The Bridges of Madison County

by Marsha Norman (book) and Jason Robert Brown (music and lyrics)

seen at the Menier Chocolate Factory on 6 August 2019

Trevor Nunn directs this musical based on Robert James Waller's popular novel about an intense brief affair between Francesca (Jenna Russell) an Iowa farm housewife, originally from Naples, and Robert Kincaid (Edward Baker-Duly), a roving free-spirited photographer hired by National Geographic to photograph the celebrated covered wooden bridges of Madison County.

Robert calls at Francesca's home to ask the way to the elusive seventh bridge, on just the day when her husband and two fractious teenage children have departed for the Illinois State Fair. There is an immediate attraction; one thing leads quickly to another; but, at the last, Francesca's family loyalty prevents her from leaving with Robert. By the time, years later, that she might consider herself free - widowed and her children fully grown and establishes - it is too late; the older Robert has died.

This is all conveyed in at times fevered prose, entirely from Francesca's and Robert's points of view, in the novel. Fortunately, the creators of the musical have dispensed with the most purple passages, and they have also fleshed out the characters of the family, showing us the children quarrelling in an utterly believable way, and the exasperation of their basically decent but no-nonsense father as he shepherds them through the expedition to the State Fair with its tense presentation of the steer Carolyn has been raising. Also, there is a clever series of vignettes concerning the neighbours, inspired by one short phone call in the novel, here expanded to show both the pitfalls and the benefits of having a neighbour all too interested in unusual goings on next door. What starts as comic intrusiveness with binoculars turns movingly into an unexpected but affectionate reticence which helps to save a potentially catastrophic break-up.

All this to show that the play is not a straight rendition of the novel, and is in many ways all the better for it. In this production, the staging, designed by Jon Bausor, brilliantly evokes the farmhouse setting with the use of two revolves to create and remove rooms, an appearance by Robert's truck, and even of one of the bridges, all managed as usual by the technical proficiency of the Menier Chocolate Factory. They have just recently created the South for Tennessee Williams' Orpheus Descending; here they do the Iowa plains equal justice.

Jenna Russell is outstanding as Francesca, showing a contained acceptance of her lot suddenly undermined by passion, but reasserting itself as she realises how vital she is to the well-being of her apparently unsympathetic family. Edward Baker-Duly brings an easy grace to the part of Robert, by no means a predator, and perhaps portrayed wisely as less mystically primeval than in the novel. In fact the interpolated scene in which he relinquishes his last hope of seeing Francesca again is one of the most moving in the play, linked as it is with the finely judged evocation of Francesca's later life, which itself has a nod to Thornton Wilder's method of dealing with death in a small community in Our Town.  The success of the piece depends on the chemistry between these two, which is of course its major subject, and they play together extremely well. The supporting cast provide relief from the intensity of their affair, but one senses that the lives of family and neighbours have their own significance, giving depth to the whole piece.

It's a good stage adaptation, though the musical numbers are not especially memorable: they serve more as reflective monologues revealing the state of mind of the characters, than as excuses for 'musical numbers' in the classic sense. But this is all of a piece, and it works well for this subject.