Kelli O'Hara and Steven Pasquale Joan Marcus

New York

The producers of "The Bridges of Madison County" were smart to bill it as "Broadway's New Romantic Musical." Full-bore romanticism is in short supply on the musical-comedy stage these days—it almost always comes slathered in just-kidding-folks irony and pastiche—and Jason Robert Brown and Marsha Norman hold nothing back in their stage version of Robert James Waller's 1992 novel about an itinerant photographer ( Steven Pasquale ) who falls for an Italian-born rural housewife ( Kelli O'Hara ) and spends four days wooing, winning, bedding and losing her in between assignments for the National Geographic. The score is lush, the sentiments starry-eyed, and if you're the happy owner of one of the 12 million copies of Mr. Waller's book that are currently in print, this show's for you.

If, on the other hand, you regard the novel and its Clint Eastwood-directed 1995 screen adaptation as sticky bucketfuls of diabetes bait, there are still reasons to see "Bridges," the first and best of which is Ms. O'Hara. Her openhearted performance is as believably acted and immaculately sung as anything she's ever done. Not only does she sound right, but she looks right as the unglamorously beautiful Francesca, who loves her husband (Hunter Foster) and children ( Caitlin Kinnunen and Derek Klena ) but pines for the lost world that she left behind when she became a war bride and moved from Naples to an Iowa farm. She's so fine, in fact, that she casts a shadow over Mr. Pasquale, an excellent singer who lacks the redeeming touch of mystery that Mr. Eastwood brought to the too-good-to-be-true role of Robert, the photographer (and who is a decade too young for the part). While it would be easy to see Francesca hopping in the sack with Mr. Pasquale, it's much harder to imagine her giving serious thought to ripping up her life and galloping off into the sunset with so uncharismatic a gent.

Up to a point, Mr. Brown's warm, expansive score is an equally strong selling point for "Bridges." Parts of it are as musically exciting as anything heard on Broadway since Stephen Sondheim's glory days. I long to hear again, for example, the breath-catchingly kaleidoscopic harmonies that accompany the words "See the world!" in "The World Inside a Frame," the number in which Robert explains the photographer's art to Francesca. The atmospheric orchestrations, which Mr. Brown wrote himself for a 10-piece pit band consisting only of strings, two guitars and a rhythm section, are just as lovely.

But Mr. Brown is rather better at writing scenes than songs, and except for "Another Life," a sweetly folk-flavored ballad sung in a flashback by Robert's ex-wife ( Whitney Bashor ), none of the songs in "The Bridges of Madison County" has a clear-cut, boldly shaped melodic profile—or, for that matter, a truly memorable lyric. This would be less of a problem if Mr. Brown and Ms. Norman, who wrote the book, hadn't decided to open up Mr. Waller's uneventful plot by packing "Bridges" with short ensemble numbers that illustrate the memories of its two principal characters. The result is a musical that feels dramatically choppy, and in which the songs rarely seem to pay off. I couldn't shake the feeling that Mr. Brown might have been more at ease writing a two-person theatrical song cycle (as he did in "The Last Five Years," his most successful show to date) instead of trying to turn so essentially intimate a tale into a full-scale Broadway show.

Bartlett Sher's cluttered staging, in which Michael Yeargan's set pieces are forever rolling on and offstage like trains passing through a station, exacerbates the problem. It doesn't help that Mr. Sher scarcely ever leaves his lovers alone onstage for more than a few moments at a time. To show how Francesca and Robert are trapped in a village full of nosy busybodies, he typically has various members of the 14-person ensemble seated at the edge of the playing area or strolling through the love scenes, a piece of point-making that gets really old really fast. So does the fact that the small-town characters in "Bridges" are all portrayed as stage bumpkins, complete with fake-sounding twangs.

I've glossed over the show's well-known source material, but of course it's central to the effect of "Bridges." Mr. Waller's novel is a specifically masculine fantasy of love without commitment, a hometown version of "Same Time, Next Year" that could have been written only by a certain kind of man. Yes, Robert offers to take Francesca away to parts unknown—but she nobly stays behind to raise the kids and slop the pigs, and though he affects to love her for the rest of his life, it's hard not to suspect that he also felt a certain twinge of relief at getting away clean from his four-day fling in the cornfields. If you find that notion wildly romantic, swoon away. If you find it embarrassingly juvenile, then you probably won't like "The Bridges of Madison County."

—Mr. Teachout, the Journal's drama critic, is the author of "Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington" and "Satchmo at the Waldorf." Write to him at