The Bridges of Madison County musical in Manchester
Even though it won Tonys for Best Original Score and Best Orchestrations, The Bridges of Madison County opened on Valentine’s Day in 2014 and closed in mid-May. Dr. Alan Kaplan, the founder and artistic director for the Manchester Community Theatre Players, has an inkling about why this happened and will apply his ideas in an upcoming production of the musical.
“This is a play I’ve been interested in for many years,” he said in a recent phone interview. Kaplan has read the novel, seen the Clint Eastwood-directed movie, and watched the first staging of the show in Williamstown, Mass. He even conversed with Jason Robert Brown, who wrote the Tony-winning music and lyrics.
The story centers on a fated couple and the decisions they must make when their connection becomes undeniable.
Francesca Johnson (Susan Schott) is a beautiful Italian woman who married an American GI as World War II was ending to escape her ravaged country. Twenty years later she’s preparing for a rare stretch of solitude on her Iowa farm while her family is away at the State Fair. Her reverie is interrupted when photographer Robert Kincaid (Don LaDuke) pulls into her driveway, asking for directions to a bridge he’s shooting for a National Geographic story.
The songs are varied and evocative, as good as anything to come from Broadway. “What Do You Call a Man Like That?” is an operatic waltz that perfectly captures the reticent housewife’s growing desire, while “Another Time,” an echo sung by Robert’s former wife, has a folky, Joni Mitchell feel. Sung by Francesca’s husband Bud (Dan Arlen), “Something From a Dream” is an aching ode to a marriage that, unknown to him, may be slipping from his grasp.
Though the music is powerful, it’s the story that brings power to the show. Hovering over forbidden love is the question of what might have been. In Francesca’s case, the man she left in Italy for glamor across the sea that never materialized, and for Robert, a driven nature that left little room for human connection.
For Kaplan, it was this element that attracted him most to directing The Bridges of Madison County.
“Usually with a musical, the music carries the show; the acting should be reasonable, but the music can cover it,” he said. “This is a musical where the actors have to really be on their game, and it gave me the opportunity as a director to really pull the most out of a cast in terms of acting ability.”
One of the challenges in presenting the play is conveying a sense of place and distance. Much of the action happens during phone calls between Francesca and her husband, Bud, as she struggles with her newfound love for Robert and how it might change her future. Some critics found the Broadway staging jarring.
“All the set pieces were on stage all the time,” Kaplan recalled, and juxtaposing cast members hundreds of miles apart was another problem. “You may have a bridge in the middle of a kitchen, or a refrigerator in the middle of an outdoor scene. It was confusing.”
Outdoor scenes more easy to accomplish in a movie were harder to do theatrically. So Kaplan took cues from Eastwood and placed a big screen at the rear of the stage to project scenery. A videographer was commissioned to capture locations in Iowa, and there is footage of Naples, Italy, and the cities Francesca imagined visiting in America.
The main set, Francesca’s kitchen, is on wheels and can be moved as the action demands. It’s an elaborate production for a community theater. That’s something Kaplan tries for whenever MCTP mounts a play, but it was particularly urgent in the case of this show, one so close to his heart.
“We didn’t want to just repeat something that only had a hundred performances on Broadway and then closed after four months,” he said, “I think that the reasons for it, as I mentioned, were pretty obvious. So the hope here is that we have improved on it.”
The Bridges of Madison County
When: Fridays and Saturdays at 7:30 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m. through May 4
Where: MCTP Theatre at North End Montessori School, 698 Beech St., Manchester
Tickets: $20 for adults, $18 for seniors, $10 for ages 18 and under at mctp.info
Featured photo: The Bridges of Madison County. Courtesy photo.