NEW YORK (AP) — On tour this winter is a Broadway musical about the one that got away, in more ways than one.

“The Bridges of Madison County,” with a superb score by Jason Robert Brown, starts an eight-month U.S. tour on Friday that features both a story about a lost soul mate and a chance at musical redemption.

The Broadway show that sparked it – starring Kelli O’Hara and Steven Pasquale – closed after just 137 performances in 2014 but the show’s staging and Brown’s Tony Award-winning songs get another chance to soar.

“I’m very grateful that these audiences around the country will get a much more direct experience of the piece,” Brown said. “To be able to really say, ‘This is the way we meant the show to be’ is really gratifying.”

The musical is about a four-day love affair in 1965 between a world-weary photographer on assignment to shoot a series of covered bridges in Iowa, and an Italian-American housewife. It’s based on the Robert James Waller novel, which was made into a 1995 movie starring Meryl Streep and Clint Eastwood.

The touring version kicks off – appropriately – in Iowa on Saturday at the Des Moines Civic Center and then travels to California, Texas, Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Missouri, Arkansas, Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee, Michigan, Minnesota, South Carolina and Washington, D.C.

It stars Elizabeth Stanley, who was last on Broadway as a repressed anthropologist in the revival of “On the Town” and Andrew Samonsky, who was in the recent Broadway revival of “The Mystery of Edwin Drood.”

“When the auditions came up, it was one of the few times where I allowed myself to want a job,” said Samonsky, from Ventura, California. “I think those simple, honest musicals really speak to me. I mean, I love a big, fancy song-and-dance show, too, but when you can do a musical like this, it’s really special.”


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