It’s a heartfelt human drama with a lot of good laughs. Because it’s Steve Martin and Edie Brickell, obviously there’s a great deal of humor, but it’s not a wild and wacky comedy. “It’s about someone finding the truth of their own past in a profound way. You know, the best side of life,” Martin says. … I called the musical sentimental I meant that in the best sense of the word … They have arguments, they break apart, they come back together. … There’s a couple of very shocking moments in the play that keep it modern. … The show - as melodic and sentimental and kind as it is - is actually quite shocking. “”I think of it as newfangled old-fashioned. This throwback setting matches the musical’s classic tone. So why did Brickell and Martin choose this time period? “They’re archetypes … but smart, strong women emancipated well before their times,” Bobbie says. This is a gal who grew up in the 1920s and grows into an adult in the 1940s and does become a literary woman.”Īdd her to the ranks of other ’40s writers: Rosalind Russell in “His Girl Friday” (1940), Katharine Hepburn in “Woman of the Year” (1942) or Barbara Stanwyck in “Christmas in Connecticut” (1945). … She loves books, she loves words, she just luxuriates in literature, and she wants to do something, she wants to be educated. “My character, she’s smart, she’s gifted, comes from a really small town, but she knows from the get-go that she’s smarter than what this town can offer. So I’m like, I just have to keep doing that,” Cusack says. … I just thought, all I can do is what is coming completely organic and natural to me, and they’re digging it. … I mean, Edie Brickell! I grew up (singing), ‘What I am, is what I am!’ And then Steve Martin! ‘The Jerk!’ ‘It’s all the stuff!’ So it’s very daunting in the beginning. “It was very daunting in the early stages. … We used ‘Chicago’ to create an homage to his career, to his visual imagination, to his sensibility, so it feels very much a tribute to him, it feels like a Bob Fosse show, and yet it’s really not very much like his original production at all,” Bobbie says.Ĭusack, who will make her Broadway debut in “Bright Star,” says she was initially star-struck to work with a trio of entertainment titans like Bobbie, Martin and Brickell. He said that if Bob was still alive, that’s how he would have done it. “Bob Fosse’s agent said one of the best compliments I ever read. After all, this is the same man who won a Tony for his Broadway revival of “Chicago” in 1996 after Bob Fosse created the original show from 1975-1977. … I went oh my god, I have to do this,” Bobbie tells WTOP.
I literally gasped, which doesn’t happen when you’re reading. And I got to the end of the first act, I was sitting in my chair, and I had the most remarkable and unique experience. … Steve walked over the script to my apartment, because we only live a few blocks away from each other. “I’ve actually known Steve a long time socially. While the production has evolved since its inception, acclaimed Broadway director Walter Bobbie says the initial script - written by Martin with lyrics by Brickell - blew him away from the start. And very much I think that’s what writing a good musical is about, staying open-minded, staying open-hearted … There’s just been no ego at all, with both of them, and they’ve continued to evolve with this story,” Cusack tells WTOP. “(Martin) has no ego with his material, and I don’t know if that comes from being a comic first, that you just have to keep continuing to try things in front of an audience. Set in North Carolina between 1923-1945, the musical follows successful literary editor Alice Murphy (Carmen Cusack) who meets an ambitious young soldier just home from World War II.