Shine On: Steve Martin & Edie Brickell’s Bright Star Musical Shoots for Great White Way After D.C.

Bright Star, the musical collaboration of Emmy and Grammy winner Steve Martin and Grammy winner Edie Brickell, will play a limited engagement in Washington, D.C. later this year. Walter Bobbie directs the production, which previously lit up San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre in 2014. The show is expected to head to Broadway in spring 2016.

D.C. performances will run from December 2 through January 10, 2016 at the Kennedy Center Eisenhower Theatre, with a cast to be announced shortly. No word yet on dates or theater for the subsequent Great White Way engagement.

The musical, which features music by Martin and Brickell, lyrics by Brickell and a book by Martin, is set in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina and travels between 1945 and 1923. Billy Cane, a young soldier just home from World War II, meets Alice Murphy, the brilliant editor of a southern literary journal. Together they discover a powerful secret that alters their lives.

The Old Globe production starred Carmen Cusack as Alice and A.J. Shively as Billy, along with Stephen Lee Anderson, Stephen Bogardus, Patti Cohenour, Wayne Duvall, Hannah Elless, Jeff Hiller, Kate Loprest, Wayne Alan Wilcox and Libby Winters.