Tag: broadway

Anaïs Mitchell Follows Broadway’s ‘Hadestown’ with Bonny Light Horseman

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In June 2019, Anaïs Mitchell picked up her first Tony Award when Hadestown beat out bigger productions like Beetlejuice and Tootsie to snag Best Musical. It was an unlikely win for the eccentric and ambitious production — and the culmination of fifteen years of hard work bringing it to Broadway.

“I had no idea how long I was going to work on it,” she tells BGS. “I really didn’t. I just knew what the next step always was and just kept taking them.”

A folk musician born in Vermont and based in Brooklyn, Mitchell first staged Hadestown as a regional production around New England, and it resembled something like a traveling medicine show, as she and her friends toured it the way they might tour an album. In 2010, she released it as something like an Americana concept album, casting colleagues and collaborators in key roles: Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon plays the role of Orpheus, while Ani DiFranco is Persephone.

The story is old, even if the production is new. Mitchell borrowed characters from Greek mythology, combining the stories of Orpheus rescuing Eurydice from the underworld and Persephone warring with Hades. But she filtered them through John Steinbeck and Upton Sinclair, imagining the underworld as an industrial hellscape, like a sooty factory or a mine, with Hades abusing both the natural world and his workers.

In 2015, she began working with a stage director named Rachel Chavkin, who brought the award-winning Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812 to Broadway. Together with a team of producers, musicians, actors, set designers, choreographers, and many others, they began to rework Hadestown for a bigger stage, streamlining the story and rearranging the music for maximum impact. In some cases they rewrote entire characters or scratched entire songs, searching for the best possible way to tell this complicated story.

When it debuted at the Walter Kerr Theater in March 2019, Hadestown barely resembled the production Mitchell staged around Vermont. It was bigger, flashier, more accessible, but also truer to the big ideas that inspired her in the first place. At its heart is an America defined by conflicts between industry and environmental conservation, between commerce and art, between various forms of love and labor. Yet, in its most innovative stroke, the production retained its roots in folk music and its populist ideas. The original cast recording just earned a Grammy for Best Musical Theater Album.

“It’s a little crazy to be on the other side of it,” Mitchell says. “I’m still trying to bend my head around what that means. Like, what kind of songs do I write now?” For the moment she’s focusing on her new band, Bonny Light Horsemen, which is something like a supergroup trio with Fruit Bats mastermind Eric D. Johnson and multi-instrumentalist/producer Joseph Kaufman. Featuring members of Bon Iver, the National, and Hiss Golden Messenger, their self-titled debut album resituates centuries-old folk songs in new settings. “Bonny Light Horsemen has been this really assuring kind of space to be creative in and make music and not feel like it’s my new statement,” she says. “Because it’s not.”

As she was packing to launch a lengthy tour with Johnson and Kaufman, Mitchell spoke with BGS about Greek and American mythologies, creative uncertainties, and songs that straddle the line between personal and universal.

BGS: You lived with Hadestown for more than a decade, during which time it morphed into a brand-new creature. What kept it compelling for you?

Mitchell: I would say that like the simplest answer to that question is that it never felt done. The studio record that we made in 2010 felt done for a studio record. It felt like a complete statement. But the show began as a stage performance piece and I always wanted to see it that way again. As soon as I started the next phase of development with Rachel Chavkin it was one chapter after another: We’re going for off-Broadway. Then we’re going for regional. Then we’re going for Broadway. And it always was like, “It can be better, it can be better…”

And the people kept the wind in the sails of the project. At a certain point it became so much bigger than me. Maybe it always was bigger, because there’s the orchestrators and the singers and all the people in the different cities. It became something like a whole community of people just chipping away at the same piece of stone. It was very exciting to be in the room with those actors and with Rachel and seeing the choreography and the sets coming into focus. It was like a hive. I couldn’t have turned my back on it.

Do you feel differently now that it’s up and running in its current form?

Now that it’s up and running, I don’t even go. It’s happening every night and I get a little report by email here in Brooklyn. It really has a life of its own. It’s become its own animal. And I think I did max out what I could give it in that period. So it feels great to just be making folk music with Bonny Light Horseman right now. It definitely feels like the right place to be.

Why did you want to pursue this story as a stage production? What made it something different than an album or even a book?

From the earliest moment of starting to work on the piece, I was excited by the idea of telling a dramatic, long-form story with larger-than-life characters. I love songs so much, but I remember noticing that even at my favorite concerts by my favorite songwriters I would start to get bored with all these tiny climaxes in the songs. There was a disconnect from one song to the next.

I will watch a terrible movie all the way to the end because there’s that question: How is this going to end? What’s going to happen next? That is so powerful and it will carry you through. I wanted that for this piece. I wanted all the songs to lean on each other, so that you had to watch the whole thing and get through to the end.

That took you well outside what most folk musicians and singer/songwriters are doing. What did you learn during that process?

There was so much learning in terms of writing a song that felt like it was structurally perfect for the album, like “Wedding Song.” It’s just three verses and a little interlude. I would play that at my songwriter shows and think, yeah, it’s so tight. But it fell flat as a dramatic scene. I had to find a way to explode the form without breaking what works about it.

I also learned about putting space into a song. You might put space into a song so that a musician can improvise or express themselves. The same is true for drama: There was to be space for the actor to create the character. As a write, I tend to want to fill that space with words. I think both of these mediums are really similar in the sense that you’re building something for someone else to inhabit. You’re building a house that someone else can live in.

If you can write a song that’s good enough that other people are going to sing it and cover it and let it live in the world, you’re creating something that is similar to a play, which can be revived just by other people’s involvement in it. It’s bigger than you. And hopefully it’ll outlive you.

That’s interesting, because right now it seems like most people prize the singer/songwriter model, where the song is heard as an extension of the person and means less when it’s covered by someone else. The idea of somebody telling their truth seems to have more validity right now than a song that can change and accommodate new interpretations and maybe means something different when different people sing it.

I think we’re approaching an idea that feels really important to me. I haven’t talked about it enough to have language about it, but I do think things need to be true emotionally for the person who’s writing them. I would say all of the songs in Hadestown came from a place of personal truth even though they maybe took on the clothing of the character or the needs of the scenario. There has to be some emotional truth. That’s a sacred thing. But there’s something intersecting that idea. What is universally true or part of some collective unconscious stuff can be exciting.

You could go about trying to write something like a hit or a standard as a kind of exercise, and it might not feel true to you. To be honest, I think a lot of Nashville co-writing scenarios end up this way, where you get something that feels structurally tight but is missing some kernel of personal truth. But you can go too far in the other direction where it’s like the person is totally self-expressing. How does that mean anything to me or to someone else?

It’s that middle ground you’re looking for, where you can sing from your own heart and experience, but you’re also singing from the heart of the world, from the world’s experience. Folk music is really interesting for that, right? Because it’s like water from a deep well. Those songs tap into a universal experience, and those archetypes and images are going to live forever. So if I can find a way to write that taps into that but also feels true to me, then that’s the zone I want to live in.

Do you feel like you reached that with this iteration of Hadestown? Is this the final form it will take, or will you keep developing the story?

There was a moment when I thought I was going to revise it for the tour that we’re doing in the fall. But we just put out this cast recording, which is beautiful and has all the material in it. I think people might want to go to the regional version and be able to experience the show that they’ve listened to on that recording. I do fantasize about a film version, but that’s maybe years down the line. For the time being I think it’s best for me to take a step away, but I could see getting really excited to roll up my sleeves again for what would essentially be another phase.

I’ve actually been working on a book, which has been very therapeutic. It’s coming out sometime this year and it’s basically the history of the project, the evolution of the lyrics. It’s called Working on a Song. I was able to go back and look at a lot of these songs and see where they came from and how they evolved. I often would say I felt like I was banging my head against the wall: The idea was wrong, the thing was wrong. It’s wrong, it’s wrong, and then suddenly it’s right. At the time it didn’t feel like those wrong choices I had made meant anything. But when I look back on the process, I can see more clearly the way certain lines came up or certain songs or ideas came about. They didn’t come up quite right, so they went back into the soil. They nourished the ground that then the right thing could grow out of.

So much of the time you feel like everything is futile. Like, I can’t believe I just sat here for however many hours and made only one rhyme that might not even be good. That happens to me all the time. So the metaphor that I came up with has to do with gardening. You have to rake around, and the raking is sort of aerating the soil. You’re preparing the ground for the right thing to come up. And when they do come up, they’re beautiful, like flowers. And then they go back into the soil and eventually nourish the next thing.

That definitely seems to fit with the story Hadestown is telling, about an artist who literally goes into the soil to rescue his beloved and finish this unfinished song. From a creative perspective, how much did you identify with or relate to the character of Orpheus?

Totally. It’s interesting that that character took so long to come into focus. Ever since our off-Broadway version of the show, Orpheus confused a lot of audiences. People weren’t falling in love with him. They found him and Eurydice to be less fully drawn and therefore less compelling than the older couple Hades and Persephone. I always thought of Orpheus as this really crazy optimist. He’s got this faith in the world and in his own music, but then he ends up besieged by doubt at the end, which is supposed to be crushing. But he has a lot of lines that if they were delivered wrong — even just by a tiny fraction of a percentage wrong — they felt swagger-y and cocky, which is not what I intended for him.

I always thought of him as this sensitive soul, and that kind of machismo was not in keeping with that idea. His first line was, “Come home with me.” And people were like, who is this guy? Why’s he trying to pick up this chick? Why should we love him? People weren’t identifying with him, and they didn’t care if he won or lost. Obviously, if you don’t love him and want him to succeed, then the story falls flat. You’ve got to love Orpheus.

After we debuted in London, there was a crisis moment when we had this awful nagging feeling that something was not quite in focus. People don’t love this hero. It came up in a lot of reviews. So we went into triage mode, me and the director and the producers. How can we fix this? So we decided that for Broadway, we would really lean into his naiveté. He’s a boy who’s lost in his own world. He undeniably has a gift to give the world but he’s not very good at living in the world the way it is. He’s socially inept. He doesn’t know what he’s doing.

Suddenly that made him appear much younger and much more innocent. It’s not like he’s so brave to stand up to Hades. It’s more that he just doesn’t know any better. He’s an innocent who finds himself in the belly of the beast, and he doesn’t know any better than to call out what he sees as true. What we fall in love with is his purity of heart. That’s what comes through in his singing. That was a really fascinating journey with that character for me. That song that Orpheus could never finish was also the song that I felt I could never finish.

(Read our second installment of our Artist of the Month coverage on Anaïs Mitchell tomorrow.)

Photo credit: Shervin Lainez

Artist of the Month: Anaïs Mitchell

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The world has finally caught up with Anaïs Mitchell. With sold-out runs in London and New York, near-constant critical acclaim, and a sweep of eight Tony Awards, the Vermont native was quite literally center stage last summer accepting the award for Best Original Musical for her creation Hadestown.

But Anaïs Mitchell has been center stage for a very long time — it’s the size and location of the venue and audience that has changed. With five solo records under her belt, a growing collection of collaborative projects ranging from a record of obscure English ballads (Child Ballads with Jefferson Hamer) to a new supergroup Bonny Light Horseman (with Eric D Johnson of Fruit Bats and guitarist Josh Kaufman), and the decade-long evolution of her now-famous folk opera Hadestown, Mitchell is profound not only in her turnout, but in the indisputable quality and beauty of everything she touches.

That’s why we’re excited to present her as BGS‘ first Artist of the Month for 2020. Throughout the month, we’ll be digging deeper into her career with an exclusive interview feature by Stephen Deusner. After all she’s accomplished in the last decade alone, we can’t wait to see what’s next for her in the one to come. For now, enjoy our Essentials playlist and prepare yourself for the Month of Anaïs Mitchell.

Photo credit: Shervin Lainez

Wait For Me: Anaïs Mitchell and Hadestown Finally Make It to Broadway

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This spring in New York City, Hadestown is being celebrated as a feat of storytelling at the not-obvious-until-now intersection between Broadway, Greek mythology, and folk music. Penned by Anaïs Mitchell, the production is sung-through on a rolling landscape of New Orleans-infused roots music, strung so seamlessly together that it feels like one long song.

It’s been nominated for 14 Tony Awards this year — worth celebrating in the folk world, considering the other accomplishments of its writer include a duo recording of songs from the collection of Francis James Child and a handful of stunning singer-songwriter albums. But what’s folkier than telling a timeless tale in hopes that we can learn something new about where we are and where we’re going? And, like most myths and folk songs, Hadestown seems to have been around almost forever.

“I never dreamed I’d be working on this thing for as long as I have!” Mitchell tells the Bluegrass Situation. “But there have been so many different chapters of it — the early stage show in Vermont, the studio album, the touring of the studio album with guest singers, the six years of development in New York with [director] Rachel Chavkin (and four productions in and out of town). Other artists, designers, actors, have kept the wind in my sails and in the sails of the piece itself.”

She adds, “When I finally had to let go of changing lyrics because we were close to opening night, I was walking outside the theater after a show and saw this crowd of kids waiting at the stage door to talk to the actors, some of them dressed as characters from our show. I had this moment of grace and humility and the deep realization that this thing has never been about me and the writing of it; it has always been so much bigger. The story is older than any of us and resonates in ways I will never understand. So I guess what I’m getting at is, my feeling about the mystery, the muse, the crazy challenging beautiful act of collaboration — all those things are as mystical to me as they’ve ever been.”

The story of Hadestown brings into parallel two love stories from Greek mythology: Orpheus and Eurydice alongside Hades and Persephone. In Mitchell’s narrative, both couples are torn in some way by doubt and fear. Orpheus (Reeve Carney) is the musician working on a song to change the world; Eurydice (Eva Noblezada) is the daring girl who falls in love with him. Hades (Patrick Page) is the king of the underworld and his wife Persephone (Amber Grey) is the plucky goddess who brings the spring and summer before returning to Hades’s side when the seasons change.

Mitchell told an audience recently that the whole thing came to her many years ago, as just “some lyrics [that] came into my head that seemed to be about this story.”

“Orpheus is this impossible optimist,” she explains. “[He’s] this dreamer who believes that he can write a song beautiful enough that he can change the way the world is, can change the rules of the world.”

Hadestown premiered as a community theater production in Vermont in 2006. Four years later, Mitchell made it an album where she sang as Eurydice and Justin Vernon was Orpheus. Greg Brown was Hades, Ani DiFranco was Persephone, Ben Knox Miller was Hermes, and the Haden Triplets were the Fates. As a folk album, Hadestown was anachronistic if not delightfully disorienting. Its songs all stood on their own, especially the lusciously navel-gazing “Flowers” and the provocative, accidentally topical “Why Do We Build the Wall?” They were each arrestingly understated, driven by the turns of the singer’s voice and the prosody in Mitchell’s lyrics.

Mitchell toured around, performing the album with a rotating cast of local singer-songwriters wherever she went. In 2012 she began a collaboration with Chavkin (Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812) and since then Hadestown has journeyed from a small thrust stage at New York Theatre Workshop in the East Village, to a larger proscenium stage in Edmonton, Alberta, then to the National Theater in London, and finally to Broadway at the Walter Kerr Theater.

Tipping a hat to the show’s folksinger origins, Orpheus really plays his acoustic guitar, the Fates wander with fiddle and squeezebox, people step to the mic when they want to emphasize what they’re singing about, and at the top of the second act, Persephone introduces the band. These elements help to set the show apart in a theater world where audiences are used to respecting a hard fourth wall.

“I come from the songwriter/music world,” Mitchell says, “and I’m very comfortable just hanging out for three or four minutes in a song with verses, choruses, maybe a bridge, digging the suspension of time and the cyclical beauty of music. So there’s been a super-slow learning curve for me in terms of how to take a song like ‘Wedding Song’ and put it in service of the kind of moment-to-moment storytelling we desire and expect from the theater. Especially because Hadestown is a sung-through piece, we needed the songs to work harder as scenes with stakes, events, and results for the characters.”

She continues, “Many of the songs for Hadestown existed as a kind of poetic portraiture and it took cracking them open, adding intros, interludes, bridges and outros, check-ins with other characters, to make them do that work. The addition of ‘Come Home with Me,’ which I rewrote one million times, in which Orpheus expresses his mission to ‘bring the world back into tune’ with song, and then especially the interlude where he debuts his ‘Epic’ melody and it has an effect on the world — flower magic! — really helped it feel like, when we got to the end of that song, something had changed. For Orpheus, for Eurydice, and for the audience.”

The Broadway incarnation is replete with these kinds of turning points and bringing them to fruition has meant a lot of rewriting for Mitchell. Thus, some of the songs that made sense on the album are no longer included, and some of the characters have evolved as well.

“I got feedback after almost every production we did about the Orpheus character not being in-focus enough,” Mitchell says. “He’s been the hardest character by far to write, I think because of all the characters in the show, he’s pure, an idealist, a believer, and everyone else has a sort of jaded or ruined quality which is easier for audiences to ‘buy.’ In earlier productions, because he’s this irrationally faithful character, mythologically speaking, and because of how he was written, he came across kind of cocky, overconfident, not the underdog hero we want to pull for.

“Finally, between London and Broadway, I really started massaging him into more of an innocent, naive character, an artist ‘touched by the gods’ who can see the way the world could be but has a hard time living in the world that is. That new character was very intuitive to Reeve [Carney], who is himself a very pure spirit. It felt right for Orpheus to be more of a mentee, an acolyte, a boy ‘under the wing’ of Hermes, the storyteller.

“So Hermes became much more of an uncle figure, more intimately involved in the story and its stakes than before. At the same time Eurydice was becoming more focused — and Eva [Noblezada] also brought so much intuitive toughness and humor to the role — as a runaway, a girl with a past, and demons that won’t leave her be. The Fates became, quite often, the voices in her head. I think those more meta storyteller characters each have a more pointed allegiance [on Broadway] to the character they hope will act out their world views.”

Further, the set has evolved: it is a barroom, a small world that feels both familiar and familial. But when we enter the underworld, the set becomes darker, cavernous. Though it physically expands, the result somehow feels heavier, more enclosed.

“We could see the effect that Orpheus’s divine music has on the world,” she says. “In the case of ‘Wait for Me,’ … the way to the underworld reveals itself to him. It’s a moment where I feel like all the design departments were bringing so much inspiration. … We go from a very warm, safe, round place, to a place that is suddenly terrifyingly large. It’s all of a sudden cold. There’s steel, those industrial lights go up and up and up. I find it very visually moving every time.”

There’s also a lift and turntable in the stage that add to the journeying portions of the show. Nowhere are the set changes more powerful than in the stunning, breath-stopping delivery of “Wait for Me” and its reprise in Act II. In the latter, Eurydice and Orpheus switch places in their travail of trust and doubt, singing with a workers’ chorus whose presence adds new depth to the show.

“The Workers were always a part of the story conceptually,” Mitchell says, “but at New York Theater Workshop we didn’t have space or budget for an ensemble, so that ‘role’ was taken on by the entire company. When we began to build in the dedicated choral, choreographic presence of the Workers, it really expanded a lot of things. ‘Wait for Me II,’ for example, gains a lot of momentum because suddenly the implications of Orpheus and Eurydice’s walk are bigger than the two of them.”

“Wait for Me II” is where the intersections of song, story, myth, folk tradition, and theatrical allegory become writ-large in the narrative. We’re reminded that a song, created as the expression of an individual, can encourage many others to follow new paths — or as the posters outside the theater say, help us “see how the world can be.”

“People inspire each other in ways no one will ever understand,” Mitchell says. “No one is coming up with any of this shit from scratch. We are standing on the backs of our ancestors and we’re singing to and for each other. The other very meta thing about letting go of the piece for Broadway was [recognizing] nothing is ever perfect. We don’t love Orpheus because he’s perfect. He’s flawed, he falls short, and we love him anyway. We love him for trying. There is goodness in the endeavor itself, whatever the outcome is.”

Lede image: Reeve Carney and Eva Noblezada
Secondary image: Amber Gray, Patrick Page, and Reeve Carney
Photo credit: Matthew Murphy

Where Everything’s Connected: A Conversation with Penny and Sparrow

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Sitting in a Philadelphia hotel room, Andy Baxter and Kyle Jahnke debate their options for lunch. The restaurant needs to be special, because the guys have reason to celebrate. The night before, Penny & Sparrow headlined World Café Live, a hip, roomy venue run by the city’s NPR affiliate. For a duo whose first Philly show — a bar gig somewhere out in Manayunk with seven people in attendance — was only three years ago, Penny & Sparrow have come a long way in a short time. Their rapid climb to headliner status is worthy of commemoration. At the very least, it’s worthy of a killer cheesesteak.

So you’re looking to grab some lunch. When you’re touring through a new town, is it important to eat and shop locally?

Andy Baxter: I look for similar things in most cities we visit — used book stores, comic stores, liquor stores. Those are the things I collect on the road. I have a few wells I always go back to in certain cities, too. I’m looking forward to Ann Arbor, because Vault of Midnight is my favorite comic store in the world.

Which aisle in the liquor store is your favorite?

Kyle Jahnke: We like bourbon. People bring us bourbon at our shows, too.

AB: We started collecting bourbon a few years ago. We usually get a bottle in the green room, and we’ll storehouse it for the entire tour. Then we do a draft at the end of every tour, where we each pick our favorite bottles and take them home. It’s awesome. I’m not gonna lie to you: I’ve replenished my bunker at home many times.

Where did that personal connection with your fans begin?

KJ: For whatever reason, the house show community builds a bed of coals for fans who will travel to come see you. There’s a connectivity there. It’s a really cool environment. We played a lot of those shows at the beginning, when venues weren’t ready to book us. We still play those shows on occasion.

Is that where you began introducing stage banter into your sets? These days, that’s a big part of your show.

AB: It probably started at the house shows, although adding it to our performances wasn’t a concerted thing. Since we want to engage with folks on and off stage, it feels normal to react with the crowd, regardless of how big it is. I love when people talk back. We feed off that interaction as much as we can.

Does the jokes ever fall flat?

KJ: The first time through town, it’s interesting for the crowd. Our songs are pretty weighty, and our banter is not. I think that throws people for a spin. Once they catch the overall pattern of the show, and they realize we’re trying to let people come up for air between heavy songs, they start reacting with us.

How many people are on the road with you these days?

KJ: We’ve got a tour manager who’s a good friend of ours, but we don’t have a front-of-house guy. Especially now that we’re playing bigger rooms, most of the sound guys are really great, and we only have a total of four inputs. It’s not a complex thing. We usually become best friends with the sound engineers, because we only have four channels. They like that.

AB: They’re like, “Oh, thank God. Vocals and an acoustic guitar? This is easy.”

Without drums or electric guitars, you can really hear the natural sound of every place you play, too.

KJ: Definitely. We’ve played all sorts of rooms on this tour. Some are built for acts like us. We show up and get to hear the natural reverb of the space we’re in. Sometimes, you’re playing these boxes that you need to orchestrate and synthetically make it sound the way it needs to. Each one is different.

Before you were headlining your own shows, would you ever find yourselves playing a show with a band that wasn’t nearly as nuanced or quiet as Penny & Sparrow?

KJ: At the beginning of our career, we’d play with local bands. Sometimes it would be in a metal venue, playing with metal bands. That was both bar jarring and very amazing. We got paired once with a world instruments band, too, and there were about 50 instruments onstage.

AB: There was a hammer dulcimer, a rain stick, and a didgeridoo. Like Kyle said, the best pairings are always the metal shows. You’ve got two different groups showing up, and they both tend to like it. We’re the palette cleanser for their group, maybe. We’re happy to be the sherbet for them. We’re just a homemade cucumber water.

Speaking of palette cleaners … are there any non-musical activities that help you clear the noise from your head and make room for new songwriting ideas?

AB: Reading. Just taking in a whole bunch of different voices from other wordsmiths. I love podcasts. I love The Moth. I love audiobooks and short stories. You’re learning different peoples’ word banks and vocabularies. And Kyle’s activity is probably baking.

KJ: No, mine is just being outside or doing non-music things.

 

What led to the creation of your newest album, Wendigo?

AB: We originally started writing this album, thinking we might do a musical of sorts. A dark-themed concert album like Redheaded Stranger, but all from the perspective of Death, like the grim reaper singing the songs. We started doing that and, at the end of the writing, some parts didn’t fit, so we began writing new songs that were inspired by fear. We wanted to figure out if stuff we’re scared of is actually worthy of that fright. I really like comic books and horror stories, so I’m familiar with ideas like the boogeyman and the Loch Ness monster. It’s like immersion therapy. Sometimes, when you a shine a light directly at something that frightens you, you can de-fang it.

We live in a scary world right now. Do you see any political parallels with your songs? Were you writing about the monsters who rule us?

AB: I won’t say that we don’t exist in a scary time right now — that would be really silly — but I’ll also admit that most of these lyrics were written long before the campaign trail was in full hatred mode. It would be disingenuous to say the album was, in any way, inspired by political ramifications. But looking at 2016 and 2017 through the lens of what we’d written was a really eerie thing. The album is all about looking at things that you’re scared of … and now we’re realizing all those things have been doused in gasoline and set on fire.

 

Your band is often compared to the Civil Wars. You worked with John Paul White on Penny & Sparrow’s previous album, which must’ve been inspiring.

KJ: We worked pretty closely with John, starting with the songwriting and moving on to everything else. We’d take him some songs we really loved, and he’d helped mold them. We co-wrote songs from the very beginning with him, too. He was producing it, and he helped us make every musical step along the way.

I see some similarities in the way Kyle and John Paul play the acoustic guitar, too. It’s a very specific thing, being the main instrumentalist in a folk duo.

KJ: He was a huge influence on the way I was playing guitar, every before I met him. Meeting him and learning techniques and seeing how he played, that just increased his influence. I love the rhythm he puts into a guitar. And before they stopped playing together, I spent a lot of time studying how he and Joy [Williams] interacted as a duo onstage, because it takes a lot for two people to fill a room with nothing else than a guitar and two voices.

Let’s get back to that whole “we wanted to write a musical” thing. Is that something you’ll continue pursuing?

AB: I loved musicals growing up, and I still love them now. Thanks to the Internet, I can now see a bootleg version of Hamilton. Years ago, if you couldn’t get to New York to see a Broadway show, you had to watch the Tonys. Kyle loves Broadway, too, and we both particularly love the narrative of Les Mis. Years ago, we started out writing songs from Valjean’s perspective, then we decided to have one thread that ties every record we do together, which is choosing a different character from that show and writing a song from their perspective. We’ll keep dong that until we run out of characters. We’ve dabbled in the idea of doing a musical for a long time now.

KJ: We love the idea of connecting a story and a song. One day, I’d love to go back to the idea and trying to do something similar to it, where everything’s connected and it has a central theme. We just love writing songs, period. We just really like our job. That’s what it comes down to.

Bright Star Does Right by Bluegrass on Broadway

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Broadway, lately, has been kind to the chorus it never saw coming, to adventurous works that look beyond traditional theater tropes and highly trained vibratos for a hook that lasts long after that curtain goes up. Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s revolutionary hip-hop musical sensation, is the poster child of this: With its explosive performances and Roots-produced, Grammy award-winning soundtrack, it set a new standard for what the modern musical could do in terms of reconnecting theater with popular culture and keeping that life line intact. Waitress, the new musical based on the 2007 film starring Keri Russell, holds that pop connection close, as its music and lyrics were penned by Sara Bareilles of “Love Song” fame.

While shows like Les Misérables, Wicked, and The Lion King continue to draw crowds to their respective spots in Times Square every night, Broadway’s audiences are clearly clamoring for the current hits whose soundtracks make for seamless additions to their Recently Played iTunes playlist. They want an experience that banks on the music before the drama — and that’s how Bright Star gives its audience what it’s looking for.

Bright Star, the musical collaboration of Steve Martin and singer/songwriter Edie Brickell, brings Americana into this conversation. Set in the hilly sprawl of North Carolina in the wake of World War II, its story follows Billy Cane, a newly anointed veteran who’s trying to find his voice as a writer having just returned from the battlefield. Shortly after he makes his way home, he’s off again, heading to Asheville in the hopes of securing a byline at the Asheville Southern Journal. Alice Murphy — the paper’s tough, terse, and hawk-eyed editor — reads one of Billy’s stories and pays him for his work, but doesn’t publish it: She offers Billy the opportunity to pitch her ideas until one sticks, and he spends the majority of Bright Star working toward that goal. Through flashbacks, we learn more about Alice — where she came from, the loves and losses that shaped the bubbly teenager who somehow turns into the stern woman Billy meets at the Journal — and that her life’s story syncs up with Billy’s in a way that neither one of them sees coming.

While the plot of Bright Star bounces between the aspirational journey of Billy’s and Alice’s painful trip down memory lane, the music is what lays a firm foundation for the folklore. With down-home arrangements, plenty of opportunities for its singers to showcase their ability to belt the hell out of a long-held high note, and the steely twang of the bluegrass band onstage throughout the program, the music of Bright Star is the anchoring force of the production — the backbone that keeps the decidedly PG storylines from broaching cheesy, try-hard territory in a venue that’s more than susceptible to that kind of family-friendly fun. This isn’t "Bluegrass by Disney" or anything, either: The arrangements are tight, the vocal lines are tough, and the accents steer clear of caricature territory (for the most part). By treating the band as a living, breathing set piece — and keeping them visible and active throughout the performance — Bright Star makes the importance of the music known, sending the not-so-subliminal message that the pickers and players backing the actors are just as pivotal to the story as Alice and Bobby are themselves. Carmen Cusack, as Alice, can summon hope and warmth (“Sun Is Gonna Shine”) as effortlessly as she can channel grief and despair (“Please, Don’t Take Him”), and the bright banjo riffs and sad bass lows do so in kind.

Bright Star may not break new ground, as far as its story goes, and the music, while lovely, isn’t especially earth-shattering, though it’s great to see an acoustic guitar and mandolin treated so venerably on the Great White Way. But like Hamilton, Waitress, and other musicals that have audiences rethinking the role popular music has to play in storytelling, Bright Star succeeds in working music — in this case, of a folkier, bluegrass ilk — into its fabric while pushing boundaries and expectations for both the genre and the artform. Broadway’s finally down with beats and poppy hooks. It’s about damn time it picked up the banjo, too.