wooden risers with cushioned straight-backed chairs form audience banks around the staging area.
All of that ceases to matter once the house lights dim. That’s because the intimacy in director Antoinette DiPietropolo’s staging, within the warmly lit wooden frames and country store bric-a-brac of Riw Rakkulchon’s cozy, rustic set, effectively transports us into the times and evocative locales of Steve Martin and Edie Brickell’s North Carolina-based musical.
It’s 1945, and central character Alice Murphy (a winning Jennifer Newman), the forward-thinking editor of a leading literary journal of the Southern Renaissance, launches the chronicle of her life with the spunky opener, “If You Knew My Story.” From its first moments, a broad array of characters (made all the more vivid by designer Travis Chinick’s period-perfect costumes) fills the stage with a palpable sense of community. As on-stage fiddler Megan Kenny, banjoist Isaac Foley, and accordion-player Amber Dawn French augment James Clark Jr.’s remarkably realistic digitized orchestral tracks, DiPietropolo’s folk-based choreography exuberantly animates this world of memory.
From that point, Martin and Brickell’s narrative splits, tracking two characters across separate timelines some 20 years apart. In the musical’s present, a rural writer named Billy Cane (David Eldridge) comes home from World War II and tries to make something of himself as a writer. He is eagerly abetted by the resourceful Margo (Emily Stober), a girl at the town bookstore. Oblivious to her romantic interest, Cane confidently heads to Asheville, where he hopes to be published; DiPietropolo imaginatively envisions the musical’s title song as a seamless travelogue.
Eldridge and Stober’s performances give dimensionality to characters and circumstances that could have easily slipped into cliché. Under Sarah Wussow’s music direction, Stober gives a deft and delicate touch to the plight of the girl left behind in the pensive ballad, “Asheville.”
Meanwhile, in alternating scenes that take place 20 years in the past, Alice’s years as the smartest girl in Zebulon’s high school unfold. She flirts with Jimmy Ray, the mayor’s son (Jimmy Rusthaven), in the duet “Whoa, Mama.” But soon, starker realities begin to filter in, including a home ruled by her menacing, rock-ribbed religious father (J.R. Rodriguez) and troubled mother (a sterling Lynda Clark).
Alice’s keen intellect, low social status, and attention from Jimmy Ray earn her the unwelcome notice of her beau’s father, the small-town tyrant Mayor Dobbs (a hissable Scott Willis).
As these narrative threads interweave, individual trials emerge—some more predictable than others. Comic seductions of sheltered, rural souls and manipulations much darker take place as the characters walk precariously from innocence into experience.
Not-quite-city slickers Daryl (a rewarding Dru Loman) and Lucy (an acerbic Adeline Trivers) feature as the self-appointed cultural gatekeepers at the literary journal that Billy attempts to conquer, trying to outdrink him in a boozy Jazz Age song-and-dance bacchanal, “Another Round.” Elsewhere, a merciless Dobbs sanctimoniously visits the horrors of a pre-Roe America upon another character in “A Man’s Gotta Do.”
These plot developments take place at more or less point-blank range, with an intimacy that, for the most part, reduces or removes our ability to maintain emotional distance. In only a couple of instances over the show’s two-hour run are we unable to fully believe in these characters, and it happens during their moments in extremis.
For the rest, the emotional intimacy of a child losing a mother, a mother losing a child, and lovers losing and finding one another once again play out to palpable effect. In a production whose actors largely add integrity to its script and musicians give life to its tuneful score, the stars are often bright, indeed.
