ANDY DRACHENBERG: Why did you decide to write the music for The Bridges of Madison County and how do you hope Broadway audiences respond to the show?
JASON ROBERT BROWN: I wanted to write a show that would move people. I wanted to write a show that the music and the story together would make audiences feel something deep and real and that would make people think about the choices and the sacrifices that they make in their lives. The show is about struggle. Everyone in Bridges is struggling to understand what they are supposed to be, what they want and what they are. In that struggle is something that everyone in the audience can respond to and question: What do I want? Who am I? What is the gulf between those two things? When we did the show up in Williamstown, the incredible full silence that you would hear was very powerful because you have a whole audience that’s listening, feeling and breathing with these characters on stage. Marsha and I always sit together and cry by the end of it. It touches us the way we hope it touches the rest of the audience.
AD: What did you decide is at the heart of The Bridges of Madison County as a story?
JRB: The novel ‘The Bridges of Madison County’ is so iconic and so ingrained in our culture that Bart Sher, Marsha Norman and I knew that if we took it on, we’d have to honor what was iconic about it. We also knew we would have bring it through our own eyes as artists and say what we have to say about this piece, and about the choices that Francesca makes. The show became a piece about questioning: What are your commitments to your family and what is family going to mean to you? What are your commitments to your dreams and what do those mean to you? How do you navigate the distance between one and the other?
AD: Can you tell us about the setting Bridges takes us to? How do you capture place and time in Bridges?
JRB: Bringing Bridges to the stage required us to understand how open the world was in 1960’s Winterset, Iowa. Marsha, Bart and I live urban lives, and we needed to say that: there’s a lot of distance between people and there’s a lot of distance between houses. What we want to show is what happens when there’s all that space. Since Bridges is not a large show and is a very intimate piece, it is important that even when the stage is at its most full and active it never feels very populated. Winterset, Iowa did not and does not feel very populated. This was our first challenge. Then there was a question about what the musical language is: what sort of music sets you in this place? The first thing I did was I started writing the show on guitar, which is not an instrument I play, but I picked it up because I thought the show shouldn’t sound urban or contemporary or all of the things I do reflexively or instinctively. The show has to have a different feel to it, a different flavor. What is Iowa in the 60’s and what does that sound like? Beyond the feel of the show was being able to write for Kelli [O’Hara]’s extraordinary instrument, and the chance to write for a soprano at the peak of her emotional abilities. We wanted to do a show about passion, about this thing that you can suddenly feel. Kelli and Steven Pasquale have these two voices that contain so much emotion in them that they are able to bring that passion to life.
AD: How do Kelli O’Hara and Steven Pasquale bring new qualities to the characters and the romance?
JRB: Kelli and Steven have a great deal of empathy and are very clear with themselves, with each other and with us about when something feels false. Marsha, Bart and I respect that and respond to that enormously. We don’t want to try and force them down a road that doesn’t feel honest and doesn’t feel genuine. That’s the work we all do together. It’s amazing to watch Kelli and Steven take on the material and respond to it on a cellular level-beat by beat, line by line. Our creative team trusts those things that actors say because they’re the real thing and that’s why you have them: so you can pull these incredible truths from them.
AD: How did you, Bart Sher and Marsha Norman collaborate as a collective team to find the identity for each part of the story as you moved forward?
JRB: Marsha and I regarded ‘The Bridges of Madison County’ novel by Robert James Waller as guideposts for everything that we needed. All of the emotional and narrative life of these characters are right in there, so we started with our source material as the most important piece of our journey. Then Marsha distilled the book and pulled certain ideas out of it. Marsha’s ideas are so specific to her strengths, her enormous heart as a writer, her intelligence and her real understanding of how grown-ups feel. Once Marsha had an idea for how the show worked, she brought it to me. Marsha and I worked very closely together to try and keep the energies balancing so that the text always talked to the music and the music always talked back to the text. Next on board was Kelli and then Bart, both of whom were very surgical in terms of their precision: what this show should be, where it felt right and where it felt that we had wandered down a different path. And so, one at a time (and then collectively) we just built on until we were this living, breathing organism creating this work for each other.
AD: What is different about this piece from other shows you’ve written?
JRB: I’m 43 years old now and I think I write as someone who has lived all that. I think I write as someone who is married, has two children and has lived in and away from New York and traveled the world. And as I get older all of those things influence my work in different ways. I don’t know if Bridgesis different from my earlier work in terms the way that I write it or the way that I think about it, but it’s different because I am older and I bring a lot to it that I could not have as a younger person. I wanted very much to write a grow-up show and I think that’s what we did.
JASON ROBERT BROWN (Music & Lyrics) is the composer and lyricist of Parade; The Last Five Years; 13; Songs for a New World; and Honeymoon In Vegas (opens fall 2013 at Paper Mill Playhouse). He is the winner of the Tony Award, the Drama Desk Award, and the Kleban Award. With Marsha Norman, he created The Trumpet of the Swan, which he conducted with the National Symphony Orchestra. He tours the world with his band The Caucasian Rhythm Kings, with whom he has also recorded a CD, “Wearing Someone Else’s Clothes.”