Today we focus on local talent with Riverside’s production of “The Bridges of Madison County,” local author Megan Simpson’s “Inventing Indefinitely,” and the upcoming Rappahannock Writer’s Conference
THE BRIDGES OF MADISON COUNTY
Book by Marsha Norman, Music and Lyrics by Jason Robert Brown
Riverside Center for the Performing Arts production 2023
Purchase Tickets
Reviewed by Dennis Wemm
THEATER CRITIC
What would happen if a story of forbidden love were told not as a potential tragedy but as a triumph of survival for all concerned?
The answer is performed through November 12 at Riverside Center for the Performing Arts and is entitled The Bridges of Madison County. Yes, this is the same story told in the novel by Robert James Waller and in the film starring Clint Eastwood and Meryl Streep. And yes, this version does it better than both of them.
It is a story of love. Love between sexual partners, between people who are married for their entire adult lives, between parents and children, between the beholder and the beheld, between members of small communities, and between artists and their subjects.
Will their attraction draw them together? It’s dramatically impossible to avoid. Will they be “careful?” That’s the question that makes the play.
Francesca Johnson is a native of Naples, Italy. After the city is devastated in World War II, she follows Bud Johnson, a tall and upfront Iowa farmer back to his home community. They live there 19 years and raise two farm kids whose bickering sounds like real life. That bickering also shows signs of disrupting the whole family balance. Daughter Carolyn has a potential state fair-winning steer, and older brother Michael has identity issues. He doesn’t want to be a farmer but doesn’t have a sense of who he should be instead. He just wants to be noticed and to be himself.
Into this family mix steps a stranger: a nice guy who doesn’t belong, but who has potential to shatter the happy family. He’s a photographer who reignites Francesca’s desire to create beauty through drawing. He comes to the house to ask for directions, and Francesca, fascinated by his intensity and his artistic drive, turns her female gaze in his direction.
He’s not only attractive and sensual, he’s attracted to everything she is. He’s not only attracted to the fact that she cooks but also what she cooks. Not only that she’s exotic but that she’s exotic because of her previous life. He also loves Naples and shows her his pictures of her native city reborn after the Allied bombings. Francesca is helplessly lost in him and he in her.
The photographer frames her not within her gender role but in the center of her being.
Will their attraction draw them together? It’s dramatically impossible to avoid. Will they be “careful?” That’s the question that makes the play.
This production features vocal performances that are nothing short of amazing. Actors Equity performers Adrianne Hick (as Francesca Johnson) and her real life husband, Andrew Foote (as Robert Kincaid), provide Broadway-level intensity and real sensual power in performances that seem to rise from their very souls and out through their voices. In a score that seems to tap into every musical genre in its time period (1965), they shine in every genre but truly transcend in the more operatic sequences.
Not only in their voices. Their longing for each other is worn in their faces, their bodies, their eventual passion, and their languid tenderness.
The rest of the cast each have their own moments: Sarah Mae Andersen, playing Robert’s ex-wife Marian, solos with a folky “Another Life.” Ian Lane (Charlie) and PJ Freebourn (Bud Johnson, Francesca’s husband) share a duet of doomed fathers in “When I’m Gone” in addition to character-driven solos throughout the show. Margo, played by Andrea Kahane, provides coffee cake, lasagna, great mentoring to Francesca, and radio-studio dance music. The family at the State Fair are in the audience for “Highway 21,” an old fashioned country western number sung by Elizabeth C. Butler. Dancer Stephanie Wood portrays Chiara, Francesca’s less-than-puritanical sister who’s still back in Naples in a flashback to the WWII days.
The rest of the Johnson family (Kathleen Laura as Carolyn and Taylor Witt as Michael) join in several moments of healthy familial chaos both in music and in words. The Ensemble of Madison County characters provide strong and pitch-perfect support.
The staging by Producing Artistic Director Patrick A’Hearn is seamless. Suggested and fragmented set pieces turn into a kitchen, a Des Moines restaurant, or a clothing store: using only a lighting change, movable props, and a background projection. Each change is complete and takes place in full view of the audience in real time. Changes are smooth and without fuss. Focus flows throughout the two and three-quarter hour running time (which you will not notice).
The lighting is appropriate and unobtrusive until it discovers Francesca and Robert in dawn’s early light at the bridge. Then, it illuminates a wonderland. It evokes every summer of youth, resplendent in golden glory. Then it returns to the mundane world. Then it opens up to the sky of a navy remote Iowa farm, inflamed in stars. It’s the shifting view of a photographer’s eye (like Robert’s) seeing not just what’s there but what makes the everyday magical.
The show runs from Wednesday through Sunday until November 12. You really should go.
Dennis Wemm started directing at age 17 and didn’t stop until he retired three years ago. He loves his new home in Fredericksburg where theatre is an art, a community, and a diversion.
INVENTING INDEFINITELY
by Megan Simpson
Any reader interested in buying a copy of Inventing Indefinitely should contact the author at [email protected]
Reviewed by Drew Gallagher
Writing poetry is difficult. Reviewing poetry may be more difficult.
Many years ago, I reviewed a poetry collection by Claudia Emerson before she won a Pulitzer Prize in 2006. After my review, I bumped into Ms. Emerson at a local restaurant and during the course of our small talk-laced conversation I mentioned one line from one poem in a brilliant collection of poems that I found to be lacking. I asked her if she agreed with my criticism of that one line from one poem in a brilliant collection. She smiled and said: “Well, I wrote that line so I guess I don’t agree.”
Justly admonished, I retreated to the table I was sharing with my wife and ordered another beer.
Reviewing poetry is difficult. Reviewing a collection of poetry written by an earnest teenager is no exception.
Megan Simpson is a senior at Culpeper High School who self-published a poetry collection titled Inventing Indefinitely. (How this poetry collection came to my attention involved my friend Perk and a high school field hockey game, so it was not a typical window into new poetry.) What Simpson’s poems made me realize was that teenagers who think enough of themselves and of their art that they will publish it for all the world to see, and criticize, gives me a shred of hope for our future. They deserve exposure and our attention, and not a globe hurtling toward mass extinction, but humanity sucks that way.
Simpson’s collection reflects a source of loss that remains unnamed throughout the poems, so whether that loss was catastrophic or merely the daily loss that teenagers experience in high school hallways is unknown. What that loss births in this collection is a degree of awareness and a love of life and art that is refreshing. But unfortunately we all know, as does the poet, that joy and love can be fleeting as she writes in the section titled “Changes”:
We have to start living like the world is on
fire.
Stop burying our feelings in 9-5s and create.
Create to be seen,
create to be heard,
because success doesn’t always tell a story.
A story so riveting you beg for more.
Fame and fortune may mean happiness for
some.
But my happiness means running through flower
fields,
dancing under the moon and
staying up late,
writing for others to read.
Life means living
and living means happiness,
as happiness fuels the soul.
None of us should ever be fated to the judgment of our teenage selves and our teenage writing, but Simpson displays a desire to find herself and the world in art. This is noble no matter the age or the stage of life, and if we take Simpson’s title of “inventing indefinitely” as a promise, then hopefully she will continue to dance in the moonlight and write herself into the world while hoping others of her generation will follow.
Drew Gallagher is a freelance writer residing in Fredericksburg, Virginia. He is the second-most-prolific book reviewer and first video book reviewer in the 136-year history of the Free Lance-Star Newspaper. He aspires to be the second-most-prolific book reviewer in the history of FXBG Advance.
Rappahannock Writers’ Conference
November 4, 2023
For aspiring or advanced teen and adult writers, the annual Rappahannock Writers’ Conference will take place on Saturday November 4th at Germanna Community College’s Workforce and Technology Center. This conference features keynote speeches from New York Times-bestselling author S.A. Cosby and Prince William County Poet Laureate Kim B. Miller, classes on writing craft and how to pursue publishing, author panels, and more. There are in-person and virtual options for attending. For a complete list of classes, or to register, visit librarypoint.org/rappahannock-writers-conference.
Odds & Ends at FXBGAdvance.com
The Fredericksburg Advance continues to bring local coverage of the November 2023 elections. For our 2023 Voters Guide please click on the link below:
To view local obituaries or to send a message to family and loved ones, please visit our website by clicking on the link below:
Support Local Journalism
The FXBG Advance is off and running, but we can’t do this without your help. You can support local journalism here in Fredericksburg by donating $8 a month. Your dollars will go toward hiring journalists so that we can broaden our reach and strengthen our coverage.
The content is now, and will continue to be, free.
Help us bring aboard the journalists who will elevate our coverage and strengthen the community we all share.
Consider joining for $8 monthly, $80 yearly, or becoming a supporting member for $200 or a Founding Member for $500.
Thank you for reading and supporting FXBG Advance.
-Martin Davis, Editor
