Hayes Theatre, September 11
8/10
Don’t necessarily judge a musical by its soundtrack. The original Broadway cast recording of Bright Star suggested I was in for a long night. The music and lyrics, by Steve Martin and Edie Brickell, are in a bluegrass/country vein, evoking the setting in North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains. The songs sounded samey, the singing ordinary, and perhaps there was a good reason why nobody had penned a bluegrass musical before.
But that didn’t allow for Steve Martin’s book, with its sharply drawn characters, wit and poignancy – as well as unabashed melodrama, melodrama having kept country ballads simmering since folks first donned cowboy boots.
It also didn’t allow for the Broadway album’s singing being completely outgunned in a production devised, improbably, by Australia’s leading Shakespeare company, Sport for Jove. Why, I’d wondered, would Sport for Jove lower the bar to hick musical theatre? Now I understand.
Although this is the company’s first musical, music has long been key to its Shakespeare productions, and Bright Star burnishes rather than clouds its reputation. Directors Miranda Middleton and Damien Ryan and musical director Alec Steedman have assembled a 16-person ensemble, almost all of whom act, sing dance and are musicians. It seemed only three band members didn’t have a character to play, and only one cast member didn’t play an instrument.
That was Hannah McInerney in the pivotal role of Alice Murphy. She has two especially potent songs, Please Don’t Take Him and At Long Last, and they would test the ability of any female singer not to become shrill while squeezing out the show’s emotional marrow. McInerney was superlative – and also acted her socks off as a literary magazine editor whose newborn babe was ripped from her arms 23 years before.
The show zigzags between 1946 and 1923 with an abruptness that initially teases, but we get our heads around it, and learn to trust Martin’s story-telling and invest in his characters. Nearly all of these are so detailed as creates an ensemble of co-leads, the expert actors including Cameron Bajraktarevic-Hayward, Kaya Byrne, Jack Green, Sean van Doornum, Katrina Retallick and Rupert Reid.
Special mentions must go to Deirdre Khoo, who maximises the minor role of Lucy most entertainingly, and Genevieve Goldman (Margot), who has an ideal voice for the material, and who, upon learning that her love interest, Billy, is being published by Alice’s magazine, performs a little dance of exquisite ecstasy.
The lively choreography by Shannon Burns dovetails with the whip-crack directing, including such joys as a door held up to be knocked on, which, upon being opened, magically becomes a dining table. Designer Isabel Hudson cunningly implied the prevailing rusticity while accommodating 16 performers on the tight stage.
Yes, the melodrama undid certain moments, and the redemptive storyline was predictable, yet all was animated by the music’s high energy under Steedman’s direction and Victoria Falconer’s onstage supervision.
Until October 5.