For over a century, the engineering behind one of America’s most iconic pieces of infrastructure was credited to John Roebling, but in truth the Brooklyn Bridge could not have been built without the long-overlooked efforts of his wife, Emily. Her tale is finally being told on stage thanks to two decades of work by New York writer-director Ray Roderick. The world premiere of his new musical, Brooklyn’s Bridge , is being produced by the Dr. Phillips Center with an all-Orlando cast. Roderick spoke with me during rehearsals about the journey he and his production have taken from Manhattan to Orlando and (hopefully) back again.

“I was in a boy choir [that] was part of the YMCA in Bloomington, Illinois, and my father’s a musician, and was very encouraging about anything regarding the arts and especially music,” Roderick says, recalling his introduction to the stage. “I kind of got hooked doing this thing called theater. One thing led to another, and I ended up doing more and more musicals in middle school and then into high school and college.”

Teenage stints performing in theme parks like Great America in Gurnee, Illinois, and Nashville’s extinct Opryland U.S.A. led to Roderick’s first big gig touring as Tom Thumb in Barnum with Jim Dale (“a force to be reckoned with”) and Glenn Close (“she is just the greatest [and] she was so kind”). After the tour, his recalls his managers said, “‘We don’t want you to do musicals anymore, because you should be doing film and all that.’ And I’m like, ‘But this is what I moved to New York for!’”

Roderick was in Far Rockaway, Queens, filming The Flamingo Kid for director Garry Marshall when he got an opportunity that would change his career. “I said, ‘I have an audition for Cats , and I’d love to go.’ [Marshall] goes, ‘OK, I love Broadway, I’m going to rearrange the schedule so you can go to your audition.’” Although he hadn’t danced in months, Roderick says, “I probably danced the best I ever did because I forgot to care, to be worried about it. I was just hoping I wouldn’t hurt myself.”

Pulled into a room with composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, director Trevor Nunn, and choreographer Gillian Lynne, he was presented a newly rewritten version of “Mungojerrie and Rumpleteazer” and ended up suggesting the song’s signature acrobatic finale. “They couldn’t come up with an ending. We’d already been doing all this physical schtick, and I said, what about something like [a double cartwheel]? We learned it on the spot, and they said, ‘That’s the ending!,’ and they created the music for it,” he says. “They did that new version on the tour, and they’ve done it everywhere since.”

After 18 years on stage, Roderick transitioned into directing and writing with the help of Mike Ockrent and Susan Stroman, whom he befriended while working on Crazy for You and The Music Man . Finding success with shows like his Irving Berlin revue I Love a Piano , Roderick first began considering a musical about Emily Roebling around 20 years ago, after randomly reading about her. “I ran into the story, and I’m like, I can’t believe that I don’t know this already,” he says. (This was long before Roebling became a subplot in HBO’s The Gilded Age .)

Although civil engineering might not be the most obvious subject for a musical, Roderick says, “In my head, the epic nature of the story — how big the idea of the bridge itself is, and the story of how it gets built — is epic. And if anything can give you epic, I do think music is that thing.” So he turned to composer Joe Baker (whom he’s known since his wife, Karyn Quackenbush, performed under his musical direction in Broadway’s Blood Brothers ). Baker set his lyrics to a score Roderick describes as “progressive rock, classical meets rock & roll, with a lot of Irish groove, what we would call pub rock.”

“When I started writing Brooklyn’s Bridge , I just started writing down some ideas, and the first song I wrote was ‘From Our Window,’ which is sort of the metaphor for the whole show, seeing this vision come alive through a window in Brooklyn Heights,” Roderick says, recalling how he presented Baker with his initial pages to pique his interest. “The first song he picked was the first song that I wrote the words to, [and] it was stunning. … We’ve been together for the last 10 years.” The result is a musical that Roderick calls “theatrical, with stories being told all the time, and my hope is that actors are acting all the time; they’re never they’re never just singing the hook over and over and over.”

The Orlando premiere of Brooklyn’s Bridge is a byproduct of Roderick’s experience with the Dr. Phillips Center’s Applause Awards for young thespians, which he’s written and directed for four years. “I feel like this show wants to be like a variety show, where we’re going bang, bang, bang, and treating it like the Tonys, even though it’s high-school students. I said, ‘Let’s add some cameras, let’s do an IMAG [video streaming] feed from the lobby,” he says. “We did it, and it’s gotten bigger and bigger, and it’s awfully fun.”

Through the Applause Awards, Roderick was introduced to Orlando talent. “ I could not believe this young talent; they are so much better than I ever was. … Something’s in the water here in Orlando. Maybe it’s Disney, maybe it’s Universal Studios, [but] it’s an interesting Mecca to me, and I’m like, ‘These people are super talented, why are we not doing more new work here?’”

Calling Orlando a “great place to start new work,” Roderick cites the attractions (especially Disney’s Finding Nemo show) for supplying several of his cast members. He also praises the Dr. Phillips Center for “doing the next new thing” by supporting his show, adding, “I think their eyes are really open for continuing to build what certainly is already one of the top art centers in the country.”

Though it’s been seen in development forms since 2019 — including a concert staging at Dr. Phillips last January — this production is billed as Brooklyn’s Bridge ’s world premiere, and Roderick hopes it attracts attention from far beyond Florida. “We’ve got interest in New York, [but] I’m not talking Broadway right away. I’m talking more the next step in New York, [or] it could be another regional [production] outside of New York,” says Roderick. “Are we interested in going to Broadway? We’d love to, but that isn’t always the best path for every show.”

As big-budget jukeboxes blaring branded intellectual properties increasingly dominate the Great White Way, I want to believe there’s still room for original musicals about human beings on Broadway. That’s a hope that Roderick also clings to. “I think there’s a real longing right now for a huge sector of the audience to see something brand-new with an original story,” says Roderick. “I think that the pendulum could be turning a little bit. I’m hoping, because we need everything to be possible on Broadway.”