With double authors and protagonists, Bright Star also manages to portray two different eras (1923 and 1940s) in bluegrass country and in the big city. As a musical and melodrama loosely based on a true story, it’s winning applause for its sentimental, romantic treatment of people and times that appeal to typical FST audiences. Banjos, guitars, fiddle, upright bass, and piano music become a melding force. As middle-aged Alice Murphy, Meredith Jones strongly enlists listeners to be interested in her (“If You Knew My Story*). She transports them to her rebellious attitude in 1923 (“Way Back in the Day”) toward just settling as a homebody in the rural South. Her plans to leave for study and a career nearly dissolve when she falls for and immediately gets pregnant by Blake Price’s upscale Jimmy Ray Dobbs (“Whoa, Mama”). His family won’t let them marry. Both fathers agree (“A Man’s Gotta Do”) to send their children’s baby away for adoption, though Travis Mitchell’s villainous Mayor Dobbs has the child thrown into a river to drown. In 1943, Max Meyers’s appealing Billy Cane returns from military service to find his mother dead and his father (William Selby, good at trying to cope) stuck in necessary routine. Billy, a would-be writer, loves but leaves behind his bookstore-tending girlfriend Margo (Ashley Rose, doing well with an extraneous role) to try his luck at the Journal in “Asheville.” There he meets Alice, now a sophisticated editor, who gives his writing rejections, sardonically noted by Journal workers (Rachel Mulcahy and Michael Grieve). How will everyone’s situations change? In Act II, they do— but after Blake Price proclaims “A Heartbreaker.” It takes a lot of people getting together and giving explanations (several of them musical) before the “Sun’s Gonna Shine” once again. “At Long Last” the double plots entwine. The company heads for an all-out “Finale” with every kind of instrument playing all the previously heard types of music—bluegrass, country, a bit of swing and jitterbug. Choreography of “A Picnic Dance” is a treat. Director Kate Alexander has done a thorough job of wringing emotions from her cast members and integrating the musical performances by many of them along with the onstage band. Fittingly, the scene designers set the basic action in a back semi-circle of platforms, mainly used by the music-makers. Furniture moving in the front by the actors goes smoothly to create different times and places. Nick Jones’s lighting is important. Though it mostly illuminates, it matches also a few very metaphorically dark places in the plot. Thom Corp’s sound is well modulated, so vigorous musical scenes’ meaning is never overwhelmed. Costumes reflect the jobs and status held by people who wear them as well as the eras in which they’re worn. People who love small, old-fashioned musicals should love Bright Star. Opinions about the story may well range from heartwarming to boring, classic to behind the times.
