With her family away at the 1965 state fair, Francesca Johnson looks forward to a rare four days alone on her Iowa farm. But when ruggedly handsome National Geographic photographer Robert Kincaid pulls into her driveway seeking directions, what happens in those four days may very well alter the course of Francesca's life. Based on the best-selling novel, and developed by a Pulitzer- and Tony Award-winning creative team, this new musical captures the lyrical expanse of America's heartland along with the yearning entangled in the eternal question, 'What if...?'"
The Bridges of Madison County stars four-time Tony Award nominee Kelli O'Hara (South Pacific, The Pajama Game) and Steven Pasquale (Rescue Me, reasons to be pretty). It features a score by Tony Award winner Jason Robert Brown (Parade, The Last Five Years) and a libretto by Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize winner Marsha Norman (The Color Purple, The Secret Garden). It will be directed by Tony Award winner Bartlett Sher (The Light in the Piazza, South Pacific), who reunites with his celebrated Tony Award-winning South Pacific design team, including scenic designer Michael Yeargan, costume designer Catherine Zuber, and lighting designer, Donald Holder. Sound Design is by Jon Weston (How to Succeed..., The Color Purple).
Wisely, composer/lyricist Jason Robert Brown, book writer Marsha Norman and director Bartlett Sher attempt to mitigate the book's high-flown verbiage and fantastical air...They work well enough together, but in attempting to moderate the novel's silliness, they've shorn the material of some of its import. Brown favours simple, string-heavy compositions that soar only intermittently and feature a puzzling lack of duets...O'Hara is as sumptuously voiced as ever and dazzles in the biographical number Almost Real. Pasquale is implausibly hunky and an able, emotive singer himself. Unfortunately, they seem more like best pals than fervid lovers, the companionable vibe enhanced by chaste choreography that suggests that sex is best achieved with jeans zipped and buttoned.
As it is, the tale of a desolate Neapolitan immigrant - distracted from her cold Iowa marriage by a hunky visiting magazine photographer - comes across as rather shaky scaffolding, in a sometimes affecting adaptation of Robert James Waller's best-selling novel that opened Thursday night at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre...But the bony narrative does acquire rewarding flesh whenever O'Hara - veteran of 'The Pajama Game,' 'South Pacific' and 'The Light in the Piazza' - is given a chance to express, in a poignant lyric or hushed speech, the sensual awakening her Francesca Johnson experiences in the presence of the picture-taker, played by the smoldering Steven Pasquale.
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