(Above: Adriana Ripley plays Alice Murphy in South Eugene High School’s production of Bright Star; photo by Margaret Bull)
By Randi Bjornstad
The plot of Bright Star is as hefty as they come, but the musical theater students at South Eugene High School have stepped up to the challenge, under the direction of theater director Pat Avery, and the result, according to people who saw the musical during its opening weekend, is a smash hit that should appeal to general audiences, not just those interested in high school productions.
This show is relatively new, having had its world premiere at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego just five years ago, with a run at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., a year later, followed by 139 preview and regular performances on Broadway in 2016, then by a 2017-18 national tour. The show was nominated for eight Tony Awards.
Bright Star takes place in two decades, the early 1920s and the mid-1940s, immediately after World War II. It opens in 1946, where the main character, a newspaper editor named Alice Murphy, tells the audience that she is going to tell them her own story.
A year earlier, a young man named Billy Cane had returned from the war and had visited the newspaper, hoping to have his writing appear in its pages. With her encouragement, he begins working on a series of stories about his life.
In a flashback to 1923, when she was 16 years old, Alice reveals that she has become involved with the mayor’s son, Jimmy Ray Dobbs, and is pregnant. The mayor arranges for her to spend the pregnancy in an isolated cabin, where Jimmy Ray occasionally visits and she knits a sweater for the coming baby.
After the birth, Alice and her parents learn that the mayor secretly has arranged for the baby boy to be adopted, and he refuses her entreaties to keep the baby, his grandson. He takes the baby and leaves town on the train with the infant in a carrier, which he throws into the river when no one is looking.
The next year, Alice prepares for college, but also determines to find the baby she believes has been adopted. Jimmy Ray also plans to go to Chapel Hill, but when his father confesses what he had done, and knowing he can’t tell Alice the truth, Jimmy Ray breaks off their relationship and stays in his home town.
Forward to 1946, when Alice has bought one of Billy’s stories, and he invites her to his home town to show her where the stories take place. She says she will go, stopping by on her way back from Raleigh, where she has some unfinished business. In Raleigh, she searches adoption records for the time period in which her baby was born, but finds nothing. In a chance encounter with Jimmy Ray Dobbs, he confesses what his father told him about the fate of their child.
Alice then stops at Billy’s childhood home, where she is astonished to see the baby sweater she had knitted 23 years before. Billy’s father explains how he found the baby in the river and saved him and raised him with his wife, who has since died.
In the finale, Alice tells Jimmy Ray that their child is still alive, Billy accepts Alice as his birth mother, and Jimmy Ray at long last proposes marriage to Alice.
If that sounds like a lot of complexity for a troupe of high-schoolers to take on, it no doubt is. Acting aside, the show is chock full of 18 musical numbers, most or all of which probably were unfamiliar to the cast going in.
Bright Star was written and composed by Steve Martin and Edie Brickell and set in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. The music is heavily influenced by the bluegrass song-and-dance style of that region.
Bright Star continues at South Eugene High School
When: 7 p.m. on Nov. 8-9, 14-15, and 2 p.m. on Nov. 17
Where: South Eugene High School Auditorium, 400 E. 19th Ave., Eugene
Tickets: $15 adults, $10 students and senior citizens, available at the box office or online at southeugenetheater.org/box-office.html up to 6 p.m. for that day’s show
Cast members sing one of the many songs in Bright Star, a musical now onstage at South Eugene High School; photo by Jill Saling
