An easy, juicy, emotionally-stirring page-turner

The Ampersand interviews author Rachel Kushner who recommends Jane Eyre:

What book would you give a 15 year old?
Jane Eyre, because it’s such generous literature, an easy, juicy, emotionally-stirring page-turner that can make a reader of anyone. I can’t wait to give it to my son when he’s 15, or younger maybe. This is a long way off. He’s only 14 months old, but I imagine him reading it, home from school with a touch of fever, maybe. In pajamas, with just a faint flush to his cheeks, like Jane Eyre herself, that healthy flush that fever, or Victorian orphandom, gives, and not wanting me to bug him because he’s totally absorbed in Bronte, and decides thereafter that big novels are actually more fun than skateboarding or whatever else he’s gotten himself into by that point, god forbid. (Interview by Mark Medley)

The Boston Globe presents the upcoming performances (November 7-22) of Gordon & Caird's Jane Eyre. The Musical by the Theatre III Company.
Picture source: Featured in Acton's Theatre III musical production of "Jane Eyre" are: (front from left) Lindsay Holland (Jane Eyre), Perry Allison (Mrs. Fairfax), Eva Ricci (young Jane), James Sheehan (Lord Ingram), Kaliegh Ronan (Adele); (back row) Ben Adams (John Reed), Pat Lawrence (Mrs. Reed), Evan Kelly (Richard Mason), and Ben DiScipio (Edward Fairfax Rochester).

The cool interior of a West Acton church has been transformed into the cold and brooding landscape of Victorian England. Actors and actresses form a somber backdrop in period outfits of charcoal, black, and ivory. Dressed like a drab brown wren, Jane Eyre (Lindsay Holland) sings of her desire for a brighter life, despite all evidence that she is destined for a colorless existence.
Bit by bit, color and passion appear. First in the form of a new employer, vermilion-clad Mrs. Fairfax (Perry Allison) and a pupil, Adele (Kaliegh Ronan), splendid in blond ringlets and sky blue frock. And then the young governess encounters that bad-boy Byronic hero, Edward Fairfax Rochester (Ben DiScipio), a dark cloak shading his light suit.
Thus Theatre III in West Acton presents the story of one of the most famous heroines in English literature in "Jane Eyre: The Musical" which opens Nov. 7.
It's no small task.
"The cast has put in an enormous amount of time," said musical director Gina Naggar during a recent rehearsal. "It's a beautiful show. It's a really passionate show. It's a dark show."
And yet, it's a show with light as well as shadow, with its themes of love, sacrifice, and independence.
"Every time I hear the music I cry," said DiScipio, with a laugh and distinctly un-Rochester-like honesty. "It is very touching."
Indeed, cast members speak of how much they adore the music - which is important as the production is very ambitious for a community theater. There are about dozen principal singers and a large chorus who all have to tackle complicated, often discordant music.
"We've had to rely a lot on body language," said director Shawn Cannon. "You have to be able - in this small theater - to get across the emotion of what [the characters] are trying to say. Especially in that period in England, they never really said what they meant, so sometimes you have to do a lot of body language. Character development is really huge in this; there's so much background."
Based on the 1847 novel by Charlotte Brontë, the musical features the music and lyrics of Paul Gordon and book by John Caird; it premiered on Broadway on Dec. 3, 2000, and ran for 209 performances.
The Theatre III production features Eva Ricci as a poignant, young Jane; Ben Adams as her nasty cousin, John Reed; Patricia Lawrence as the equally nasty Mrs. Reed; Jeff Adams as the sanctimonious schoolmaster, Brocklehurst; Miranda Gelch as the saintly Helen Burns; and Jared Forsyth as the handsome yet passionless St. John Rivers. Casting was difficult as a record 88 persons auditioned for about 30 acting slots, said Mary O'Loughlin, the company's executive producer.
"We had to turn away some gorgeous voices," O'Loughlin said.
The musical's plot is rife with Gothic imagery: a hero with a secret and a mad woman locked in an attic, for example. It deals with issues that may startle modern sensibilities, "not the least of which, Rochester is 20 years older than Jane," DiScipio noted.
Above all, Jane Eyre is a love story between two opposites; the unworldly, naive governess and the world-weary, cynical playboy.
"There's something about the theme of redemption he sees in her," DiScipio said. "She acts as his confessor."
And yet Jane more than holds her own. "She is so virtuous and so conservative, but she does play with him a little bit. And I think he finds that exciting," he said. (Stephanie Schorow)

More upcoming theatre performances: The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review announces another production of Charles Ludlam's The Mystery of Irma Vep at the Open Stage Theatre in Pittsburgh that opens today October 30:

The company begins its season-long celebration of American comedy with the late Charles Ludlam's tour-de-force farce, "The Mystery of Irma Vep."
Two actors play all the characters -- male and female -- in this campy romp through melodrama, mummy movies and vampire flicks. The script is peppered with bits of plot from and allusions to the works of Alfred Hitchcock, the Bronte sisters and William Shakespeare.
Open Stage artistic director David M. Maslow will direct the production, which features actors Dean Novotny and Robert O'Toole.
"Irma Vep" begins tonight and runs through Nov. 15 with performances at 8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays, except for the 10 p.m. performance this Friday, 2 p.m. Sundays, 7 p.m. Monday and 2 p.m. Nov. 15.
Open Stage Theatre is at 2835 Smallman St., Strip District, but the entrance is from the free parking lot in the rear of the building. (Alice T. Carter)

And The Brontës.nl announces a new Dutch theatre play which will be premiered next year (October 1, 2009) by the Toneelgroep Dorst Company: De Brontë Sisters by Matin Van Veldhuizen. With Petra Laseur, Trudy de Jong, Elsje de Wijn en Theo De Groot. Directed by Kees Hulst and with costumes by Yan Tax. More information here. EDIT (22/11/08): Interview with Elsje de Wijn on ED.nl.

The Northern Echo talks about Coronation Street's new developments with some Brontë references:

NOT since Mrs Rochester in Jane Eyre has there been such a secret in the attic.
The captive in Coronation Street (ITV1) isn’t mad, she’s hopping mad. Rosie Webster hasn’t taken kindly to being locked up by former lover, crazed cabby John Stape, in his dead grandmother’s house.

The reference is explicit as we read in The Dominion Post (New Zealand):

I loved Rosie's line about needing a shrink till she's 70 to get over her abduction and her empathy for Mr Rochester's wife in Jane Eyre, which John wants her to read in an attempt to do a remake of Educating Rita. (John Bowron)

Jill Parkin writes in the Daily Mail about white lies we tell our children and we have these paragraphs quite amusing:

There's one set of white lies I still use even though my children are in their teens and take no notice. I can't help myself; it's these ancestral Yorkshire voices in my head.
A daughter goes out in a plunging neckline and I come over all Wuthering Heights. 'You'll catch your death going out like that on a day like this,' I say, portentously, scarcely stopping myself from adding: 'Mark my words, young Catherine Earnshaw.'
As for going to bed with damp hair, I know it won't really give them water on the brain, but somehow my father takes over my powers of speech and I just have to say it, even if it's under my breath. They take no notice, of course.
They snap back with some witticism, like: 'Why not consumption?'

The Times and the Evening Standard talk about For You, the new opera by Michael Berkeley (who in 1992 premiered his own operatic setting of Jane Eyre):

Must every Michael Berkeley opera be born with an accompanying drama off-stage? Nine years ago his half-completed score for Jane Eyre was stolen and never recovered; it had to be rewritten virtually from scratch. This year, the first performances of Music Theatre Wales’s For You, his collaboration with Ian McEwan and the author’s first libretto, were cancelled when the singer playing the antihero withdrew at the last minute. (...)
But if For You has a faultline, then it’s how this macabre short story finds its connection to Berkeley’s score. Jane Eyre was close-focus and tightly written; so, too, is For You. (Neil Fisher in The Times)

On the blogosphere, Note Songs has visited Haworth.

Categories: Brontëites, Haworth, Jane Eyre, Music, References, Theatre