People that keep asking, “Who is Carmen Cusack,” I really want to answer that question in different ways and take them on a tiny bit of a journey. I don’t really have a story theme in my show. They’re just really strong songs that give a story point or, hopefully, that’s what the audience will understand: that I don’t necessarily need a storyline. But this is going to be exciting because I can bring my own interpretation into the songs, and I’ve picked songs that stand on their own without a through line. So hopefully that’s where we’re headed with the set.ĭo you find your interpretation of songs changes depending on the setting? If you’re doing them within the context of a show where you’re responsible for an entire through line versus in concert?Ībsolutely, it changes. There was a lot of collaboration and it took three years, and there’s a lot of stories. If people are going to come to the show, it’s probably going to be because they love the music of Bright Star, so I want to keep within that ilk and I also want to surprise them with some songs that they did not get to hear and fill them in on certain story lines that had to get dropped for us to get to our final product. So I want to surprise the audience with some of those songs. I’m so happy that we came up with the show that we came up with, but along the way they’d just continue to write beautiful songs, and several of those songs I became very attached to, and they had to drop them-these little gems kept falling off of our Bright Star wooden house that twirls around, we just had to keep letting go of these beautiful songs. I’m also going to be singing some songs that were, unfortunately, cut from Bright Star. It really depends on the situation, it depends what I’ve just come out of, but for this I really felt like I needed to speak to my Bright Star fans and give them some of that music, but along with that I’m going to add some flavors of my own favorites that complement the style of Bright Star’s music. What has your process been for picking songs for your 54 Below concert? I met Carmen at Elizabeth Street Garden-a cross between an English garden and Southern Gothic cemetery, in the heart of SoHo-to talk about her upcoming concerts at 54 Below, Bright Star, and her life both past and present. And now people are trying to organize the facts of her life, which is always a complicated proposition when many, sometimes conflicting things, are true at once. She’s done a lot of things and is, simultaneously, the new girl in town. She’s American, but had worked in London for years. It was her Broadway debut and, as she says, led to a lot of people asking, “Who is Carmen Cusack?” She had played Nellie Forbush in the tour of South Pacific and Elphaba in the tour of Wicked. She earned glowing reviews and a Tony nomination for Best Actress in a Musical. There was a certain multifaceted-ness in Carmen’s performance onstage that was captivating not only for it’s depth, but for its autonomy. I found myself thinking about this as I watched Carmen Cusack play Alice Murphy in the Broadway musical Bright Star, written by Steve Martin and Edie Brickell. That same year he also, with no grand announcement, stopped performing standup comedy. In 1981, Steve Martin starred in the film Pennies from Heaven, where he played a sheet music salesman who wondered why life couldn’t be like the songs on the radio. Bear with me for a moment while I tell you something that’s going to seem only tangentially connected to the subject of Carmen Cusack.
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