The man that got away

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I review The Bridges of Madison County. Here’s an excerpt.
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The producers of “The Bridges of Madison County” were smart to bill it as “Broadway’s New Romantic Musical.” Full-bore romanticism is in short supply on the musical-comedy stage these days–it almost always comes slathered in just-kidding-folks irony and pastiche–and Jason Robert Brown and Marsha Norman hold nothing back in their stage version of Robert James Waller’s 1992 novel about an itinerant photographer (Steven Pasquale) who falls for an Italian-born rural housewife (Kelli O’Hara) and spends four days wooing, winning, bedding and losing her in between assignments for the National Geographic. The score is lush, the sentiments starry-eyed, and if you’re the happy owner of one of the 12 million copies of Mr. Waller’s book that are currently in print, this show’s for you.
If, on the other hand, you regard the novel and its Clint Eastwood-directed 1995 screen adaptation as sticky bucketfuls of diabetes bait, there are still reasons to see “Bridges,” the first and best of which is Ms. O’Hara. Her open-hearted performance is as believably acted and immaculately sung as anything she’s ever done….
Up to a point, Mr. Brown’s warm, expansive score is an equally strong selling point for “Bridges.” Parts of it are as musically exciting as anything heard on Broadway since Stephen Sondheim’s glory days….
But Mr. Brown is rather better at writing scenes than songs, and except for “Another Life,” a sweetly folk-flavored ballad sung in a flashback by Robert’s ex-wife (Whitney Bashor), none of the songs in “The Bridges of Madison County” has a clear-cut, boldly shaped melodic profile–or, for that matter, a truly memorable lyric. This would be less of a problem if Mr. Brown and Ms. Norman, who wrote the book, hadn’t decided to open up Mr. Waller’s uneventful plot by packing “Bridges” with short ensemble numbers that illustrate the memories of its two principal characters. The result is a musical that feels dramatically choppy, and in which the songs rarely seem to pay off….
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Read the whole thing here.