When you are doing a musical based on the bestselling book and hit film The Bridges of Madison County and cannot actually build a bridge onstage, that conundrum creates a seemingly insurmountable obstacle. But scenic designer Michael Yeargan tackled the problem with ingenuity, knowing that sometimes one can show someplace or something without fully representing it. He needed to figure out “how to depict a covered bridge on the stage when this action happens in it, through it, and behind it,” he says. “There was no way we could really build a covered bridge, so we designed it to indicate it with those arches that fly in.” It was a balancing act of scope and intimacy for a story centered on two people in love in an extramarital affair.
Scenic Ballet
Three rectangular arches fly down from the ceiling at a diagonal to the front of the stage while stagehands bring on fences to slide up against them in order to create the basic framework of a covered bridge without the painted boards being present. Yeargan feels that director Bartlett Sher used the fences and the elements “in a balletic way, a choreographic way, to finesse the scene changes so it wasn’t just somebody coming on and plopping down a chair. They come on, spin around, and do it in unison with everyone else so that in the best kind of Rodgers and Hammerstein tradition — [like] when you look at the dream ballet with the floating staircase in the film Oklahoma! — all of those things just lighten it and keep it from getting heavy.”
The goal was to keep the show moving, especially with sweeping scene changes like the one that shifts from the hustle and bustle of the State Fair to an intimate bedroom scene with two people. “It was trying to play with all of that,” acknowledges Yeargan. “I’m not sure that people get it. I’ve read some of the stuff that people said about it, and they don’t understand it. ‘Didn’t the designer read the marquee? It’s The Bridges of Madison County! Why isn’t the bridge there?’”
Yeargan laughs off the criticism. The show is doing fairly well and has been praised for the lead performance of Kelli O’Hara as Francesca, an Italian immigrant who married an American soldier and lives a plain existence with him and their two children in Iowa. She misses her homeland and has a lust for life that is rekindled when Robert, a National Geographic photographer passing through while shooting the bridges of Madison Country, begins a romance with her while her family is at the State Fair for a few days. The story chooses to be poetic and non-judgmental about a situation that is more universal than one might expect.
“Now that this has opened, I’ve talked to so many people who say, ‘That’s kind of my story. I met somebody and we almost ran away, but I just couldn’t do it, I had to stay with the family,’” remarks Yeargan. “I think it’s more common than people realize, or at least the notion of letting it happen but not, and some people wishing that they had let it happen. It plays with the morality of the country in a funny way.”
According to Tony Award-winning designer, the cast and crew worked on the show for a long time, and he adds that while it looks simple, it was very complicated to work out. “We did it up in Williamstown during the summer, and it really solidified itself up there. We didn’t really change a lot between then and coming here. We elaborated a little bit on the State Fair sequence at the beginning of the second act, mainly just to get some variety and to bring people back into that world. You want to connect with the husband Bud and the kids at the fair. It helped with the character development a little more.
Design by Implication
Yeargan’s choice to create a lot of design by implication helps to maintain the brisk pace as the show moves through the numerous transitions. The Bridges of Madison County musical was already daunting, because it involves so many scene changes, and evidently there were more in the original version.
“When we first got the script, it jumped around in time even more than it does in the final version, and there were a lot of very short scenes,” recalls Yeargan. “You never landed in one particular set long enough for a whole thought to finish sometimes before you were into another place. The whole sequence of her in the kitchen and seeing him on the road, then going to the bridge and being in the car — those are the fragments that are left of all of that. We had to figure out how to put it on the stage, and we knew that we could not do huge, realistic sets that mechanically move on and off. It just didn’t feel right for what was written, and Bart [Sher], the director, really wanted to mix it up even more so that you had a moment like when he talks about his first wife and she just walks into the kitchen [from his memory], sits down, and plays a song. It’s kind of a metaphor for their life.”
Keeping all these transitions in mind, Sher and Yeargan had to create what the designer calls “a surround that would accommodate all of that. We wanted it to be a little bit more surreal, and we looked at the Lars von Trier film, Dogville, which is interesting because it’s a film that’s made like a play. It was filmed on an empty soundstage, and the first shot of that film is a ground plan. There are fragments ripped out of these buildings like the real general store door with the peeling paint. We didn’t go quite to that extreme, but it led us into a way of thinking about that was not literal, and we knew that we wanted to indicate places as opposed to fully depict them.”
The kitchen had to be depicted fairly solidly, however, since so many pivotal scenes take place there. It includes a door, a kitchen sink with adjacent window, the dining table, and a set piece with a refrigerator, oven, and cupboards joined together. It helps that the kitchen has some definition, yet with open spaces where walls would be so that we can sometimes see what is happening outside. Yeargan invokes the scene where Francesca is cleaning dishes after making Robert dinner. He stands outside looking at the stars, contemplating the magical time he is having with her, while she is framed in the window looking out as well.
Dream Sequences
The open walls also help when certain characters that are not there actually pass through. They are representing memories or reminders for Francesca or Robert, such as his ex-wife drifting through or a neighbor nestled by the kitchen wall as if spying on her. There are moments when her children are depicted at being at the State Fair and pass in front of or behind the kitchen. They are both active in another place and alive in Francesca’s memory.
The scenic designer says he never counted the number of scene changes in the show because it is so fluid. “The hardest part of it is there’s very little room backstage. It’s like a shell game back there. Even when the pieces come on, it’s never a stage full of scenery. It’s just the organization of what comes on next and what moves behind what. But I’ve no idea how many actual scene changes there are.” (There are easily dozens.) “Again, it’s just written that way. Suddenly, they’re in the kitchen, and she starts talking about Italy. Then we go to a sidewalk café in Italy, then you come back to a diner in Des Moines. There’s a lot of stuff like that.”
One intriguing aspect of the set is the way the floor is arranged, and it is something that is probably only appreciable by those audience members sitting in the balcony. “The floor is horizontal, but it’s broken by this diagonal that connects to the steps that lean over the orchestra pit [at stage left],” says Yeargan. “They play that as a road. Not only does the bridge form around it so that this road goes through it, but it is also a link between them. There’s one moment where she’s downstage by the steps and he’s at the back, and he realizes this pattern on the floor is a representation of time in a way. It starts with the stairs [at stage left] and then it cuts across. It was very important to the way it was staged. It pushed a lot of the blocking into the diagonal, which I thought really helped.”
Big Field and Sky
An omnipresent scenic element that is visible to everyone is the large backdrop looming over everything. It is a simple yet effective depiction of a flat Midwestern wheat field drenched in a golden color with a soft blue near the top to represent the sky. It is a translucency that many people have mistaken for a projection which would not be possible, as the backdrop is practically abutting the back wall.
“The image is actually painted on the backside of the canvas on the upstage side in varying degrees of translucency and opacity, so that when it’s lit from the front, like in the Naples scene in Italy, it’s totally light, totally blank,” explains Yeargan. “But when we slowly bring the lights up behind it, this image comes through in a very soft, romanticized way. [Lighting designer] Don Holder is just so brilliant. He can change the color and the sensibility of it. A lot of times we would light it so one side would be a golden color, and it would fade to a purplish blue for night on the other side.”
Another important set piece is the telephone pole located upstage halfway between center stage and stage left. It rises above the approximately 18-foot-tall stage. The mounted phone is used more than once in the story. “There’s a line in the show about if the boy could get out of here, he’d shoot like a rocket to the sky,” notes Yeargan. “In a funny way, that telephone pole did that for me, and it wasn’t even intentional. It breaks the space and represents communication to the outside world. There are a lot of telephone conversations in the play. It was just trying to evoke an atmosphere.”
The Telephone Portal
Phones play an important role in The Bridges of Madison County. Francesca has one in her kitchen. The nearby neighbors, whose modest set pieces roll out downstage at stage right, have a phone on a small table. There is also a prominent phone mounted on the edge of stage left, which is used when the kids call home, when Robert calls the National Geographic office, and when a woman at the office answers his call near the end. “The phone on stage left by the stairs actually pivots around,” says Yeargan. “It folds back behind the portal, and when it’s needed, they can just push it out.”
The rolling staircase tucked upstage at stage left is used for key moments during the show, such as the kids leaving and arriving back home, and especially when Francesca comes down to dinner in a very sexy dress. It also is moved a little in the first act. “At the very beginning, you see it swirl across the stage for her song after she’s fallen in love with him and going into town to buy the dress, like her world is turning around her,” says Yeargan of the Oklahoma!-inspired scene.
The stage is not as deep as it might seem to some, and perhaps it is an illusion derived from the openness the spaces represented in the show. “It’s only 29 feet, which is not very deep at all for a musical of this size,” notes Yeargan. “For example, the stage at Yale where I teach is 40 feet deep, and we’re using a lot of rear projection, which we couldn’t do in New York. The [Gerald Schoenfeld] Theatre is really more of a playhouse. We wanted a smaller theater because of the intimacy, and the show seems to work well there.”
