Olivier Award winner Jenna Russell will lead the cast of 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), Trevor Nunn’s new staging of the award-winning Broadway musical is due to begin preview performances from 12 July 2019 ahead of an opening night on 23 July.
Following on from the continuing critical and commercial success of Fiddler on the Roof, the second production in the Menier Chocolate Factory’s re-kindled relationship with multi award-winning director Nunn is due to play the Menier until 14 September.
An Olivier Award winner for her performance in Sunday in the Park with George, Russell will return to the Menier to play the central role of Francesca, the Italian war bride whose quiet family life in the American Midwest is changed forever when she meets Robert Kincaid, a National Geographic photographer on assignment filming bridges in the area.
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.
Public booking is now open for the Menier production which is produced in association Michael Harrison and David Ian.
Angela Thomas
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