While this kind of article may typically include a warning for spoilers, there are no longer any shows to spoil; the last opportunity to watch Bright Star on campus was on Saturday, November 13. Because there is no longer a need to shroud in secrecy the plot of the show, we have opted to include a brief synopsis for the benefit of the reader.

Bright Star revolves around the connected and yet separate lives of Billy Cane and Alice Murphy. The show is set in North Carolina in the postwar 1940s, with flashbacks to the 1920s. Billy is an aspiring writer who has dreams of writing for the Asheville Southern Journal, with its notoriously difficult editor Alice Murphy. The show’s flashbacks exist largely to justify Murphy’s difficult personality and set up the shocking twist of the show- that Billy Cane is actually Alice Murphy’s long-lost son. We learn that Billy is the product of Alice’s forbidden relationship with Jimmy Ray Dobbs, the son of the mayor of Zebulon, North Carolina. Once Jimmy Ray’s father finds out about their child, he tosses the baby off a train and claims that he put the baby up for adoption in Raleigh. As it turns out, the child survived the fall when he fell into a river, where he was discovered by Daddy Cane, who adopted him as his own, and who never saw fit to inform his “son” that he was in fact adopted under the most unusual of circumstances. Billy does not find out that he was adopted until Alice accompanies him back to his hometown and meets his “father,” where she was shown the artifacts of his discovery and recognizes them on first sight. In the end, Alice and Billy end up reunited and Alice marries Jimmy Ray.

PROS

The authors of this article saw the show with two different casts. However, we both maintain that the cast and crew of the show was phenomenal and they gave their all to bring this story to life. While the musical was a bit simplistic, we both found the story of the musical to be quite charming and riveting. Even though the theater space itself was quite limited, the production staff did a great job of constructing believable sets and working past these limitations. The acting and singing done by the cast was also phenomenal. The cast altogether was extremely talented. Extra emphasis on the acting itself: it was phenomenal and the actors involved did an amazing job of conveying all the emotions needed. The crew also did an amazing job of making sure the show ran smoothly and without a hitch. Overall, the show was a very enjoyable experience and we would recommend it to anyone who gets the chance to see it in the future.

CONS

While we enjoyed the show,  there were a few minor things that we were not too keen on. One of our biggest critics of the show was that some of the jokes in the show fell flat, in our opinion. This is not the fault of the cast as they had great timing and delivery. This was more the fault of those who wrote the musical in general. Another issue we had with the production was that we felt that the conflict resolved itself a little too fast during the second half. Billy was delivered some life-altering news that made him re-examine how he viewed his family and it seemed like he moved past that very suddenly with no reason given. Our News Editor, Spencer Finley, also holds that the character of Margo was a character who had no purpose other than to provide Billy with a love interest. If her character had been removed, the plot of the show would have been almost entirely unaffected, and certainly not affected in any kind of a material way.