Rebel Against Expectations or The Minister and the Loo

Cleveland Jewish News gives details of the upcoming premiere of the revised version of Gordon & Caird's Jane Eyre musical:

The world premiere of a re-envisioned version of the Broadway musical “Jane Eyre” is coming to town courtesy of Cleveland Musical Theatre (CMT), a recently-formed professional production company dedicated to staging collaborations between New York and local artists.
This new work is a streamlined rendition of composer-lyricist Paul Gordon and librettist John Caird’s 2000 Tony-nominated, critically acclaimed “Jane Eyre” production. It is the result of a year-long partnership with CMT artistic director Miles J. Sternfeld, who was raised in Orange, attended Temple Tifereth-Israel in Beachwood, and currently resides in New York City. Sternfeld is directing this staging.
“For a few years now,” recalls Caird, “we have been keen to explore the possibility of creating a chamber version of the musical” that simplifies the story and storytelling, and “intensifies the emotional journey of the central characters.” (...)
Broadway alums Andrea Goss (“Once,” “Indecent”) and Matt Bogart (“Jersey Boys,” “Aida”) star as Eyre and Rochester, respectively. Local actors, who play multiple roles or are part of a vocal ensemble, include Lauryn Hobbs, Greg Violand, Laura Perotta, Fabio Polanco, Emma McClelland, Calista Zajac, Nina Takacs, Patrick Mooney, and Sydney Howard.
 “John Caird and I are truly excited about the journey ahead,” notes Gordon, “and we welcome the chance to come to Cleveland and make ‘Jane Eyre’ the best musical it can be.” (Bob Abelman) 

Broadway World posts some pictures of a rehearsal of the musical Wasted:

Through the lens of a rock documentary, Wasted is a brand new musical that gives an access-all-areas account of the struggles, heartbreaks and triumphs of the three Brontë sisters Charlotte, Emily, Anne, and their brother Branwell. Brought up in a remote, poverty-stricken town in Yorkshire, without money or opportunity, they fought ill health, unrequited love and family feuds to write some of the most celebrated literature including Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.
Never afraid to rebel against expectations, the lives behind the pages expose a struggling, squabbling, ferociously driven, drug-fuelled crash and burn trajectory from obscurity to celebrity and ultimately to their untimely deaths. Coupled with a rock score from Christopher Ash (Showstoppers - Oliver Award winner for Best Entertainment), book and lyrics by Carl Miller (Emil and the Detectives, National Theatre), directed by Adam Lenson (Superhero), the Brontës ask - was it all wasted?
This is the Brontës as you've never seen them before.

The Penistone Hill Country Park closed public toilets will be going under the hammer soon. The Yorkshire Times reports:

The former public toilet block is in a prime spot at the popular Penistone Hill Country Park on Moorside Lane, Oxenhope, near Haworth.
Set on a hilltop in one of Yorkshire’s most picturesque locations, it overlooks the surrounding moorland made famous by the Brontë sisters. The loos will go under the hammer with a guide price of £10,000.  (...)
There are over 30 lots at Pugh’s next Yorkshire property auction at Elland Road Stadium in Leeds on September 4. www.pugh-auctions.com. (Sharon Dale)

The Arts, Heritage & Tourism Minister, Michael Ellis, visited Keighley. Keighley News says:

[Keighley MP John]Grogan invited Mr Ellis to meet some of the groups preparing the bid, as well as visit the Brontë Parsonage Museum, which is celebrating the 200th anniversary of Emily Brontë’s birth. (David Knights)

Picture Source: Brontë Parsonage Twitter.

Privileged to welcome @Michael_Ellis1, Minister for Arts, Heritage & Tourism, to the Museum to view the iconic Pillar Portrait #cominghome.

More pictures on @Michael_Ellis1 and @DCMS.

We all know that Yorkshire is great. But the Huddersfield Daily Examiner insists on it:

West Yorkshire may be a built up metropolitan county with 2.3m people but it still has space for some fabulous rural scenery.
From the Peak District in the southwest corner to the moors in the north, which gave Emily Brontë the inspiration for Wuthering Heights, it is a spectacular county.  (Dave Himelfield)

Now that a new Vanity Fair TV series will be broadcast on ITV this autumn, Lucy Worsley talks about Becky Sharp in The Telegraph:

What options would have been open to a woman in her position? Well, she was supposed to become a governess on about £50 a year. But that could be a friendless life of alienation; we know the Brontë sisters heartily disliked it. She could have become something racier, like a milliner – often a euphemism for a sex worker – or set herself up as the preening mistress of an aristocrat.

The Independent talks about literary references on mainstream TV shows and obviously includes the Friends episode on which

 Phoebe manages to convince Rachel that Jane Eyre is a cyborg. (Alex Johnson)

The Telegraph visits Walter Scott's Abbotsford:

The house continued to receive eminent visitors after Scott's death in 1832, when his family opened it to the public. Other notable arrivals included Charlotte Brontë and Charles Dickens and, from America, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Washington Irving, and the 18th president Ulysses S Grant. (Claire Wrathall)

Introverts on Elite Daily:

Personally, my perfect introvert night probably sounds like something out of a brooding Charlotte Brontë novel, if I'm being totally honest (minus the whole, wife-locked-in-the-attic part, that is). (Jordan Bissell)

The Rock Island Dispatch-News joins the RBC (Random Brontë Comparisons) group:

Like Charlotte Brontë, who died five years before she was born, Octave Thanet wrote of social issues and women’s issues.  (Ellen Tsagaris)

SeaCoast Online celebrates the National Romance Awareness Month (it is a thing, apparently) and recommends Jane Eyre. That's What She Read reviews My Plain Jane.  The Quill Guy reviews Charlotte Brontë's original novel.

Finally a fascinating article on ElectricLit about how Jane Eyre helped the author to lead out of Orthodox Judaism:

I was sitting on a beat-up, cream-colored hand-me-down pleather couch, one of many such hand-me-downs my husband and I lived on and off of during our first young years of marriage, reading Jane Eyre for the first time. It was the “big book” in the 10th grade curriculum at my first public high school teaching job — my first job teaching in the secular world since becoming an Orthodox Jew. (...)
What I had found in religion was something I would only be able to put words to later, when Charlotte Brontë would name it for me: “A new servitude.” It wasn’t God I was serving, but order, boundaries, the rules I felt would keep me and my body safe from those who, due to animal desire and lack of self-control, would seek to harm it. I knew somehow, innately, that the kind of freedom I truly desired was much more hard-fought and hard-won than the one I’d sought in the rules and restrictions of yet another constructed paradigm. I knew, too, perhaps, when I chose this life, that I wasn’t ready for that harder, more personal fight. I trusted the man I had chosen to make a life with, but I still didn’t trust myself somehow, and was willing to submit to the constriction of my own body and mind in exchange for safety. But in the end, it wasn’t enough. (...)
I remember putting my down book on my knees, breathless, when I’d finished the chapter. I remember that my eyes were filled with tears. I don’t remember what I said to my husband, but I remember the feeling of it. I finally felt ready, not for a new servitude, but to begin to seek the imperfect and blundering freedom I hadn’t believed until that moment could be mine. I felt myself expanding to take up my rightful space in the world. (Rachel Klein)