THE WASHINGTON POST: Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban’s divorce is a lot for their fans to absorb

Keith Urban’s best songs are either achingly sweet or crushingly depressing - there is no in-between. But usually, he just wants to let you know that everything will be okay.

“Someday, baby, you and I are gonna be the ones,” the country music superstar crooned at his Saturday night concert over the plucky sound of his electric guitar. “Good luck’s gonna shine!”

Urban’s shows are a place for joy, and this one at Jiffy Lube Live in Bristow, Virginia, was no exception as thousands in the audience screamed.

In addition to the aforementioned Better Life, he belted energetic tracks about appreciating small moments (Days Go By); how you don’t need money to be happy (Who Wouldn’t Wanna Be Me); and the delight of fleeing the city for fresh country air (Where the Blacktop Ends).

That’s not even counting the peppy love songs, such as his well-known smash, Somebody Like You, or newer album cut, Chuck Taylors.

The only thing that threatened to upset this giddy vibe was the shocking news that dropped just days before the show: Urban, 57, and his wife of nearly two decades, Academy Award-winning movie star Nicole Kidman, 58, have separated. TMZ broke the story last Monday, and on Tuesday, Kidman officially filed for divorce, ending one of Hollywood’s longest-reigning and much-beloved marriages.

Urban, not surprisingly, did not bring up the news during his two hours onstage, which was one of the last dates on his High and Alive World Tour that wraps up in Nashville next week. But many people in the audience were thinking about the split.

Oh, were they ever.

“The entire way here, we were talking about it,” said Deirdre Mott, who drove to the show with her mother, Sarah Henry, from Frederick, Maryland.

They pondered the odd dynamics of life as part of a celebrity couple and what it might have been like for Urban to see Kidman in roles such as last year’s erotic thriller, Babygirl. (It reminded Henry of how Kidman got divorced from Tom Cruise not long after their sexually charged film Eyes Wide Shut was released in 1999.) They wondered whether the cloud hovering over Urban’s personal life would leave him “down in the dumps” during his show.

“I’m just hoping that everything will go well tonight, and that he will embrace the love of his music, and it will get him through everything that’s moving forward,” Henry said, “Because that’s what you have to do.”

Urban, always a professional, did choose that path. He grinned, he laughed, he ran around the stage and gave fans shout-outs for their birthdays. He complimented a poster that displayed a photo of one attendee’s license plate, which was “URBNFAN.” He didn’t engage in much crowd banter, though at the beginning of the performance, he delivered his mission statement: Repress all negative thoughts.

“I’ve been promising this since the very first night that we started this tour back in May. I’ve got one promise, one job to do tonight. And that’s to make sure that none of you think about your life outside of here for two frickin’ hours,” Urban said as the crowd cheered. “In the Jiffy Lube Live center tonight, we are a utopian, inclusive, all-one existence … where there are no troubles, no stress. Just people singing, having a good time. Are you with me, Virginia?!”

Urban’s sunny public persona - particularly onstage where he’s in his element as a killer guitar player - is one reason his pending divorce stunned the world. (Or at least America, as well as Australia and New Zealand, Kidman and Urban’s home countries.)

Plus, as many fans have mournfully noted, they just seemed so adorable together.

They met in Los Angeles at a 2005 gala thrown by “G’Day USA,” the US-Australian diplomacy program. Urban, who had just attained star status with a pair of multi-platinum albums, got her number but was so intimidated he waited months to call. Kidman, a couple years removed from winning a best actress Oscar for The Hours, assumed he wasn’t interested.

Eventually, they connected and hit it off. The two positively glowed on red carpets supporting each other at their respective industry events, with Urban accompanying her to the Oscars and Golden Globes and Kidman attending a multitude of country music award shows. They lived a quiet home life with their two daughters in Nashville, where fellow residents would see them out at restaurants or Whole Foods and leave them alone.

“They felt like one of those couples that just like - they’re going to be together forever,” said Charlotte Elwood of Arlington.

“They kind of bridged two different worlds, like country music versus Hollywood and truly being an icon in the acting world,” said Kendall Dobbins of Washington. “Being together for that long across two separate audiences was so inspiring … it’s kind of like a, ‘Oh my gosh, how does this not work out?’”

Though as with any relationship, you never know what’s going on behind the scenes. In an emotional tribute to Kidman last year when she was honoured with the AFI Life Achievement Award, Urban spoke about how his addiction issues nearly blew up their relationship shortly after they wed in 2006.

“Four months into a marriage, I’m into rehab for three months, with no idea what was going to happen to us. And if you want to see what love in action really looks like, give that a whirl,” Urban said. “Nic pushed through every negative voice, I’m sure even some of her own, and she chose love.”

So it’s hard to reconcile that with the current stories pouring out of tabloids and celebrity publications, citing anonymous sources who said that the couple has been living apart for months or that the split has turned “dramatic.”

The internet pounced on a recent tour video of Urban changing the lyrics of The Fighter, a love song he wrote about Kidman, to include the name of his backup musician, Maggie Baugh, who sang the duet with him onstage. Although fans pointed out that Urban frequently live-improvises lyrics, he removed The Fighter from his set list this week. (If you don’t want to feel melancholy, don’t watch this goofy video of Urban and Kidman singing it to each other in a car.)

Darla Markley of Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, has been following Urban’s career for at least 20 years and has been to more than 40 of his concerts, which have always put her in a good mood. So she gasped when Inside Edition, the syndicated program that airs after her local news, announced the breakup last week.

But Markley admitted that she suspected something was a bit off. Earlier this year, Urban suddenly let go some of his longtime band members. She also found it odd that his tour schedule these past several months sent him to the United States, then Australia, then Canada, then back to the U.S. That didn’t leave him much time to see Kidman, she thought, given that photos showed the actress was in England this summer filming Practical Magic 2.

“I don’t want to judge. We don’t live in that house, we don’t know,” Markley said. “But I was sad.”

It’s hard for fans not to feel personally invested, especially after they have spent so long connecting to Urban as an artist and a person. Susan Fredericks of the Baltimore area said that she nearly started crying when she saw David Muir report the breakup on ABC’s “World News Tonight,” because she thought the headlines she saw earlier were fake. She appreciated that Kidman, who went through the wringer with Cruise, met Urban at the same time he was looking for love.

“They just kind of found each other,” she said. “I was just so happy when they got married, and just as disappointed that they are getting a divorce.”

Urban promised that he would visit the thousands of fans toward the back of the venue, and in the second hour of his set, he journeyed through the amphitheatre to a small platform right between the last row of seats and the beginning of the lawn. This reporter happened to be sitting about two feet away from the platform and got a very close-up view of Urban singing his acoustic set: A cover of Chappell Roan’s Pink Pony Club, as well as one of his saddest hits, You’ll Think of Me, which won him his first Grammy Award in 2006 for best male country vocal performance.

The ballad, sung through the haze and anger of a breakup, felt particularly apropos, though it’s a staple at any Urban concert. At one point, he peppered the lyrics with an expletive and fell to his knees - but fans report that he pulls that move routinely. Attendees clamoured, filming every moment, yelling his name and begging security guards nearby to stop Urban in the aisles so they could get a picture or shake his hand.

He travelled back to the main stage for another tearjerker (Blue Ain’t Your Colour) along with a cover of Johnny Cash’s Folsom Prison Blues. (“That’s a sick-ass lyric right there,” Urban interjected, at the part about shooting a man in Reno just to watch him die.) During the encore, he continued his mix of devastating and swooning, going from “Stupid Boy,” about a man who destroys a woman’s self-esteem, to Making Memories of Us, an exceptionally romantic ballad centred around the line, “I’ll earn your trust making memories of us.”

Outwardly, anyway, Urban showed no signs of anything amiss. He beamed as he bid the audience good night, all eyes on him as he strolled offstage, back to his real life that no one in the ecstatic crowd really knows anything about.

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