Another Light in the Piazza connection: Steven Pasquale was in the original cast before it moved to Broadway.
Also, both shows deal with the meeting of American and Italian cultures. In Bridges, the Italian flavor of Francesca's (Kelli O'Hara) songs contrast with the country flavor of her husband's (Hunter Foster) songs, but ultimately blend with the American folk quality of her lover's (Steven Pasquale) songs, a perfect metaphor for the story.
The score is orchestrated by JRB (to get back to an earlier discussion of composers who do their own orchestrations) for 10 musicians, mostly strings. Francesca has a haunting cello theme that starts the show and is repeated periodically.
In a 92nd St Y presentation a couple of weeks ago, Bart Sher talked about using the previews as a way to determine what material to cut, and last night's first act felt too long (even accounting for the delay after the stage mishap). The second act builds momentum as we watch Francesca being torn between a kind of love that she's never known and her loyalty to a loving family, as expressed in the spectacular duet between Kelli O'Hara and Steven Pasquale "Before and After You"/"One Second & a Million Miles." (You can see the press presentation of this sequence at the link below.)
My main problem with the show is that it's saddled with a cliched romantic fantasy figure: the handsome, artistic, strong yet sensitive loner. The bookwriter Marsha Norman does what she can to minimize the pretension of the book, but I can't help but wonder if JRB and Marsha Norman should have found better source material for their "La Traviata," as they've been calling it. Of course, without the popular source material they chose, they might not have been able to get the show produced in the first place.
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