Ashley Wenzel-Jones and Daryl Ray Carliles
The two leading role actors are traveling hours from North Carolina for weekly rehearsals in the Clarksville Community Players’ upcoming musical Bright Star, written by Steve Martin and Edie Brickell.
Ashley Wenzel-Jones plays the female lead, Alice Murphy, and Daryl Ray Carliles plays Jimmy Ray Dobbs. These performers and almost half of the cast travel from outside Clarksville to work on the production since the cast alone numbers 29 people.
Wenzel-Jones is excited to challenge her range as her role is a bit like playing two characters since she plays Alice as a teenager and Alice as an adult.
While some productions of Bright Star cast separately for the younger and the older Alice, Wenzel-Jones said this is exactly what she wants — to portray two different types of personalities “is fantastic.” This is her first performance with CCP, and she auditioned after working with director Josh Glasscock in Ragtime last fall at McGregor Hall.
A veteran of stage performance, Wenzel-Jones has been in 15 productions, mostly musicals.
A bubbly young actress with the voice of an angel, she lights up when she talks about doing theatre work. “Being able to tell someone else’s story through song is everything to me, and being able to see the audience’s faces gives me an adrenaline rush. You can’t really see past a few rows because of the lights, but you can see people’s eyes when you’re singing and how they feel.”
She’s enthralled with the music Edie Brickell and Steve Martin wrote for this show and describes it as powerful.
Wenzel-Jones travels 45 minutes each way from Stem, N.C. to rehearsals, leaving her two-year-old son with her husband Alex and two goldendoodle dogs. And in her spare time, she does Disney cosplay. Cosplay is dressing up in costumes, in her case mostly as Disney princesses, and either lip syncing or singing while doing costume reveals to her TikTok followers (of which she has over 11,000.) “It’s mostly detailed shots of the costume that I’m wearing, and for some reason, people go crazy for that,” Wenzel-Jones said.
Ashley Wenzel-Jones
Wenzel-Jones and her friend, Daryl Ray Carliles, are both making the drive from North Carolina. Carliles travels 90 minutes each way for rehearsals and is portraying Jimmy Ray Dobbs who is charming, well-built and intelligent. Carliles says of his character, “He upsets the generational patterns, that a lot of men during this time period, and even today, still root themselves in and he goes against them and believes more in romance and love, in fairness and freedom, and equality. And he’s a dreamer.”
Carliles, a professional actor who’s worked in New York City and North Carolina on stage and screen, will be playing the role of both the young teenaged Jimmy Ray Dobbs and the adult Dobbs; and, he has a unique connection to Bright Star. About a year before the play came to Broadway, he stopped to admire a singer busking on a New York City street, and singing like a Broadway performer. They struck up a conversation and turns out the singer was interested in listening to Carliles talk as he was studying for a part in an upcoming show that would feature a young man from North Carolina; Carliles who had grown up in North Carolina, had the right accent. That actor, Paul Alexander Nolan, turned out to be the one who originated the role on Broadway in Bright Star a year or so later.
Ever since that chance meeting in 2015, Carliles has wanted to play this role. Within a few weeks, he’ll have his chance.
This musical is based on a true event that took place in Missouri in 1902 but this production is set in the 1920s and 1940s in North Carolina.
Come watch these characters unfold in a story with twists and turns set to music that’s not quite your “ordinary showtunes” — as the strains from a banjo and mandolin fill the auditorium.
Bright Star opens April 20, at 7 p.m. (with five show dates), and tickets are available online for $20. Ticket includes a half-hour live bluegrass concert before the show by Boone Mountain Bluegrass, who will also play a short set during intermission.
Tickets may be purchased here: www.ticketor.com/clarksvilleplayers.org/default#buy
Bright Star is presented through special arrangement with and all authorized performance materials are supplied by Theatrical Rights Worldwide, 1180 Avenue of the Americas, Suite 640, NY, NY 100316. www.theatricalrights.com
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