When Jason Robert Brown imagined the road from page to stage for “The Bridges of Madison County,” the composer quickly realized that a musical adaptation of the 1992 romance novel would require detours from its source material.
First off, Brown had never read Robert James Waller’s populist novel after his mother, an English teacher, deemed it schlock and advised him against it. He also had only watched the first 20 minutes of Clint Eastwood’s 1995 movie adaptation. On reading Waller’s book, after playwright Marsha Norman asked whether he’d be interested in a collaboration, he wasn’t particularly impressed with the prose and plotting.
Yet Brown found himself transfixed by the protagonist: Francesca, an Italian war bride in 1960s Iowa, wrestling with the choice between doubling down on an affair with Robert, a photographer passing through town, and sacrificing her own desires for the sake of her husband and children. So Brown agreed to collaborate with Norman and director Bartlett Sher to build a show around that central conflict — and to take some liberties with the rest of the text.
Advertisement
“I will continue to say it’s not a very well-written book,” Brown says. “A lot of the places that the book focuses its energies just seemed bizarre. But what was very powerful about it was this idea about what it means to be in the middle age of your life and to reach a sort of crossroads.”
Although “Bridges” ran for only four months on Broadway, from January to May 2014, the sweeping musical still won Brown his second Tony for original score. Now, as Signature Theatre mounts a production of “Bridges” starring Erin Davie and Mark Evans, the revival comes amid a Brown resurgence. Last year, he earned a Tony nomination for scoring the Billy Crystal-starring musical “Mr. Saturday Night.” A smash-hit production of “Parade,” Brown’s 1998 breakout, earned the Tony for best revival of a musical in June. And his latest show, the journalism-centric musical “The Connector,” is set to premiere off-Broadway in January.
In a phone interview earlier this month from New York, Brown reflected on his “Bridges” experience, renewed appreciation for his work and the concerns that come with mentoring the next generation of theater makers.
(This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.)
Q: The score to “The Bridges of Madison County” is often lush and operatic, but also folksy and fast-paced. How do you balance a range of eclectic sounds with tonal consistency?
Advertisement
A: I think I’m very aware of setting. In the case of “The Bridges of Madison County,” the world was pretty easy for me to diagram because it’s Iowa in the early ’60s. Then I was able to add to it these two people who don’t belong in Iowa in the ‘60s. Francesca comes from Italy, so I thought to use Neapolitan folk song and a little bit of opera. It’s more art song than opera, but that idea of real Italian art music. Then we have Robert, who also doesn’t belong there, and he foreshadows music of 10 years to come. Then, hopefully, I’m a strong enough musician and a resourceful enough composer that once I have that information, I can start combining chemicals in fun ways and seeing what gets combustible.
Q: You won a Tony for that score, and many people adored the show, but “Bridges” had an abbreviated run on Broadway. What do you make of the response to the show?
A: I will say that I value in the work I do a certain kind of ambiguity and a certain kind of ambivalence. Those are qualities that are very resonant to me personally. But I don’t think the Broadway musical as a rule traffics in ambiguity and ambivalence. Broadway audiences are trained on certainties. They are trained on absolutes. They are trained on big declarative statements. In “The Bridges of Madison County,” we just didn’t make big declarative statements. It’s a show that talks about really complex emotions and talks about them in a very real way, and I’m not sure that the commercial audience of 2014 was really ready to hear that the way that we wanted to say it. But I never look back on that production and go, “Gee, I wish we had written it differently.” I’m immensely proud of the show we wrote.
Q: Fondness for “Bridges” seems to have grown over the years, based on how often it’s produced at regional theaters. The Broadway revival of “Parade” was a hit after the original production received a more mixed reception. What do you think it is about your work that lends itself to being rediscovered and newly appreciated over time?
Advertisement
A: When I talk about that thing about ambivalence and ambiguity, I’m not only talking about it on a verbal level. There is a lot in my music that I deliberately leave open not just to interpretation but, really, I like to leave space for the audience to make a decision about what they feel about something. If all you’re doing is living in a world of major and minor chords, the music tells you what you’re supposed to say all the time and tells you what you’re supposed to feel. I think I left enough space in “Parade,” in “Songs for a New World,” even in “13,” that those shows get to be filled with the era that the audience sees them.
Q: When “Parade” premiered, you were seen as a rising talent on Broadway. Now, you’re something of an elder statesman. How do you feel about that transition?
A: It’s an interesting thing because I came up in the business mostly at the knee of [Broadway producer and director] Hal Prince, and that was obviously an extraordinary privilege. But the long-term consequence of it is I was there at the tail end of a certain kind of musical theater and I fell in love with that, and I think that things have evolved away from what Hal and Steve Sondheim did. So I’m still here trying to write a very literate musical theater that takes the challenges of musical storytelling very seriously in this very specific way, and I don’t see a lot of musicals written now that still aspire to that. So I very much like being the elder statesman, but I worry sometimes that what I pass on is actually so far out of fashion that it’s not entirely valuable to the people I’m mentoring. But I still so much value a particular kind of musical storytelling that I just keep trying to keep that tradition alive and pass that word on.
Advertisement
Q: Let’s discuss your new work. What can you say about “The Connector”?
A: “The Connector” is, in a lot of ways, a very unconventional musical and a very dangerous musical. We in the audience aren’t entirely sure who we’re supposed to believe at any point throughout the show. I think there’s a very obvious political element to that, but there’s also, to me, a very powerful personal element to that. It’s just this sense of, “What do we trust about people? What do we trust about the stories that they tell us?” There’s a lot about the show that is very explosive, in a way, because it takes an audience to certain places and then asks the audience to make some decisions about what they saw.
If you go
The Bridges of Madison County
Signature Theatre, 4200 Campbell Ave., Arlington. sigtheatre.org.
Dates: Through Sept. 17.
Prices: $40-$99.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZLKvwMSrq5qhnqKyr8COrZ%2BemaSav3B%2Bj2tqaGhoZH53e8maqqimXae8o7HRrWSbqp%2Bsu26u0aKboJ2jYrqisMispqdn