While the transfer of Trevor Nunn’s intimate Menier production of Fiddler On the Roof continues in the West End, it is doubtful that Nunn’s new show for the theatre will join it.
Jason Robert Brown’s musical version of the late Robert James Waller’s best-selling romantic novel — best known for the 1995 film in which Clint Eastward’s peripatetic photographer Robert Kincaid falls for Meryl Streep’s Iowan farm-wife — amounts to a long evening of the inevitable.
Jenna Russell is on typically excellent form in the Streep role of Italian-born Francesca, wife to farmer Bud (Dale Ripley) and mother of their teenage children. It’s a seemingly idyllic life they lead, and Brown’s sweeping opening number, To Build A Home, is a lesson in exposition as it reveals how Francesca left war-torn Napoli and ended up in placid, flat-as-Norfolk Iowa.
It’s the archetypal place where nothing happens. Then Bud takes the kids to Illinois for a few days and up rolls a battered old pick-up truck driven by stranger, played by Edward Baker-Duly. Physically Baker-Duly is more Kevin Bacon than Clint Eastwood, which is no barrier to his being the rugged, silent type. His polite, and chivalrous Kincaid has become lost while searching for of the last of seven local bridges which he is photographing for National Geographic.
Francesca offers herself as her guide. And among all the many misjudged moments of Nunn’s production it this series of innocent-sounding offerings by Francesca that gets dangerously close to that fatal trap of drama — unintended humour. The offer to ride with Kincaid in his van might just about be forgiven in an era of relative innocence (the story is set in 1965). And maybe the offer of dinner can be put down to southern, or Italian, hospitality. But the offer to use her shower is not spared titters from the audience. And neither, in this evening of theatrical realism, is Kincaid’s battered old pick-up, the front of which has been chopped off, presumably to save space backstage. Who did this strong, silent Texan buy it from, one wonders. Noddy?
Brown’s music, is the best thing to say about the evening. The composer of such Jewish shows as The Last Five Years, 13 ( about being barmitzvah age) and Parade, has not lost his knack for melody that is as emotionally intelligent as his lyrics. And once again this is a score that bears listening to outside the context of the show for which it was written.
But not even this Tony-winning music can save a slow-moving evening that makes Marsha Norman’s script feel in desperate need of a cut.
I hadn’t realised until now how close the story of Bridges is to Brief Encounter. It too is about decent people whose sense of duty towards their established lives is overwhelmed by a whirlwind romance. Though brief is the last thing you would call this ponderous, overlong evening.
