So the fact that Martin and Brickell, in their songwriting at least, are so broadly unironic - a rare thing in musical theater today - turns out to be not a boon but a boondoggle. Pop music rarely works as theater music exactly because it’s rarely so specific: It is most often told in the songwriter’s voice, not a character’s, and is designed to reach everyone, not someone. Rather, they lack the granularity, the fingerprint, of lived experience: the particular need that (a few blocks away) causes Amalia in She Loves Me to make thrilling arias out of ice cream and missing shoes and phrases like “I am so sorry about last night.” Or that causes Small Alison in Fun Home to feel her way toward a unique truth about herself in a song about a ring of keys. It’s not that the words don’t fit the tune. The title number, for instance, follows an early scene in which Billy tells his girlfriend that he’s going to submit his stories to the Journal the music has a nice locomotive impulse but the lyric offers only this generic and almost nonsensical sentiment: Instead of deepening and specifying the emotional situations they arise from, the songs repeat, in the most clichéd terms, what we already know from the dialogue. The mostly bluegrass score, with country, gospel, and a little swing thrown in, sounds great (the music director is Rob Berman) but almost always does exactly the opposite of what a story-based musical requires. How the stories intersect with the songs is the larger problem here. I won’t say more about the plot except that it doesn’t take a wizard to figure out how these stories eventually intersect. just returned from World War II with a stack of stories to sell. Awkwardly sandwiched within this story is another, involving A.J. Cusack plays Alice Murphy, the prickly, punctilious editor of a literary magazine called the Asheville Southern Journal in the 1940s, and, in a series of 1920s flashbacks, a bookish yet spunky teenage version of herself in rural Zebulon. (Only one of the musical’s numbers - “Sun’s Gonna Shine,” the act-two opener - appears to be a direct lift.) Instead, the two have built, around an actual 1902 incident involving a baby thrown from a train, an elaborate new history set in two time periods and various locations around North Carolina. It is, for one thing, an entirely new work, not based on a movie or a book, though its authors, Steve Martin and Edie Brickell, do say it was inspired by their 2013 roots-music album, Love Has Come for You. There’s a lot to like in Bright Star and a lot to admire in the way it was made. Which is not to say it has no smarts and no value. With banal, self-cancelling, upbeat lyrics like “If you knew my story you’d have a good story to tell,” it mostly shows us that we are going to have, in Bright Star, a banal, self-cancelling, upbeat musical, the kind that wants to demonstrate a lot of heart without actually having one. But unfortunately it does its “show the audience what to expect” job too well. (The result: “Comedy Tonight.”) Since then, Robbins’s fix, specific to that occasion, has become a nearly inflexible rule, and so Bright Star now opens with an establishing song called “If You Knew My Story.” It’s super-catchy, and Carmen Cusack, whose role in the proceedings we do not yet comprehend, sings the hell out of it. Many shows do it’s been almost a rite of passage since Jerome Robbins rescued A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum by having Stephen Sondheim write a new song to show the audience, right from the start, what to expect. To learn more about the program, click here.At some point between its San Diego premiere in September 2014 and its pre-Broadway tryout at the Kennedy Center earlier this winter, the musical Bright Star, which bows at the Cort tonight, acquired a new opening number. Road to Recovery is an organization dedicated to helping young people battle addiction and more. And so I think kids that do have the gift of art, writing painting, drawing, designing, metalwork, woodwork… any craft-type stuff… caring for that… caring for that." When I'm able to write a riff, write some lyrics, stuff like that… it's the way I connect with the world. Hetfield continues, "Playing music has saved my life. Other ones I've picked up on my own and then created… Shame's a big thing for me." Other ones, I've been able to drop some of that. Some of it is things I've taken from my parents and carried it a little further. I'm coming to grips with that, 'cause I have groups of people that I'm able to share all my horrible stuff with - shameful, extremely shameful, dark stuff. "You wouldn't really like me if you knew my story, if you knew what horrible things I've done. In this latest clip, Hetfield opens up in a way few have ever seen.
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