Like many lesbians of their generation, the actress Beth Malone and the writer Mary Ann Stratton have a history with the Indigo Girls. The two women, who are both 56 and have been friends since their college years in Colorado, still vividly remember the sense of awakening they felt seeing the musical duo in 1990, when they were roommates sharing a basement apartment. “Here come these two women in their cowboy boots and their ripped jeans and their bi-level haircuts,” Stratton said, laughing. “We have boyfriends, and we’re both like, ‘Wait … we’re going to rethink everything now.’”
Their fandom only grew. “One time at an Indigo Girls concert, Mary Ann threw my bra at Emily,” Malone said.
She was referring to Emily Saliers, one half of the Indigo Girls, who was sitting inches from Malone and quickly interjected: “That’s happened once in 40 years, I want to let you know that.”
Confirming that the lesbian world runs on two degrees of separation, Saliers and Malone were introduced many years later by a mutual friend. In a further twist, Saliers, Malone and Stratton are now collaborators on the new musical “Starstruck,” a modern variation on the classic play “Cyrano de Bergerac” that’s having a world-premiere run at Bucks County Playhouse, in New Hope, Pa., through March 21.
Like Saliers, Malone is part of the lesbian canon: She earned a Tony Award nomination in 2015 for her performance as Alison, the lesbian narrator of the groundbreaking coming-of-age, coming-to-terms musical “Fun Home.” For “Starstruck,” she is wearing two hats, as actress and writer (she wrote the book with Stratton). Add a producing team that includes the best-selling memoirist Glennon Doyle and her wife, the former soccer player Abby Wambach, as well as the comedian Tig Notaro, and you can’t blame a reader for guessing that the new show involves women falling in love with each other.
Spoiler alert: It does. In this production, a gruff Idaho park ranger and astronomer, Cyd DeBerg (Malone), finds herself falling for an ebullient podcaster named Roxanne (Krysta Rodriguez) — but steps aside to help a sweet doofus of a colleague (Sam Gravitte) woo her. (To make the situation even more complicated, Cyd wants to create the first International Dark Sky Reserve in the United States, but faces some local opposition.)
While the main conceit is as old as, well, the 19th-century “Cyrano de Bergerac,” this latest riff feels new. Yes, it is slightly less rare than it once was to have women dominate a creative team (the director and choreographer is Lorin Latarro), but the show’s three authors are well aware that “Starstruck” sticks out in musical theater, an art form that is not especially teeming with lesbian content, especially in the foreground as opposed to relegated to supporting characters.
“We thought ‘Fun Home’ was going to do something and equalize things,” Malone said. “It was a one-off, and things are business as usual and more fear. Anytime the industry is running on fear, you have very little risk-taking.”
That “Starstruck” would have a queer angle was not necessarily part of Malone’s original plan. Some time ago, she was watching ’80s movies looking for one that had potential as a musical, with a good part for her, and realized that she kept noticing the male lead first.
“It was always some awesome, flawed, messed-up, funny, romantic lead guy who is kind of a mess,” she said, “and I was like, ‘Well, I want to play that guy.’”
She was particularly drawn to the 1987 film “Roxanne,” Steve Martin’s spin on “Cyrano,” and wondered what would drive a female Cyrano to hide her desire. In the original, Cyrano has an oversize schnoz and feels unworthy of love. Malone remembers thinking: “What’s the nose? This woman feels like she’s so ugly because the way life’s treated her. She feels like she must be just, like, a people-repellent. And so the nose is on the inside — it’s an interior, complicated nose.”
She and Stratton, a retired teacher, began developing the idea as a lark during the pandemic shutdown, when they both had a bit of time on their hands. Then things got a lot realer when Malone connected with Saliers. Coincidentally the musician — who had played Mary Magdalene in a “Jesus Christ Superstar” tribute project in the mid-1990s — had musical theater on the brain.
“I really began to feel myself drawn to the depth of musical theater — arrangement, melody, harmonics, all that,” Saliers said. “I have to admit, I thought it was silly that people broke into song. But then I don’t know how to explain it except that it was just this sort of thing that was pulling me.”
Saliers and a friend, the country singer Jennifer Nettles, had floated the idea of adapting a book about women who go to work in a Gibson guitar factory during World War II. Then Nettles pivoted to a different project (“Giulia: The Poison Queen of Palermo” starts previews in June at the Perelman Performing Arts Center), while Saliers signed up for “Starstruck.”
A major challenge for Saliers, 62, was that the Indigo Girls have always been associated with an unfiltered approach in which writer, narrator and performer are rolled into one, with a song’s emotions and feelings assumed to be in intimate resonance with their author’s. Musicals just don’t work like that.
“I know a lot about writing about human relationships and complexities, but I always felt a little inauthentic trying to write someone else’s story,” Saliers said. “It was always very personal: ‘This is me through my own lens.’ Where this was like, ‘It can’t just be through your own lens, you’ve got to be someone else.’”
She threw herself into the process and figured things out as she went along. Tom Kitt, the show’s orchestrator, arranger and music supervisor, has shepherded several pop, rock and R&B shows to Broadway, including “Head Over Heels” and “Jagged Little Pill,” and helped her translate her writing to a different format and its different needs.
Still, when I attended a rehearsal recently for the show in Manhattan, I was surprised to overhear someone mention the Indigo Girls hit “Closer to Fine.” Yes, that song is in the show, though Saliers didn’t take it well when Kitt first brought up the idea of including it.
“I felt physically sick in my body all day long because I didn’t want it in there,” she said. “I was like, ‘This song doesn’t have a [expletive] thing to do with the show. I felt the same way about ‘Galileo’ — I didn’t want those two big singalongs.
“When you put these big songs in, it’s about feeling joy and being entertained,” she added, “and I was being all artsy about it, like, ‘No! I want to write new music, I know I can do it.’”
Eventually she relented and the new songs are interspersed with a handful of Indigo Girls hits and obscurities, often with tweaks to the lyrics to make them fit the plot and the characters. Saliers noted a new line (“I go online and meet these guys/I want to squeeze them between my thighs”) in the song “Run,” saying, “People are like, ‘Indigo Girl fans are not going to like that.’ But I like it.”
Possibly even more likely to raise debate, Stratton pointed out, is having a romantic lead whose “edges do not get smoothed out.” Malone circled back to those messy male leads from ’80s movies, saying of Cyd, “She’s crunchy, and you know what? You’re going to want her to get kissed. You’re going to want her to fall in love. You’re going to want her to crack open and soften.”
She and Stratton also emphasized that the musical centers on an older woman — one of the aspects that convinced Doyle, already a huge Indigo Girls devotee, to sign on as a producer.
“So many of our love stories are just young people, and my personal experience in my life, the greatest love story of my life didn’t begin until I was 40, when I met Abby,” Doyle, 49, said in a video interview. “So queer middle-aged love stories are very personal to me.”
They can be funny, too, as poor Cyd desperately tries to figure out what hit her — something that should resonate with audience members across the board. “We’re trying to make a comedy that goes straight up the middle,” Malone said. “It is a rom-com for everyone.”
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