Author: Michael Witthaus

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.

Book recounts the roots of Manchester Airport

By Michael Witthaus

[email protected]

Charles Lindbergh’s historic solo flight across the Atlantic in 1927 was followed by a surge of interest in aviation. This so-called “Lindbergh Boom” inspired construction of a pair of runways on what’s now Manchester-Boston Regional Airport. A hangar and administrative building were added in the 1930s, and it became an Army base as World War II approached.

Today few physical traces of this history remain. Leah Dearborn, an Associate Director at Aviation Museum of New Hampshire, set out to find and document memories of Grenier Field, as the facility came to be known. Grenier Air Base: A Beacon on the Home Front was published late last year.

Dearborn will talk about her book and take questions during an April 18 appearance at the Bookery in Manchester. In a recent phone interview she shared her motivations for writing it, along with some of the fascinating things learned during her research.

“It’s an interesting era in history, and also one that’s slipping by us very quickly,” she said. “I think part of this project was driven by the urgency of some of this history. If we don’t do something about it right now, the remaining people who can tell us about it might not be able to in the near future.”

The story begins with a humorous twist: Civic rivalry is a big reason why the airfield came to be in the first place.

“Charles Lindbergh was doing a tour across the United States, and when he got to Manchester there wasn’t an airport,” Dearborn said. “So he had to skip Manchester and go to Concord. That spurred the movement for Manchester Airport to be built; I like to call it a spite airport.”

Many of those interviewed for the book were children during the war years, and their recollections were surprising. Flying was still relatively new, and accidents were frequent. In fact, American fatalities in flight training were significantly higher than those sustained in air combat.

“By 1943, there were six fatal training accidents per day,” Dearborn said.

Many crashes happened at Grenier, she continued. “Local kids would bike out to them, just out of curiosity … and they’d pull little souvenirs off the plane. Just learning about the childhood of these local kids who spent all their time at the base or around it, watching from afar, was pretty interesting.”

The base was named for Second Lieutenant Jean Grenier, a Manchester native who crashed in Utah while scouting a flight route. He was one of many Army pilots who quickly took over commercial mail delivery following the so-called Airmail Scandal in 1934. A rapid handoff of responsibilities, coupled with a brutal winter, resulted in many flying deaths.

“This was being done mainly by pilots with very limited experience, in open cockpit aircraft, in some of the worst weather in decades,” Dearborn said. “A lot of them lost their lives in the few months that this was planned, and Jean Grenier was, unfortunately, one of those.”

As Dearborn researched her book, a group of museum volunteers were engaged in reprocessing the archives. “When they found something in their effort that might connect back to what I was doing, they would leave it on my desk,” she recalled. “I’d walk in in the morning and find this stack of paper … that was really helpful.”

Among the valuable finds was a trove of newspaper clippings spanning the war’s early years to the 1950s. “Somebody at Grenier in the military was keeping tabs on the war abroad,” Dearborn said. “Anytime a New Hampshire soldier … made the news, somebody at a desk was taking a pair of scissors and cutting these out.”

At the Bookery, Dearborn will dive into favorite Grenier memories and display some photos. However, the best moments frequently happen after her presentation.

“People come with their own stories, and sometimes that’s where I get the best leads for new writing projects,” she said. “I ended up talking to a man who fought during the Battle of the Bulge for this book, and that’s exactly how I met him. I gave a talk on the history of ballooning, and a friend of his came up at the end and said, ‘You really ought to talk to this guy, he witnessed the Hindenburg fly over New England.’ Stuff like that is pretty invaluable.”

Grenier Air Base: A Beacon on the Home Front w/ author Leah Dearborn

When: Friday, April 18, 5-7 p.m.
Where: Bookery, 844 Elm St., Manchester,
Tickets: free; reserve at bookerymht.com

Featured photo: Leah Dearborn. Courtesy photo.