(WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass.) – A new musical theater adaptation of Robert J. Waller’s best-selling romance, The Bridges of Madison County, premieres on Williamstown Theatre Festival’s Main Stage from Thursday, August 1 to Sunday, August 18, 2013. The show is slated to go to Broadway in 2014. The new musical production is written by acclaimed playwright, screenwriter and novelist Marsha Norman (Pulitzer Prize for ‘night, Mother), with music and lyrics by Tony Award-winner Jason Robert Brown (Parade; The Last Five Years). Norman’s additional Broadway credits include book and lyrics for The Secret Garden, for which she won a Tony Award and the Drama Desk Award, as well as the libretto for the musical The Color Purple; Brown has been hailed by the New York Times as “a leading member of a new generation of composers.”

Directed by Tony Award-winner and Resident Director of the Lincoln Center Bartlett Sher (South Pacific, Golden Boy, Awake and Sing!), The Bridges of Madison County captures the lyrical expanse of America’s heartland along with the deep yearning entangled in the eternal question, “What if…?”

Francesca, a beautiful Italian woman, played by Elena Shaddow (Les Misérables, The Light in the Piazza) marries an American soldier to flee war-ravaged Italy. Her new life on an Iowa farm is uncomplicated until the day a National Geographic photographer Robert Kincaid, played by Steven Pasquale (“Rescue Me,” The Light in the Piazza), comes up her driveway looking for directions, forever changing the course of their lives.

The 1995 film version of Waller’s novel starred Meryl Streep and Clint Eastwood.