Please join us for a presentation of the new musical, The Bridge, in Morse Recital Hall at Yale University, on November 21 at 7:30 PM.
The evening will feature selections from the new musical The Bridge. Written in collaboration with esteemed lyricist and book writer, Kathleen Wrinn, and composer, Frances Pollock, The Bridge tells the story of the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, a daring and exciting historical drama that includes all the things we love in stories about New York City–corporate espionage, public mismanagement, boardroom politics, Tammany Hall, the works! But what is more, we tell our story from the perspective of those who are often left out of the story and lost to history. Led by the perspective of Emily Roebling, the wife of the Chief Engineer who secretly took over the project when her husband fell ill, and of the laborers, some of whom lost their lives in its construction, The Bridge asks the question “who builds history?” and “what bridge will it take for us to move onward?”
But the musical is just the beginning. If there is one reason to present a musical telling the story about building a historical bridge, it is with the hope of illuminating the possibility of building another.
As part of the recital, we will also present a new model of construction–a bridge if you will—in how we might affect the building of large cultural assets, like musicals, going forward. This proprietary model, crafted at Yale and developed by Midnight Oil Collective, draws on the efficiency of models in the world of STEM and startups. The project here is simple. How do you allow all of the people who build a bridge or a musical, to be recognized for their contribution so that they are not also lost to history? This, ultimately, is the project of The Bridge and of the bridge that we hope to build in a time when bridges are so desperately needed in this world.
After the performance, please join us for a reception at the Adams Center for Musical Arts, where you can meet the incredible people involved with this undertaking and continue the conversation about what’s next for the musical and the bigger bridges we are attempting to build in the world.
The event is free and open to the public, but we ask that you RSVP here.
If there’s one thing that we’ve learned at Yale, it is that progress is hard and that cynicism often outweighs possibility. But we’ve also learned at Yale that there is nothing like a story and shared song that makes the impossible possible. That’s what bridges do.