Mr Brocklehurst and Georgiana Reed's new faces

We are still putting faces to names in the new production of Jane Eyre. Here are two more:

Simon McBurney is Mr Brocklehurst and Emily Haigh is Georgiana Reed.



Credits Jane Bown and L.Reed, respectively

And on to another current production of Jane Eyre: the revised Jane Eyre the Musical at the Masquerade Theatre in Houston, reviewed by The Houston Chronicle:

Kristina Sullivan's strong performance as the resilient Jane Eyre remains the greatest asset in Masquerade Theatre's current revival of the musical based on Charlotte Brontë 's classic novel.
Sullivan sings superbly and acts this wounded yet persevering soul with overwhelming intensity, conviction and pathos. Her characterization has deepened considerably since her previous turn in the vocally and dramatically demanding role.
Sullivan is ably supported by Luther Chakurian, likewise powerful in voice and portrayal in his return to the role of the brooding Rochester, mysterious lord of the gloomy Yorkshire estate where Jane finds work as governess.
Masquerade gave the musical's Houston premiere in 2006. Artistic director Phillip Duggins is reprising it because of recent revisions by its authors.
Yet as the alterations chiefly involve chorus, small roles and slight changes in orchestration, the essentials remain much the same as in the company's previous staging.
The show, which enjoyed a seven-month Broadway run in the 2000-01 season, remains a competent but uninspired adaptation.
John Caird's book and Paul Gordon's music and lyrics dutifully put the story across but lose the subtle shadings of the novel, while adding little that is memorable in its own right.
As most of Jane Eyre is sung, the score is the main problem. Many points would be better dispatched as dialogue.
Most of the songs don't have a strong melodic profile, and the lyrics are predictable, flat and at time ungainly. The finale Brave Enough for Love is typical, with its not-quite-right cadence and word choice in the repeated lines “And I know you're afraid/I'm as scared as you are.”
Most of the numbers sound too much alike and go on too long, repeating the same point till it's tiresome. It feels as though we hear “Forgiveness is the mightiest sword” 100 times, though it actually may repeat just a dozen or two. When the score breaks out of dirge mode, it flirts with Jekyll & Hyde bombast, as in Rochester's “Damn the passion, damn the skies/Damn the light that's in her eyes.” (At least all the stresses are correct there.)
The novel also presents one challenge that perhaps not even a Frank Loesser could have overcome: the passive heroine. Novels fare well enough with a protagonist who simply endures. Musicals do better with a protagonist who acts.
At three hours plus, the show's a bit of a slog.[...]
But the chorus work is solid, and the orchestral performance, conducted by Rick Spitz, is excellent. [...] (Everett Evans)

We do like the original Jane Eyre the Musical even if we haven't yet listened to the revamped version (only the songs played in this podcast), and clearly this reviewer doesn't like any of them, so if you do like the original and/or Jane Eyre and are in the area before it closes, we suggest you go and see for yourself. Also, we would never have thought of describing Jane as a 'passive heroine'.

More music. Laura Marling is a well-known Brontëite around these parts and she shows it yet again in The Colorado Springs Independent.

Marling grew up in the tiny English hamlet of Eversley, devouring Victorian literature and learning blues guitar from her father. At 16, she became fascinated with mortality, while dreaming that she'd lived in the early 1800s ("because of the dark romanticism of the Brontë era," she explains). The Grim Reaper still haunts her work, she adds, "because the things that are motives for me, as a writer, are love, death and birth. I think folk is a natural genre to take on those things." (Tom Lanham)

And today we meet another young singer who also happens to be a Brontëite: Emily Jane White in The San Jose Mercury News:

Her literary inspirations include "Wuthering Heights". . . (Paul Freeman)

We are of course highly intrigued about her name - Emily Jane - which she shares with the author of Wuthering Heights. EDIT: Not so highly as we realize she quotes Emily Jane Brontë as one of her influences on her myspace website.

And not a singer, but a fictional character who likes those brooding Brontës as well, as seen on Beyond Her Book - a Publishers Weekly blog:

Writing Jane Austen by Elizabeth Aston
Authors, imagine that your agent comes to find a heretofore undiscovered first chapter of a handwritten Jane Austen manuscript, hands it to you, and says, “Here, finish this, and no one can know she didn’t write it.” That’s just what happens to award-winning author Georgina Jackson, only she doesn’t write light, bright Regency romance, but grim, darker Brontë-style fiction of a later period, has never read an Austen book, and is annoyed by the Austen fans of the world. As the story unfolds, Gina has to delve into a romantic world she never experienced, and finds she likes it there. (Barbara Vey)

The Guardian has a quiz on 'literary siblings'. The first question is extremely easy for any reader of BrontëBlog:

1. What was the fictional country created in a series of stories by Charlotte Brontë and her brother, Branwell?
Heathia
Serenia
Happia
Angria

The Victoria News reminds us that Jane Eyre, now a classic, was deemed 'offensive' by some at the time of publication. (Not so much offensive as coarse). And The Telegraph and Argus reports that this Sunday a new train route London-Bradford opens, which means there's one more way of reaching Brontë country from London, of course.

Stop and Smell the Ink discusses Wuthering Heights. The same novel has inspired three people today: My Quilted Home is working on a quilt block based on the Twilight-looking cover of Wuthering Heights, and Flickr users cliffjamester and Always a Dog have uploaded Wuthering-looking images. The Bookworm chooses Heathcliff as one of her favourite villains. Much Madness Is Divinest Sense posts about Maria Brontë. And finally, Books Are Like Candy Corn is giving away a copy of Rachel Ferguson's The Brontës Went to Woolworths.

Categories: Books, Brontëites, Haworth, Jane Eyre, Juvenilia, Movies-DVD-TV, Music, Theatre, Wuthering Heights