Theatre 2025: Bright Star @ CAA Theatre

My husband Rich and I watch a lot of live theatre in a year, which can be both a blessing and a curse, as we are always excited to see a show but are sometimes exhausted and over-stimulated from all the new ideas coming our way.  By the end of 2025, we will have watched 30 shows, not including the five that we saw at the Toronto Fringe Festival, eight that we took in at Edinburgh Fringe in Scotland, and twelve that we watched at home from a variety of streaming services including National Theatre at Home (London),  Stratford at Home (Ontario), Youtube and CNN (with a special broadcast of George Clooney’s Good Night and Good Luck).

We are subscribers to both of Mirvish Productions’ main and off-Mirvish subscription series as well as Crow’s Theatre.  This makes September/October a particularly busy span since all the major theatres seem to start their new seasons at around the same time in mid to late September. Just scheduling all these shows so that there is no conflict becomes a nightmare. This means that we have been watching one to two shows every week for four consecutive weeks.  Trying to keep up and write down my thoughts in my theatre blog about one show before it gets jumbled in with the next has been difficult and stressful.  I need to keep reminding myself that I love it! 😊

But seeing so many shows so closely together naturally fosters comparisons.  This week, we watched the extremely complex, cerebral musical Octet on Tuesday night immediately followed by the light, fluffy and totally predictable bluegrass musical Bright Star the next evening.  Experiencing the two shows back-to-back made their differences even more apparent.  While they were both enjoyable in their own ways, it would be like watching the weird and wacky 1999 movie Being John Malkovich immediately followed by any Christmas Hallmark movie.

The book, music and lyrics of Bright Star were written by comedian/banjo player Steve Martin and his writing partner Edie Brickell.  The plot is set in two separate time periods, current day 1945 shortly after the end of WWII and flashbacks to 1923.  In current day, Alice Murphy, the prim and proper editor of the Ashville Southern Journal and her two employees Daryl and Lucy, are approached by young writer Billy Cane, who has just returned from the war and hopes to sell his stories to the newspaper.  Flashbacks depict how Alice was once a wild child who fell in love with Jimmy Ray Dobbs, the mayor’s only child, became pregnant by him and had his son.  Wielding his wealth and power, Mayor Dobbs takes the baby away from Alice, declaring that he will find him a good home.  In actuality, he dramatically flings the bag containing the child from a moving train into the river to close the first act of the musical.  At this point, most of the audience have worked out the present-day relationship between Alice and Billy in this corny, predictable plot.

Despite the story being trite and lacking sophistication or nuance, the musical is still an enjoyable, feel-good show with the expected happy ending.  Interestingly, the shocking event that drives the plot is actually based on a true story that Steve and Edie learned about.  In 1904, a baby stuffed inside a suitcase was thrown from a moving train yet miraculously survived.  Dubbed the “Iron Mountain Baby”, the infant was found by a farmer by the side of a river.  The farmer and his wife adopted the baby and named him William Moses Gould Helms.  So, the most incredulous and melodramatic plot point in the musical actually turned out to be based on truth!

Bright Star is considered an “Actor-Musician” musical where the actors also play musical instruments while on stage, combining acting, singing, dancing and instrumentation. Reading the actor biographies in the programme, it is revealed that each actor plays multiple instruments.  Instruments played on stage included the piano, percussions, bass, cello, violin, viola, fiddle, mandolin, banjo, accordion, and bugle. When not featured in a song, actors would pick up an instrument and join the on-stage “orchestra”.  Sometimes even the lead singer would be playing an instrument while performing his or her song.  It was impressive how these talented actor-musicians seamlessly switched from instrument to instrument in between their acting responsibilities.

With a show oozing of Southern charm and Americana nostalgia, the songs include lilting ballads ("She’s Gone", "Way Back in the Day", "I Can’t Wait"), lively ditties backed by fiddle/banjo chords and square-dance like beats (“Whoa Mama", "Firm Hand/Do Right”) and overwrought, ultra melodramatic songs ("Please Don’t Take Him", "A Man’s Gotta Do", "Heartbreaker") that would fit in with Latin telenovas if they were produced as musicals.  The characters spoke and sang on and off with such heavy twangs that you expected them to shout out “Yee Haw!” at any moment.

The leading man role of Jimmy Ray Dobbs is played by the tall, dark and handsome (and alas, openly gay) Canadian actor George Krissa who seems to be in all the recent Mirvish musicals lately.  He played the sexy scoundrel Anatole in Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812, stealing the show with his gratuitous (“but absolutely essential” said every woman in the audience) shirtless scene where he flexed his pecs with a sly grin.  The closest we got to that in Bright Star was a flexed bicep while wearing a tight t-shirt during the song “Whoa Mama”.  It does seem like he is being typecast in roles that take advantage of his good looks.  After this show, he will play the sexy, tight pants wearing William Shakespeare in &Juliet.  Good thing he is a legitimate quadruple threat with his acting, singing, dancing and musical instrument playing skills.  Seems almost unfair to have all that in one package.

Compared to the many other musicals that we have watched over the years or even this just year, this is a simplistic musical with predictable tropes and archetypical characters.  The villainous Mayor came just short of twirling his mustache.  But every once in a while, it feels good to relax, put your brain into neutral and just enjoy a show without having to overthink it.