Jeff Weissman
A Brighter Blood
It started with a different title: Waiting...
I had just moved to New York, waiting tables by day and playing in bands at night. One shift it hit me: why not write about artists? The waiting, the wanting, the in-between. So I began writing it — music, book, and lyrics.
It was too much for one person. I handed the writing to my friend Antonia Tancredi, and she took over the book and lyrics.
Then it changed. She had watched a lieutenant colonel named Oliver North testify before Congress in his fatigues, saying that a man was out to get him — Abu Nidal, the terrorist who boasted he could walk into any country, bomb it, and leave without anyone knowing his name. Antonia pulled the story toward them. The restaurant stayed in the bones of it, but we were writing about something else now. She called it Gray Men.
I never liked that title. Antonia came up with A Brighter Blood.
The score was finished, and we were headed for our first reading.
Then, in February of 1993, a bomb went off beneath the World Trade Center. Our director called and told me to turn on the television. Watching the coverage, she said what we both already knew: a show that asked an audience to feel for a terrorist had just become impossible. We put it on hold.
After all that work, Antonia and I were in despair.
But on January 1, I picked up a synopsis of Ophelia and started writing. We finished it in three months and went straight into a reading.
A Brighter Blood had twenty-two songs. The five here are the ones we were able to record— but there are eighteen more!
Synopsis
Lydia waits tables in Manhattan, estranged from the father whose restaurant she walked away from. When she hears he's dying, she races to the hospital and arrives ten minutes too late. But in his room lies a stranger, bandaged and in a coma, who suddenly grabs her hand and begs, "Stay, Angel." She does.
Lydia inherits her father's restaurant and runs it with Montenegro, the fearless woman her father took in as his own. Every day she visits the stranger, who has no memory of who he is, and they fall in love. On the morning his bandages are to come off, he vanishes.
Lt. Col. Nathan Dally, a decorated Marine, has been made the scapegoat for a failed rescue mission that killed a family, and is quietly sent to New York to hunt down the man behind a new wave of bombings. When a bomb explodes during a parade, Nathan carries the injured Montenegro to safety, then takes a job as Lydia's bartender. Lydia falls for him too, until she discovers who he is and why he's really there.
The bombers seize the restaurant. Lydia frees Nathan and stays behind as a hostage, and comes face to face with their leader: her stranger from the hospital, his memory restored. He is Abu, a scholar whose wife and children died in Nathan's raid. Lydia uncovers the truth: both men were set up by the same official, with a promise that was never meant to be kept. But neither man will stop. In the final confrontation, Lydia refuses to choose between them-
The two men turn their guns on each other, and they kill each other.
At the graveyard, Lydia hands the proof to a reporter, gives the restaurant to Montenegro, and scatters Abu's ashes on the wind. Only then does she feel both men beside her, and she finds what their hatred could not: the strength to forgive.
LISTEN
Excerpts from the score
1. A Starless Indigo Midnight Sky.
In the hospital, the stranger fears he is a man with nothing inside, no memory and no past. So Lydia fills the silence with the beautiful things of her world: fireflies, summer rain, snow on your face. What starts as a way to comfort him becomes a dance, and by the end of the song they are strangers no more.
2. The Candle's Flame.
Beaten and handcuffed, waiting for the man who has sworn to kill him, Nathan asks Lydia to shave him so he can die looking like a soldier. He tells her about the young men who died in his arms, and how he lit a candle for each of them. "Who'll light a candle for me?" Lydia lights the candles, not for his death but for hope, and in the darkness they finally admit their love.
3. Something in a Woman
Across the city, two enemies prepare for the same fight. Abu paces his hideout with Lydia held captive nearby; Nathan loads his weapons alone. Neither knows the other is thinking of her. Each man begins to doubt what he has done, and their voices meet in the same confession: there is something in a woman that heals, and steals away your reason.
4. Always Faithful
Alone in a rented room with his medals, a bottle, and a loaded revolver, Nathan has lost his rank, his marriage, and his good name. As he weighs whether to end it all, the voices of his past rise around him: the boy who dreamed of being a Marine, the cadets who swore loyalty, the bride who promised to be faithful. Out of that chorus comes his answer. If no one else will stand by him, he will stand by himself, and he calls the news to tell Abu he'll meet him face to face.
5. Right Hand of God
Abu's memory has returned, and with it the loss of everything he loved. High above the city, grief hardens into something darker, and a gentle scholar becomes a man consumed by vengeance. Across the city, Nathan answers him, and two enemies swear the same oath. It is the moment the story turns, and the audience sees what hatred makes of broken hearts.
6. HOMELAND(piano instrumental)
The show opens with a father and his family celebrating news they believe will bring them home. It is their last happy moment together. A piano-only recording, with the accompaniment, the melody, and a solo at its center. No one sings on this one. I’ve included it simply because it’s one of my favorites.