New York City may not have a country music station, but now that the stage musical adaptation of Urban Cowboy has opened here with shotguns blasting, the big city has a country show. Or a sorta-kinda country show, since most of the boot-stomping ditties written for the 1980 John Travolta-Debra Winger flick have been replaced on Broadway with numbers by the only somewhat countrified Bob Stillman and city slickers such as Jeff Blumenkrantz and Jason Robert Brown. This is a job in which the hyper-kinetic Brown sits at the on-stage piano, as he did for his exceptional The Last Five Years, and contributes reliably smart musical direction.

Urban Cowboy began life as an Esquire article called, m[...]