Stage and screen actor Edward Baker-Duly will star opposite Olivier Award winner Jenna Russell in the Menier Chocolate Factory’s eagerly-anticipated UK premiere of the musical version of Robert James Waller’s much-loved novel The Bridges of Madison County.
With music and lyrics by triple Tony Award-winning composer Jason Robert Brown (The Last Five Years, Honeymoon in Vegas) and a book by Pulitzer Prize-winner Marsha Norman (‘night, Mother, The Secret Garden), the new staging by multi-award-winning director Trevor Nunn is due to begin preview performances from 13 July. With an opening night on 23 July the production will run until 14 September.
As previously announced, Russell who won her Olivier Award for her performance in the Menier’s Sunday in the Park With George, will return to the venue to play the central role of Italian war bride Francesca whose quiet family life in the American Midwest is changed forever by a chance meeting. Duly-Baker, whose West End theatre credits include Trevor Nunn’s Gone With The Wind and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Wizard of Oz, will play Robert, the National Geographic photographer who meets Francesca while on assignment filming bridges in the area.
The cast will also include: Georgia Brown (Daddy’s Girl, A Chorus of Disapproval); Shanay Holmes (Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Rent); Gillian Kirkpatrick (Sweeney Todd, Spring Awakening); Paul F Monaghan (Man of La Mancha, La Cage Aux Folles); David Perkins (Spring Awakening, The Rose Tattoo); Dale Rapley (The Addams Family Musical, Wicked) and Maddison Bulleyment who will make her professional stage debut as Francesca’s daughter, Carolyn.
The Bridges of Madison County musical debuted in the US at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in the summer of 2013, before arriving on Broadway in 2014 with Kelli O’Hara stepping into the role of Francesca opposite the show’s original Robert, Steven Pasquale. The production was nominated for four Tonys, winning two for the show’s composer Brown.
A US tour and international productions in Manila, Seoul and the Netherlands followed. Waller’s original best-selling was famously made into a film by Clint Eastwood who also starred as Robert opposite Meryl Streep’s Francesca.
The Menier production is produced in association Michael Harrison and David Ian.
Angela Thomas
SHARE THIS POST:
Comments are closed.