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. Jerry told me to be more careful.”īarbara Isenberg is a former Times staff writer and the author of “Tradition! The Highly Improbable, Ultimately Triumphant Broadway-to-Hollywood Story of ‘Fiddler on the Roof,’ the World’s Most Beloved Musical.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. “I looked up, startled and then kept right on walking, working on the song. “The driver slammed on the brakes and honked his horn,”Harnick told me. One time he was concentrating so hard on putting lyrics to a melody that Bock had written, he stepped right in front of a truck. Harnick would write lyrics on hotel stationery, scraps of paper and simply in his head. There was a discarded song written for the butcher, and another, also discarded, for Motel the tailor, called “Dear Sweet Sewing Machine,” which featured the tailor’s promise to love, honor and keep polished his new sewing machine. “We would say it’s about this dairy man and his daughters,” Harnick told me, until finally Harnick said, “It’s about tradition.” Robbins replied, “That’s it. Harnick, Bock and Stein had written nearly a complete show before meeting with director Jerome Robbins, Harnick once told me, and Robbins kept asking them what the show was about. It eventually became “Tradition,” one of musical theater’s best-known songs. He kept all the lyrics for “Fiddler on the Roof” in a thick pale-blue three-ring binder, and after going off to another room to get it during our interview, he started calling out titles for songs going back to 1961, and laughing aloud at some of them.Ĭonsider “Fiddler’s” first song, originally called “We’ve Never Missed a Sabbath Yet.” Its first opening lines were about getting ready for the Sabbath - cleaning the house, plucking the chicken for supper and such. Harnick was also very organized, lucky for me. There have been stage productions all over the world, as well as in thousands of schools, community centers and regional theaters. It won nine Tony Awards, including best musical, and was still on Broadway when United Artists released Norman Jewison’s film of the same name in 1971. The next day, there were lines around the block, and nearly eight years and 3,300 performances later, it became the longest-running show on Broadway at the time. While its first review, from noted critic Walter Kerr, wasn’t very good, it hardly mattered. While nearly all of Harnick and Bock’s shows have done well over the years, their biggest hit was “Fiddler.” It opened on Broadway on Sept.
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