The media are thrilled with the upcoming production (next spring) of a Bollywood-style adaptation of Wuthering Heights by the Tamasha Theatre Company. Some even suggest a possible Bollywood adaptation:It has all the ingredients for the perfect Bollywood drama: sweeping landscapes, a tortured hero, a long-suffering heroine and an unrequited love story with tragic consequences – Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights is about to get a Bollywood makeover.The Telegraph:
The acclaimed writer Deepak Verma has put the finishing touches to a musical version of the novel, transposing the quintessentially Yorkshire love tale to the deserts of Rajasthan and swapping Victorian snobbery for India's strict caste system.
The play will be set to Bollywood-style music but will broadly follow the plot of the 1847 novel, which recounts how the tormented foundling Heathcliff fell in love with Catherine, the daughter of the kindly benefactor who took him off the streets of Liverpool.
The brooding figure of Heathcliff is replaced by Krishan, a low-caste street urchin who is adopted by a kindly merchant and falls in love with his headstrong daughter Shakuntala.
Verma, one of the first British-Asian actors to become a household name in the UK when he played Sanjay in EastEnders, said he always thought that the novel lended itself to a Bollywood makeover.
"Marrying Wuthering Heights to Bollywood just seemed like the obvious thing to do," he said. "Everything about it suits Bollywood – a tragic love story set in a beautiful and harsh environment. It's perfect." Casting for the 12 roles has already begun and the production will tour the UK next spring.
The Tamasha Theatre Company, a charity set up in 1989 to bring British-Asian work to the stage, is producing the play. Tamasha has helped launch the careers of some of the most successful British-Asian performers.(...)
Kristine Landon-Smith, who set up Tamasha with the playwright Sudha Bhuchar, said of Wuthering Heights: "This production will go up to the death of Catherine's character. It's the perfect Bollywood tragedy with epic landscapes and epic characters. The hierarchical structure of Victorian society translates very well into the same era in Rajasthan."
Andrew McCarthy, who runs the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth, near Bradford, said Wuthering Heights could easily be adapted to different locations and cultures. "I think it's a wonderful idea," he said.
He hoped a Bollywood version of the novel would help open up new audiences to Brontë's classic work. (Jerome Taylor & Sofia Mitra-Thakur)
The tale of the tempestuous love affair between Heathcliff and Catherine is being relocated to the Rajasthan desert.The news agency France-Press:
Deepak Verma, the writer, and the Tamasha theatre company are collaborating on the project, which will debut at the Oldham Coliseum next March before touring Britain.
"It is not like putting a square peg into a round hole," said Kristine Landon-Smith, Tamasha's artistic director.
"I thought of the harsh landscape in the original book, and if you put some swelling Bollywood music behind it you already almost have a Bollywood film. It just felt to me that it was a perfect match. There are points where the emotions get so high that they have to sing instead of speak. It's natural why it should be a musical."
Although Tamasha has already transposed the works of Emile Zola, the French novelist, to an Asian setting, this is the London-based company's first attempt to marry a musical to classic literature.
Rather than being a "high-octane and colourful" production, Landon-Smith said it will have a "moody, Chekovian feel".
"But we're not going to go too far," she told the Sunday Herald. "The production has to meet some of the expectations for a feel-good Bollywood musical."
The Bronte Parsonage Museum in Haworth described the Bollywood Wuthering Heights as "a fairly radical reinterpretation".(Graham Tibbetts)
Deepak Verma, a former star of popular British soap opera "Eastenders," has turned the classic Emily Bronte novel into a stage musical with a Bollywood theme and hopes to see it move eventually to the big screen.Categories: Music, Theatre, Wuthering Heights
"The book was just perfect for adaptation. There are so many things about it that just fitted in with aspects of Indian culture," Verma told AFP. "What interested me is the ghostly, haunting aspect of the book.
"The Victorian values in the novel are also found in Indian society and the desert is a harsh place, just like the moors of Yorkshire."
In the musical, the novel's main male character, the brooding Heathcliff, has been renamed Krishnan, a street urchin who falls in love with the merchant who adopts him. (...)
The London-based Tamasha theatre company has already started casting for the 12 roles and the production will tour eight British cities from March, including a four-week run at the respected Lyric Hammersmith theatre in London.
Verma, who is currently producing films in Britain, the United States and India, said he believed the musical would lend itself to a big-budget Bollywood production.
"I really want to get the play out there and then see what happens," he said. "Hopefully it will be made into a Bollywood film. I think it would be perfect."
The scorched desert landscape of Rajasthan is the setting for an evocative new musical interpretation of Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë’s timeless tale of passion, jealousy and revenge, which runs at the Belgrade Theatre from 9 – 13 June.Stage news comes also from Barry's Bay This Week about Murder by the Book, a play in two-acts presented by Madawaska Valley District High School last Thursday night.
1770s Rajasthan, with its rigid social hierarchy, inequality of wealth and Victorian influences, is an ideal location for this classic story of passion corrupted by prevailing social values. In place of the cold moors, the wild scorched expanse of the desert provides a symbolic setting for the doomed love affair of Shakuntala and Krishan (Cathy and Heathcliff from the original novel).
“A stunning take on Wuthering Heights… the show looks gorgeous…Youkti Patel is a Bollywood-standard beauty” The Sunday Times
Tamasha’s version of Wuthering Heights retains the dark and brooding atmosphere of the original novel, whilst seeking to create a fresh musical style with a fusion between a Bollywood cinematic treatment and other more classical elements of a western musical. Wuthering Heights follows Tamasha’s previous large-scale populist productions, Fourteen Songs, Two Weddings and a Funeral and Strictly Dandia.
Director Kristine Landon-Smith, co-founder and artistic director of Tamasha, directed Bollywood musical: Fourteen Songs Two Weddings and A Funeral for the company. As an adaptation of the blockbuster Hum Aapke Hein Koun, this was a direct transfer of the original film to stage in English. Kristine’s recent credits include Sweet Cider (Arcola), A Fine Balance (Hampstead and UK tour), The Trouble With Asian Men (artsdepot and UK tours).
“Could surely transfer to the big screen with the same success as Tamasha's East is East" The Independent
Writer Deepak Verma has previously worked with Tamasha on his play Ghostdancing (Lyric Hammersmith, also directed by Kristine Landon-Smith) which was based on Zola’s Thérèse Raquin and translated to an Indian setting. He is additionally known for his long-running role as Sanjay in EastEnders.
Wuthering Heights, designer Sue Mayes travelled to Rajasthan in 2008 to research the set and costumes. Inspired by her trip, the design includes the scorched desert, a sumptuous palace and a camel racecourse! The creative team has also looked at the history of Indian cinema and used many classic films as reference, including Madhumati (1958) with its brooding landscapes, the brutality of Mother India (1957) which mixes folkloric music and culture with original composition, Devdas (1955) which examines caste hierarchies in a black and white epic narrative and the more recent colourful blockbuster, Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam (1999).
Music for the show, composed by Felix Cross and Sheema Mukherjee, reflects the epic nature of the story and landscape with a score that combines original composition and authentic Rajasthani folkloric music. Felix Cross is Artistic Director of Nitro and his extensive theatre credits include the music for Tamasha’s Ghostdancing and A Fine Balance. Sheema Mukherjee brings her blend of Western tradition and Indian classical music. Previously she has collaborated with Natacha Atlas, Transglobal Underground, Noel Gallagher, Cornershop and Courtney Pine. In Wuthering Heights eleven actors will sing in lip-synch to a pre-recorded score, which has been performed and recorded by a team of classically-trained musicians in Bangalore and vocalists in London. Musical Supervisor is John Rigby who has worked with many of the UK’s leading orchestras and on some of the West End’s biggest musicals. Co-arranger Chandru is a renowned violinist and arranger who has previously worked with George Harrison, Ravi Shankar, Bjork, Nitin Sawnhey and The Cure.
Choreography is by Nikki Woollaston (recent credits include West End musical Marguerite and ENO’s Kismet). The cast includes Pushpinder Chani as Krishan and newcomer Youkti Patel as Shakuntala.
Tickets are available now from the box office on 024 7655 3055 or via www.belgrade.co.uk, priced from £9.30 to £18.11.
When the Raven Society meets on an isolated island to determine the best mystery book of the year, little do the members realize that their own lives are in jeopardy. Membership in the society is secret: each person comes disguised as a famous author and is known only in that persona. When the group receives a letter declaring each member will die by their own words, the authors must determine who the murderer is before it’s too late.On a not-so-unrelated note, the Boston Globe reviews composer John Williams's world premiere Concerto for Viola and Orchestra last night. Apart from that premiere, some of his soundtracks were also played.
This is the premise of “Murder By The Book,” a two-act play brought to life on the stage at Madawaska Valley District High School Thursday night. The authors were famous indeed: Agatha Christie (Kim Fehr), Edgar Allan Poe (Jacob Harron), Mary Shelley (Katherine Benkhe), William Shakespeare (Nathaniel Wildsmith Chappell), Mark Twain (Jordan Fehr), Louisa May Alcott (Joan Thompson), Charlotte Bronte (Amber Morrison), Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Tylor Eleser) and Emily Dickinson (Melynda Marco). The only other person at the meeting is housekeeper Violia Danglon (Yasmin Fakli). (Heather Kendall)
And Williams's Suite from Jane Eyre gave the strings a chance to shine, especially in the second movement, when the conductor emeritus held up a finger to the violins to keep them sawing away while he leaned in the other direction to give close attention to the cellos. (Joel Brown)John Williams wrote the beautiful score of Jane Eyre 1970.
If you could only have one book to read for the rest of your life, which book would you choose?And we would like to add that it has even more things. Because we are still trapped in that Jane-Eyre-is-only-for-girls sort of thing, as evinced by this article in the Sequim Gazette.
That’s a hard question, I love so many books but if you insist on one, then it would have to be Wuthering Heights. It has everything. It is the perfect book, with so much passion and hatred. The characters are unforgettable. I remember reading it as a teenager. I read it in one session, I could not even eat.
Which story do you wish you had thought of first?
I would love to have written Jane Eyre, the ultimate romance. To have been the first to have written that book – it has everything: romance, mystery, suspense and passion. (Erin Russell)
When recommending books for girls, [Sequim Middle School librarian Jo Chinn] says “Jane Eyre” by Charlotte Bronte is a top choice. For boys, Chinn has read every sports book in the library to better recommend titles. (Matthew Nash)We are very sorry to say this, but that is one certain way of not expanding children's horizons. As we have seen, shown and repeated here on BrontëBlog time and time again a good many boys like Jane Eyre. And if more boys/men don't appreciate or even read the novel is because it's constantly being tagged 'for girls'. Men in the Brontës' times were shocked by Jane Eyre and even found it 'coarse'.
In all, Three Wolf Moon T-Shirt has 731 customer reviews [on Amazon] as of today. To contrast, there are only 572 reviews for “Wuthering Heights.” (Kevin Wilson from Freedom New Mexico)If Wuthering Heights is marketed 'for girls only' then that is not surprising: a classic book will have less reviews than a T-shirt.
LEEDS-LIVERPOOL CANALA couple of blogs today: Ramblings & Writings reviews Jillian Dare and Margaret Muir posts briefly about Pilot.
Running across the Pennines, this waterway has some steep flights of locks but re-pays the work involved with glorious scenery.
Running between the two cities of its name, this canal is the longest in Britain, so holidaymakers tend to pick a section to explore. Perhaps the best plan is to start from Skipton, “Gateway to the Yorkshire Dales”, You can head east through the Bronte Country around Keighley and on to Bingley. Or west through rugged Dales scenery to Barnoldswick. (Terry Ramsey)
The Telegraph (Calcutta) publishes details about the next production of Tamasha Theatre Company which revamps Wuthering Heights as a Bollywood musical: (Picture: Sudha Bhuchar (left) with Rajneet Sidhu. Source)“Our next production will be Wuthering Heights,” I am told by Sudha Bhuchar, artistic co-director of the Tamasha Theatre Company.The Guardian explains the origins of playing charades and how to play them. A mention to the ones in Thornfield Hall is mandatory:
She adds: “It will be a Bollywood musical.”
By that she means it will be a song and dance affair but in English for a British audience. Perhaps the spirit of Emily Brontë should not be too perturbed at this Indianisation of her 1847 novel, but Tamasha is transposing her classic to somewhere not a million miles from the Lake Palace Hotel in Udaipur.
Instead of Heathcliff searching the windswept moors of Yorkshire for his Cathy, “the scorched desert landscape of Rajasthan is the setting for this musical interpretation of Emily Brontë’s classic tale of passion, jealousy and revenge. Shakuntala, headstrong daughter of spice merchant Singh, falls for Krishan, a street urchin that Singh brings home after one of his trips to the market.”
The big question is: “Can their adolescent love withstand India’s rigid social hierarchies?”
Tamasha is at its best when doing popular stuff but 10 years have passed since it did the hugely enjoyable Fourteen Songs, Two Weddings and a Funeral, based on the Bollywood blockbuster, Hum Aapke Hain Kaun. Andrew Lloyd Webber came to see the musical, left at the interval and then did his own thing — Bombay Dreams — with music by A.R. Rahman.
Tamasha has been good at nurturing young talent. So this is a time of hope for Rajneet Sidhu, a 27-year-old actress who is bidding to play Shakuntala in Wuthering Heights and who is part of the new generation of British-born Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis who have all been bitten by the acting bug.
She has just played the central role of Tazeen, a runaway Pakistani teenager in Sweet Cider, Tamasha’s current offering which presents an exceedingly bleak picture of young Muslims in a northern English town.
“I have read Wuthering Heights a long time ago,” Rajneet tells me, after the last night of Sweet Cider in London last week.
The Brits don’t go in for lip synch — the lucky ones picked for Wuthering Heights will have to act, sing and dance.
“We are starting to cast,” reveals Sudha. (Amit Roy)
Charades originated in 16th-century France where parlour games were the popular way to spice up an evening. In Britain, the game was embraced by the Victorians and the Edwardians, and became a fashionable source of after dinner entertainment.The Daily Star (Malaysia) reviews John Mullan's Anonymity and quotes several Charlotte Brontë/Currer Bell anecdotes:
Charlotte Brontë uses a game involving Mr Rochester and Miss Ingram as a narrative device in Jane Eyre. (Carlene Thomas-Bailey)
And it seems Charlotte Brontë was also reluctant to admit that she was Currer Bell, author of Jane Eyre. She was so determined to maintain her anonymity that when, at a dinner party, the novelist W.M. Thackeray addressed her as “Currer Bell”, Brontë said she knew there were books by that person but that she was “Miss Brontë”, and that she saw no connection between the two. And yet, it must have been clear to Brontë that she had been invited to Thackeray’s party only because she was the author of a famous book. Perhaps, while she desired public recognition and the rewards that came with it – such as being invited into literary society – she was also leery of how the knowledge of her sex would affect public opinion of her novels.And now a Jane Eyre-meets-something/someone sighting. The Independent reviews Michael Faber's The Fire Gospel:
At that point in time (Jane Eyre was published in 1847) in Britain, it was still not considered wholly respectable for a woman to write books unless they were edifying and moralistic texts. George Henry Lewes, on realising that Currer Bell was a woman, commented in his review of Brontë’s Shirley, on the book’s “over-masculine vigour”, which “often amounts to coarseness”, and accused Brontë of attempting to “escape her femininity”. No wonder the poor woman wished that Currer Bell should be the only name “mentioned in connection with my writings”. (Daphne Lee)
Faber's signature preoccupation with extreme grottiness, established in The Crimson Petal and the White (think Jane Eyre rewritten by William Vollmann) remains intact: The Fire Gospel's brief duration is fit to burst with seedy dwellings, open wounds and post-coital slumps. (Ed Lake)The Portuguese Jornal de Notícias discovers another Brontëite, author António Lobo Antunes:
O homem para quem o "Monte dos Vendavais" de Emily Brontë, é o livro, um daqueles que retrata o silêncio e provoca um ruído inquietante e insónias, as características que mais aprecia e o desafiam numa obra, disse que aos 13 anos tinha sonhos de glória. (Lucínia Girão) (Google translation)The German magazine Cicero interviews author Donna Leon who, we are afraid, will never join our ranks:
"Ich hasse Jane Eyre. So eine schleimige Gestalt!“ Als sei das keine Romanfigur, sondern eine höchst aufdringliche Bekannte. (Carla Woter) (Google translation)Finally, Eclipse Magazine publishes a brief review of the Studio One Anthology DVD release which includes Wuthering Heights 1950, Gondal-girl talks about Justine Picardie's Daphne:
Daphne is an mysterious story wrapped up in another mysterious story. Sometimes I am not sure what is fact and what is writerly invention, which is at times clever and sometimes frustrating, for I want to get to that kernal of the truth. Sometimes as I read, I wonder would this story have been better told as a kind of biography - for Justine looks at her modern character who looks at Daphne who looks at Branwell, and I feel I am trapped in a hall of mirrors - where writers are being haunted by their characters and the mystery deepens.and Frames/sing publishes a scholar article entitled Piranesi and Bronte: Gothic Constructed Haunting, a move toward eternity:
This is a pragmatic study of the narrative strategies employed by Emily Brontë in her opening scenes of Wuthering Heights. I say pragmatic because it seeks to examine the constitutive effects brought about through her treatment of two classes of figurative language, those of “space” and those of “sound”, with the aim of showing how Brontë in the her initial three chapters constructed a signifying machine, that is, a juxtaposition of readerly effects, such that allowed her to present an unpresentable: a space that speaks. (kvond) (Read more)Categories: Books, Brontëites, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, Music, References, Scholar, Theatre, Wuthering Heights
It's one of the most instantly recognisable titles in English fiction, but when Wuthering Heights arrives at the Lyric Hammersmith next week, precious little else about it will be familiar. Because the theatre company Tamasha has taken Brontë, wholesale, to Bollywood. Its adaptation of the classic, 19th-century tale of thwarted, illegitimate and, on occasion, frankly imponderable love is relocated to 1770s Rajasthan, where Cathy and Heathcliff are reincarnated as Shakuntala and Krishan, clad in silks and spangles, and the story is set to an all-new Bollywood score.You can catch it in London from April 29th to May 23rd. After that they continue with their extensive UK tour.
Tamasha's co-founder and Wuthering Heights director Kristine Landon-Smith insists that “it's such a perfect marriage of story and genre, it seems almost obvious. When Brontë meets Bollywood, it really works.”
The play's writer, Deepak Verma, once known to the nation as Sanjay in EastEnders, decided after a trip to the region that the Rajasthani deserts were just as romantic, foreboding and unforgiving as the blasted heath of Brontë's imagining. “From there,” he says, “all the pieces fell into place.” The repressive, corseted Victorian culture of the novel found a perfect foil in the rigid caste strictures of Indian society. Hinduism provided additional illuminating parallels: the inviolably sacred nature of a brother-sister relationship and the haunting consequence of not completing funerary rites, for instance. In the creeping evolution of the East India Company into a controlling nation state, Tamasha also discovered an intriguing new light in which to cast Cathy's pursed-lipped, respectable husband, Edgar Linton, here renamed Vijay, a tax collector and puppet of the British ruling classes.
“The love that is fated is the absolute classic Bollywood formula,” Landon-Smith explains. She noted, on watching William Wyler's 1939, Oscar-winning film of Wuthering Heights, starring the Indian-born Merle Oberon and the permanently furrowed, slightly sweaty brow of a young Laurence Olivier, that “it's full of these immediately recognisable Bollywood close-up moments”. Wuthering Heights, you recall, is a story in which a woman dies of a prolonged fit of pique, ghosts pop up whenever there's a high wind, and at a hint of rain at least two characters will be sure to come down with consumption. The kind of fictive caper, then, to which the excesses of Bollywood seem uniquely suited.
First published in 1847 under the authorial pseudonym Ellis Bell, Emily Brontë's only novel has inspired a raft of adaptations, from the Spanish director Luis Buñuel's Abismos de Pasión in 1954 to an all-female Japanese opera, recently revived in Tokyo, and it has already been the subject of a large-scale, Bollywood interpretation, the 1966 India-wide release Dil Diya Dard Liya.
If these adaptations have met with a decidedly mixed reception, so too have a stack of high-profile attempts to splice Eastern form with Western content, such as Gurinder Chadha's luckless Jane Austen Bollywood spin in 2004, Bride and Prejudice.
“Crossovers fall down,” Landon-Smith says, “when they don't follow the transliteration through. It's vital that the original story remains absolutely visible, but you also have to deliver the Bollywood element. You have to hold both audiences in your mind at once. It's when the cultural specificity of the retelling is very real that the story can become truly universal.”
Tamasha should know. Now in its 20th year, it developed East is East, Ayub Khan-Din's stupendous social comedy of a mixed-race northern family, which had its premiere at the Royal Court in 1997 before becoming a hit indie film, and the company hasve produced a string of sell-out Anglo-Indian shows since.
Developing Wuthering Heights, however, has proved uniquely demanding. “We wanted it to sound authentically Indian,” Landon-Smith says, “but the songs also had to work within a Western musical theatre tradition,” which meant employing a three-tiered system of composers, arrangers and performers, and relaying samples between Basingstoke and Bangalore before prerecording the final score, which, in true Bollywood style, will be lip-synched on stage.
Pushpinder Chani, Krishnan/Heathcliff to Youkti Patel's Shakuntala/Cathy, has, surprisingly, found that skill the most difficult to master: “Lip-synching's way harder than it looks, but that's the key to Bollywood acting,” he chuckles, “that and trying not to look too stupid when you dance.”
“The landscape of the whole world changed with Slumdog Millionaire,” says Verma, who is determined to turn his play into a film. “The attention this is getting is just amazing.” And, whatever the fate of Tamasha's Wuthering Heights, he is probably right to predict, as India's economy continues to boom and its addiction to cinema shows no sign of waning: “Just wait. We haven't even touched the surface of this crossover phenomenon yet.” (Lucy Powell)
And now for something completely different: the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain has done a very different cover of Wuthering Heights. Check it out. It's irritatingly catchy. (Jillian Allison-Aitken)Ann Cannon, from the Deseret News, writes a letter to Twilight's own Edward Cullen.
Oh, you make a great romantic lead. Classic, even. No doubt about it. In fact, I'd rank you right up there with Jane Eyre's Rochester and Catherine's Heathcliff and possibly even Elizabeth's Mr. Darcy, who (like you) obviously has excellent personal grooming skills. You're mysterious and aloof, and yet underneath it all? Wowza.The Filipino SunStar quotes Anne Brontë:
"But he that dares not grasp the thorn," Anne Bronte advices, "should never crave the rose." (Henrylito D. Tacio)These beautiful words come from a poem called The Narrow Way. We suggest you read the whole poem.
The author of Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte, used the pseudonym ¡°Action Bell¡± to circumvent prejudice against women writers. (Park Kyeong-sin)What is surely not due to character-conversion is the fact that the original must have said Acton Bell. Acton Bell was actually Anne. Emily hid herself behind Ellis Bell. We love 'Action Bell' though.
Meet Edward Rochester, a secret agent from Britain that was sent to Hatii to stop the inner turmoil. While there, he meets the lovely Jane Eyre, a French senator, and they quickly fall in love. Watch as Rochester partakes in wacky phenomenons while he attempts to take down the evil Mr. Brocklehurst, the leader of a brainwashing rebellion, and free the Hatiians from this tyranny. Will Jane and Rochester succeed, or will the revolutionaries doom the entire world?Part 1 and Part 2.
This video uses characters from the novel Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte.
Jane Austen and the Brontës: 'Sense' versus 'Sensibility'Categories: Alert, Anne Brontë, Books, Brussels, Emily Brontë, Jane Eyre, Music, Poetry, Talks, Theatre, Villette, Weirdo, Wuthering Heights
Farncombe Estate Centre
Broadway (Cotswolds)
Worcestershire, WR12 7LJ
Literature & Writing
27 April 2008 at 2:30 p.m.
With Angela Day
So much in common and yet so different: Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters. We look at Austen’s "Sense and Sensibility" and "Pride and Prejudice", Charlotte Bronte’s "Jane Eyre" and Emily Bronte’s "Wuthering Heights" and discuss this apparent paradox. Austen’s approach is through a rejection of excess of sentimentality – sense. The Bronte novels emphasise the power of the imagination – sensibility.
'Brontë goes to Bollywood" is how the British-Asian theatre company Tamasha has tagged its cross-over version of Wuthering Heights, in which saris, song and sand replace the rather more dour elements of Emily Brontë's Gothic novel. Although not a homage to Hindi cinema in the way that Slumdog Millionaire is, this adaptation by Deepak Verma is persuasive enough to have reduced the three Oldham-Indian ladies beside me to tears.And the Guardian devotes quite a lengthy article to this production:
As Sanjay in EastEnders, Verma used to say "This time next year we'll be millionaires." Verma might well have struck gold with his idea of relocating the tale of doomed passion and poetic grand vision from the bleak, windswept Heights to the scorched desert of late 18th-century Rajasthan. Here, in India, the turbulent weather conveyed in the Yorkshire word "wuthering" is translated into sandstorms that blast not a heath but a simple set comprising beige ramps and evocative backdrops cinematically lit to convey epic landscapes. Against this background, Brontë's tale of fate, destiny and duty – aspects of Wuthering Heights which Hindu society would recognise all too clearly – is peppered with references to spirituality, dance sequences and a catchy soundtrack by Felix Cross and Sheema Mukherjee.
The musical opens in a market with camels dotted across the horizon and the tale unfolds through the words of a wanderer carrying a sacred urn. It doesn't take long before Shakuntala has fallen for Krishan whom her father Singh has brought home from the slums. You don't need to identify Brontë's characters since the story unfolds in a perfectly accessible way from whatever culture you approach it. For rigid Victorian values and snobbery, read stringent Indian hierarchies; for complicated, contradictory Bollywood heroine, see feisty, single-minded Yorkshire lass. Kristine Landon-Smith's take on Brontë owes as much to the 1939 film with Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon as to the novel. But was it fanciful also to detect echoes of Bernard Herrmann's opera? The Bollywood melodrama is kept firmly in check, thanks to the sensitive characterisation of Pushpinder Chani as the Heathcliff character of Krishan opposite Youkti Patel, a vivid Shakuntala (Catherine Earnshaw).
In true Bollywood style, the songs have been pre-recorded in India so that the cast has the additional challenge of lip-synching to some of Bollywood's finest professional playback singers.
Verma has spiced up the English with some humour and incorporated a number of Hindi phrases so that the dialogue comes across more authentically in the genre of Bollywood. It certainly adds an exotic touch.
With a cast of just 11, the director, Kristine Landon-Smith, is hard-pushed to create the kind of all-singing, all-dancing line-up found in a Bollywood extravaganza. However she succeeds in drawing big-hearted performances and if busy market and grand party scenes – and the camel race – seem sparsely peopled, they are handsomely costumed and subtly choreographed.
The pace of the production isn't exactly fast but it seldom drags, the action evolving fluidly. It's no time at all before we're on the banks of the Ganges, spectators at Shakuntala's funeral pyre. The urn on the stranger's back, it becomes clear, contains the fettered spirit of his beloved Shakuntala. Cue another sandstorm into which Baba the narrator disappears, to emerge drifting in the breeze in a pretty "picturisation" as young Krishan is reunited with the freed spirit of Shakuntala. "Shukar he Bhagwan ka" (Thanks be to God) says Ayah (Nelly Dean, of course). It's an imaginative perspective on a great classic and one that, with a little reworking, could surely transfer to the big screen with the same success as Tamasha's East is East. (Lynne Walker)
When the Asian theatre company Tamasha announced that it was producing a Bollywood version of Wuthering Heights, it could have seemed a crossover project too far. The attempt to splice western content and eastern form has been attempted before without wholly successful results - as Andrew Lloyd Webber and AR Rahman's collaboration Bombay Dreams, or Gurinder Chadha's hapless Jane Austen adaptation, Bride and Prejudice, both proved.Categories: Music, Theatre, Wuthering Heights
Yet when you consider the elements of Emily Brontë's novel - passionate, larger-than-life characters; wild, spectacular locations; a confusing plot spun out across a couple of generations - it does have all the ingredients of a classic Hindi film. Tamasha's artistic director, Kristine Landon-Smith, was initially sceptical: "When the writer, Deepak Verma, first came to us with the concept of a Bollywood version of Wuthering Heights, my response was, 'Are you kidding?' Then I thought, 'Why not?' On reflection, it seemed one of those ideas so obvious that no one had thought of it."
When Emily Brontë wrote the book she probably didn't have saris and elaborate song-and-dance sequences in mind. But instead of the novel, Tamasha's version takes its inspiration from the melodramatic 1939 movie, starring Merle Oberon and Laurence Olivier. "It occurred to me that if you added a soundtrack of Hindi pop music to that film you would have the perfect Bollywood prototype," says Landon-Smith.
It's a suggestion that becomes all the more intriguing when you consider that Merle Oberon had Asian parentage: she was born in Mumbai, and her mother was Anglo-Sri Lankan, although this was kept secret at the time. Nor does it require a huge leap of the imagination to perceive Cathy as the archetypal Bollywood heroine: contradictory, complicated and compelled to deal with her emotions by running out of doors - though, in this instance, it will not be the windswept Yorkshire moors but the parched desert of Rajasthan.
"We had to find a way of making the story work in an Indian context," says Landon-Smith, "yet the parallels seem perfectly clear. Rajasthan was a rigidly hierarchical society, controlled by the British. So Heathcliff's mysterious transformation from street urchin to self-made man might be seen to reflect the opportunistic fortunes to be made within the East India Company."
In Verma's adaptation all the characters' names have been changed; the production has also introduced sandstorms, Hindu spirituality and camels. Verma explains: "As a writer, I am interested in creating characters who seem real. Yet Bollywood demands that you use certain archetypes. There has to be sentimentality, a clear distinction between good and evil, and songs and dances."
Tamasha has a long track record of developing Asian drama with broad crossover appeal. It was the company that first produced Ayub Khan-Din's East Is East, and Verma hopes there is similar scope for turning this version of Wuthering Heights into a film. If so, it won't be the first: Brontë's novel has been given the Bollywood treatment a number of times, the earliest being a 1966 film entitled Dil Diya Dard Liya. And the story has emerged in much stranger guises: as a 1950s Spanish-language version set in Mexico; in an all-women treatment by the Japanese company Takarazuka Revue; and, most bizarrely of all, in Cliff Richard's much-reviled stage musical, Heathcliff.
If Cliff seemed an odd fit for Brontë's antihero, Pushpinder Chani, who plays the Heathcliff-inspired character in Tamasha's show, looks very much the part as he rehearses his dance sequences and multilingual dialogue with co-star Youkti Patel. Chani prepared for the part by studying Olivier's performance alongside a number of brooding, Bollywood baddies, but he says the hardest task has been learning how to mime the songs convincingly.
For authenticity's sake, the music for the production has been recorded in India, and the actors must faithfully recreate the vocal performances of some of Bollywood's leading playback singers. "It would be easier just to sing the songs, to be honest," says Chani. "It's not just the words - you have to get all the details of the breathing and the intonation right, otherwise you're just left opening and closing your mouth like a fish."
Though big Bollywood production numbers are difficult to reproduce live on stage, early performances of the show suggest that it should be worth the effort. Even within the bare space of a rehearsal studio, the music helps establish the mood, and the story runs more fluidly. Stage adaptations of Wuthering Heights often stagger beneath the weight of the narrative: here, the central characters' growing infatuation is summed up with one choreographed frolic through the desert.
As the action builds towards a grand funeral rite on the banks of the Ganges, it becomes clear that this version of Wuthering Heights is really more like a spiritual cousin of Emily Brontë's work than its direct descendant. In fact, the two ultimately have so little in common you wonder why Tamasha chose to retain the title. "The title itself is non-negotiable," explains Verma. "It's like Coca-Cola - it's instantly recognisable around the world. There are thousands of people who have never read Wuthering Heights. But everyone knows what it's about." (Alfred Hickling)
WUTHERING HEIGHTS, Emily Bronte's gothic tale of wild, dark, passionate love, has inspired everything from Kate Bush's songs to Gordon Brown's sense of identity. But this classic of English literature is about to undergo its most radical transformation yet: it is to be remade for the stage as a Bollywood musical.We wonder if the producers are aware that, as matter of fact, there is a Bollywood precedent of an adaptation of Wuthering Heights: Dil Diya Dard Liya (1966) (check this old post for more information).
Acclaimed writer Deepak Verma and theatre company Tamasha are swapping Yorkshire's blasted heaths and Victorian Britain's hierarchical society for the Rajasthan desert and India's strict caste system in a production that is due to come to the Citizens' Theatre in Glasgow in the spring.
According to the producer, Bronte's gloomy story of the destructive love affair between the outcast Heathcliffe and prototype wild child Catherine Earnshaw is closer to the upbeat spirit of a Bollywood musical than most people think.
"It is not like putting a square peg into a round hole," says Kristine Landon-Smith, Tamasha's artistic director. "I thought of the harsh landscape in the original book, and if you put some swelling Bollywood music behind it you already almost have a Bollywood film. It just felt to me that it was a perfect match. There are points where the emotions get so high that they have to sing instead of speak. It's natural why it should be a musical."
Previously, Tamasha have transposed the works of French novelist Emile Zola to an Asian setting, but this is the London-based company's first attempt to marry a musical to classic literature.
Rather than being a "high-octane and colourful" production, Landon-Smith said it will have a "moody, Chekovian feel".
"But we're not going to go too far," she said. "The production has to meet some of the expectations for a feel-good Bollywood musical."
The Bronte Parsonage Museum in Haworth described the Bollywood Wuthering Heights as "a fairly radical reinterpretation".(...)
"I think it is a fantastic thing and we very much support it," said Andrew McCarthy, director of the museum. The museum is in the middle of a racially diverse area. McCarthy hopes this new production will help break down the preconceptions attached to the Bronte's work.
"One of the difficulties we have in the museum is we are traditionally seen as a very white, middle-class visitor attraction and anything that can change that image is very much to be welcomed," he said.
Literature academics have also welcomed the adaptation.
Sarah Edwards, professor of Victorian and Edwardian literature at the University of Strathclyde, said moving the book's setting from Yorkshire to India is a great way to explore Heathcliffe's racial heritage. In the book he is described as being dark and swarthy, with many literary historians believing Emily Bronte may have conceived him as a Romany.
Like Landon-Smith, Edwards said Bollywood is a natural home for Bronte's tale.
"Bollywood is quite melodramatic and melodrama encompasses both very positive and negative emotions," she said. "Wuthering Heights is very gothic, and gothic is very melodramatic, like Bollywood.
"They both deal with quite stereotyped characters. But a lot depends on the director and the casting. If it's not done well, it could be overblown."
Tamasha's production of Wuthering Heights debuts at the Oldham Colosseum next March before touring the UK. (Ed McCracken)
Now that the production has arrived in London, the reviews of Tamasha's Wuthering Heights (picture source) keep coming in. The Financial Times finds it 'generally successful': Out in the wily, windy desert of Rajasthan, they’d roll and fall in sand... Not exactly the orthodox version, either of Emily Brontë’s novel or Kate Bush’s song, but the Tamasha company’s “Bollywood” adaptation at the Lyric Hammersmith is close enough to be familiar and is generally successful.The Times gives it 2 out of 5 stars:
The action has been relocated from the bleak Yorkshire moors to the inhospitable territory of what is now north-western India, at more or less the same early 19th-century period. Kristine Landon-Smith’s cast faithfully lip-sync to English-language “playback” numbers written for the production and recorded in Bangalore. Lyricist Felix Cross and co-composer Sheema Mukherjee achieve optimum crossover appeal, especially with the two big numbers between the central couple, “What The Rajkumari Wants” and “The Sun Will Rise”.
Deepak Verma changes little of Brontë’s story, apart from the names and, like the 1939 film version, the plot more or less ending with Cathy’s death. Here Cathy is Shakuntala, who grows up sharing a more than sisterly bond with Krishan (alias Heathcliff), a beggar boy raised by her father as his own son. There is a jealous biological brother who abuses Krishan/Heathcliff after the father’s death; Shakuntala/Cathy marries a rich man, Krishan disappears for years and returns with a mysterious fortune, intent on revenge and regaining Shakuntala; he is haunted by her for years afterwards. Pushpinder Chani smoulders effectively as Krishan and Youkti Patel is passionate yet irresolute as Shakuntala. In another astute touch, Verma turns the maid, Nelly Dean, into Shakuntala’s ayah (played by Rina Fatania).
The novel’s several framing devices here become the single framework of an old man retelling the story to an urchin in order to have his cherished urn returned to him: the ageing Krishan, carrying Shakuntala’s ashes. This framework also makes for some points about class and wealth as young Changoo walks through scenes and numbers unremarked by the characters, ostensibly because they are merely figures in old Baba’s story but also because he is beneath their notice in terms of caste. I am astounded to find that Tamasha is already 20 years old; cultural hybrids have become much more common on British stages in that time but they remain at the forefront, demonstrating that “multicultural” is more than a mere buzzword. (Ian Shuttleworth)
If you were ever reckless enough to stage Jane Eyre in the style of Busby Berkeley, you would presumably make a point of ensuring that song and, above all, dance played a dominant role. Similarly, if you are going to give Heathcliff and Cathy the Bollywood treatment, it makes sense to turn up the volume and give the choreographer full rein.The Telegraph gives it 3 stars:
Which is, oddly enough, precisely what does not happen in this production from Tamasha, the pioneering company that gave us East is East, that magnificent celebration of the new Britain. As conceived by Deepak Verma — familiar to TV audiences as Sanjay in EastEnders — Emily Brontë’s novel becomes a doggedly one-dimensional pot-boiler set in the deserts of Rajasthan.
Felix Cross and Sheema Mukherjee’s lip-synched music — specially recorded in India, although you would hardly guess it — is never more than tepid. And Kristine Landon-Smith’s direction delivers little of the visual energy that is the hallmark of the Bollywood industry. Brontë’s taste for the Gothic and Mumbai’s love of melodrama ought to have made a promising match. However, this half-hearted pairing yields neither spectacle nor psychological insight. (Then again, some of us felt much the same way about the madly overrated Slumdog Millionaire.) Heathcliff becomes the lowly gypsy outsider Krishan, who is adopted by a well-to-do merchant and inevitably falls for the beautiful daughter Shakuntala (Cathy in the original). When the girl marries the insipid landowner, Vijay, Krishan disappears, only to return three years later, a wealthy man of the world. His passion for Shakuntala remains unfulfilled nevertheless.
Any adaptation is doomed to jettison much of the detail of the original. In this case, what little remains functions on the level of high-minded pantomime in a tale narrated by a mysterious beggar. The latter part of Brontë’s novel has been omitted, Verma preferring to end at the death of Shakuntala. The decision to pepper the dialogue with Hindi phrases is irritating too. My Indian wife has taught me quite a few over the years, but I was still left in the dark as my neighbours chuckled away.
Youkti Patel and Pushpinder Chani make the best of the paper-thin central roles, and Sue Mayes’s set designs provide some fetching vistas. The characters, though, seem dwarfed by the stage: only in the party scenes in the mercifully brief second half do music and movement briefly come together. (Clive Davis)
I only wish I could recommend Tamasha theatre company’s Wuthering Heights, which transposes Emily Brontë’s novel into a Bollywood musical setting, with ardency.The Naples Daily News reports the commencement speech given by the outgoing Student Government President Sean Terwilliger as student speaker yesterday at the Florida Gulf Coast University. This is a fragment of what he said:
I notice that former EastEnders star Deepak Verma, who initiated the project and wrote the book, runs a film company. This might explain why the show has such a half-way house feel about it. You can see how it might look good on the big screen; on stage, it feels dramatically malnourished.
There’s insufficient dirt and extremity in the 18th-century Rajasthan we’re shown here to match the desolation and wildness of Brontë’s Yorkshire moors. Pushpinder Chani’s sullen street urchin Krishan and Youkti Patel’s Shakuntala, headstrong daughter of a spice merchant, come across as sanitised versions of Heathcliff and Cathy. True to Bollywood form, the cast lip-sync to the songs, which sums up a show that never cries out from the heart. (Dominic Cavendish)
“Often the maturing process is spoken about as if it is an automatic, but everyone knows that a true higher education is much more than knowing the Pythagorean theory or reading Charlotte Bronte,” Terwilliger said. “I don’t believe it’s automatic or an instinctual habit that allows us to mature. I believe we can only mature through experience. We must live our lives with integrity, honesty, and care for others while allowing others to care for us.” (John Osborne)And this is what we have found on the blogosphere: Jane Eyre is discussed by Bookstove, Liberfilia (in Spanish) and Scriptural (in French). Word Craft has written a poem about Jane Eyre, the character, too. Echostains Blog tries to guess how Charlotte Brontë really did look judging from her various portraits. On Flickr, kristienkahn has uploaded a few pictures of Fritz Eichenberg's Wuthering Heights illustrations.
People will be able to sample fair trade chocolate at the Bronte Parsonage Museum and Bronte Weaving Shed in Haworth this month.The Haworth Village website provides more details on the events.
The venture is part of Haworth’s Fairtrade Fortnight celebrations and will take place for most of the day on Saturday, February 28.
There will be a quiz about fairtrade and Haworth, with entry forms available for collection at the Tourist Information Centre, in Main Street. The winner will receive a hamper of fairtrade goods, donated by Oakworth Co-op.
Also, cafes in Haworth will be serving refreshments made from ethically-purchased ingredients and there will be a fairtrade ‘Chuffin Fair’ at the Keighley and Worth Valley Railway’s Oxenhope engine shed at 6.30pm, attended by Bruce Crowther, who launched the nationwide movement of fairtrade towns. He was recently awarded an MBE.
The event will also include a raffle, music and a fashion show.
Rita Verity, of Haworth Fairtrade group, said there were only a limited number of places available for the fair. Anyone interested should call her on (01535) 647776.
Brontë Country should benefit from a marketing campaign designed to raise the profile of Pennine Yorkshire, according to Jackie Bennett, of Bradford Council's tourism department.The easier the better, of course, but you'd think journalists could take a bit of 'research'. We are pretty sure that a lot of tourists/visitors manage to find their way to Haworth from Keighley by bus.
She said this was a joint project between Bradford, Kirklees and Calderdale councils, which would also take in Hebden Bridge, Holmfirth, Ilkley and Wharfedale.
She said brochures had been printed and distributed and a new website — pennineyorkshire.com — would be launched early next month.
Mr Mitchell said travel journalists visiting Brontë Country must be kept informed about the area’s public transport.
He was responding to Ms Bennett’s report on recent media interest in the region.
She said a freelance journalist was visiting Haworth for an item on the Brontës for Sky Travel.
In addition to this, she said 12 journalists had visited the village last month as part of the British Guild of Travel Writers annual meeting. Mr Mitchell said these journalists needed to know it was possible to visit Haworth by leaving cars in Keighley, then taking the bus. He said cutting down on the number of cars travelling around made good sense. (Miran Rahman)
A Bronte Country Partnership member said he was frustrated that the latest edition of the Bradford District Visitor Guide did not treat Keighley as a separate destination. [...]Still in the UK, What's On Stage is getting ready for Tamasha's adaptation of Wuthering Heights:
Haworth, Cross Roads and Stanbury parish councillor Barry Thorne said the guide made little reference to the potential market provided by the disabled.
He said advertising attractions as being accessible to those with physical disabilities did not answer the concerns of the larger numbers of people who had learning disabilities.
“Physical access isn’t the issue for about 70 per cent of people with disabilities,” he added.
He said appropriate training for attraction staff and a statement in the guide explicitly welcoming disabled visitors would go some way towards addressing the problem.
Partnership chairman Samantha Lawson said if amending the guide was difficult due to cost, the BCP might be able to offer some financial support. (Miran Rahman)
Tamasha Theatre Company, formed in 1989 as a partnership between director Kristine Landon-Smith and actor/playwright Sudha Bhuchar, have announced the full cast and tour dates for their 2009 musical adaptation of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. The production will tour the UK from 13 March – 20 June and is a Tamasha and Oldham Coliseum co-production in association with the Lyric Hammersmith.On the blogosphere, Flightless Bird writes about Wuthering Heights and Not-So-Gentle Reader gives the 1992 screen adaptation a B+. Boktradition posts about Jane Eyre in Swedish and In depths discusses Jane Eyre's quest for independence.
The hot, scorched desert landscape of Rajasthan is the setting for Tamasha’s evocative musical interpretation of Emily Brontë’s timeless tale of passion, jealousy and revenge. 1770s Rajasthan, with its rigid social hierarchy, inequality of wealth and Victorian influences, is an ideal location for this story of passion corrupted by prevailing social values. In place of the cold moors, the wild scorched expanse of the desert provides a symbolic setting for the doomed love affair of Shakuntala and Krishan (Cathy and Heathcliff from the original novel). Tamasha hope that the musical will fuse a Bollywood cinematic treatment with other more classical elements of a western musical.
For the tour the lovers will be played by Youkti Patel and Pushpinder Chani. They will be supported in the cast by Adeel Akhtar, Shammi Aulakh, Rina Fatania, Anil Kumar, Divian Ladwa, Sheena Patel, Davina Perera, Gary Pillai and Amith Rahman.
The nationwide tour will begin on 13 March at the Oldham Coliseum Theatre and will continue on to venues including Exeter Northcott (7-11 April), Citizens Theatre Glasgow (21-25 April), Northern Stage Newcastle (27-30 May), Nuffield Theatre Southampton (2-6 June), Belgrade Theatre Coventry (9-13 June), Harrogate Theatre (16-20 June). It will also appear for an extended run at London’s Lyric Hammersmith from 29 April until 23 May.
The original concept for the musical was created by Deepak Verma. Kristine Landon-Smith directs while the music is from Felix Cross and Sheema Mukherjee with lyrics by Felix Cross. (Kate Jackson)
A BOLLYWOOD-style version of the Victorian classic Wuthering Heights transports Northern Stage to sunnier climes this week.Still in the world of stage, China.org.cn announces that Wang Luoyong - a Chinese actor well-known in Broadway for his role in Miss Saigon - will become Mr Rochester in a Chinese production of Jane Eyre, written by 喻荣军 (Yu Rongjun).
Gone are the bleak moors of Emily Brontë’s Yorkshire-set novel and, in their place, are the India deserts of Rajasthan.
The worst anyone can say is that this adaptation by British Asian theatre company Tamasha is different. The best is that it’s a refreshingly imaginative and daring venture that adds colour to the 1847 tale.
It’s all down to actor-turned-writer Deepak Verma, who came up with the idea in the first place.
And the version he’s written shows he dares to be different.
But then Brontë was daring in her day and her love story involving Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff – packed with cruel passions, vengeance and jealousy – was a bit of a shocker when it was published.
Deepak – who played EastEnders character Sanjay Kapoor for six years until 1998 – turns the famous main characters into the fiery Shakuntala (Youkti Patel in her professional stage debut) and Krishan (Pushpinder Chani) and sets them in Rajasthan, in the 1770s.
He saw a clear parallel, he says, between “the darkness of the moors and harshness of the desert. They’re unmerciful, unforgiving, relentless”.
To a large extent, he decided to free himself from the book and the 1939 film version starring Merle Oberon and Laurence Olivier.
“As a writer you have to do that or else you stifle your creativity,” he explains.
“And I had to make a big decision about what part of the book to transfer.”
For him, Heathcliff, the anti-hero, was the key. Then he found parallels between Victorian England’s restrictive class hierarchy and Indian society’s taboos and the caste system.
“On a metaphysical level, it really fits into the Hindu belief in reincarnation, having a soul that leads through many lifetimes,” he says.
“That relates to Heathcliff’s beliefs.”
The religious servant Joseph, meanwhile, quotes the Koran instead of the Bible.
The musical’s designer, Sue Mayes,went to Rajasthan to research the set and costumes, and the show also draws from the history of Indian cinema, Rajasthani folklore and Indian classical music.
The result is a timeless work, developing into a big musical bonanza – with actors lip-synching to a pre-recorded score by classically-trained musicians in Bangalore and vocalists in London – and also featuring a sumptuous palace, even a camel racecourse, plus a surprise at the end.
Kristine Landon-Smith, co-founder of Tamasha and director of the show, said: “Bollywood is all about characters, unrequited love, death – big human emotions. I think in Brontë’s Wuthering Heights you get that and it makes a perfect marriage with a Bollywood treatment.
“Our show mixes sequins and saris with the power of a Victorian novel and it’s a family show.”
Tamasha enjoys interpreting literary classics through musicals and comedy – its past work includes the Olivier-nominated East Is East, later made into a film – so, for Deepak, the joint venture proved a meeting of minds.
The boss of his own film and TV production company Pukkanasha Films, he has more ideas of adding a twist to the traditional, such as a Jewish musical version of Hobson’s Choice, called Cohen’s Choice, and a reworking of Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 classic Rebecca.
Wuthering Heights opens at Northern Stage in Newcastle tomorrow and runs until Saturday. Visit www.northernstage.co.uk or call (0191) 230-5151. (Barbara Hodgson)
"Jane Eyre", the novel had nothing to do with "Miss Saigon", the musical. That is not until Chinese actor Wang Luoyong returns to the theater stage next month.Back to books, Blogger News Networks publishes a review of Jillian Dare by Melanie M. Jeschke, the first chapter of which can be read here.
Wang, who has been hailed as a "top Asian actor in Broadway" for leading the long-running musical "Miss Saigon" in 1990s, will play Jane Eyre's lover, Edward Rochester, in an upcoming Chinese theatrical adaptation of Charlotte Bronte's classic romantic novel.
Actress Yuan Quan will star as Jane Eyre.
The show, which will have a ten-day run at Beijing's National Center for the Performing Arts from June 19, is Wang's first theatrical effort in seven years.
Honestly, Melanie M. Jeschke did not do a great job of moderizing Jane Eyre, in my opinion. The old story was darkly romantic and heavy with mystery. This novel is not. While the characters are fairly well developed, and you do notice within the first 10 pages or so that this is the retelling of Jane Eyre, (the cover tells you that, too) it does not live up to expectations. The supporting characters are not developed well. They don’t have much depth and this detracts from the story, making the reader want to fill in a hole somewhere but you don’t know where the hole is.You will read BrontëBlog's review of Jillian Dare soon too.
I have a strong feeling that this is an editing problem, not the author’s problem because publishers these days don’t want to publish books with more than 97,000 to 100,000 words. Jane Eyre had 200,000 words or more and every single one of them was needed to progress the feel of story which is what Jane is all about.
Jane went to work in a dark and brooding household, whereas Jillian goes to work in a bright and airy mansion of a place. Jane feels closed in and almost oppressed by the mystery, and Jillian is merely puzzled. Jane is frightened and timid, but perserveres, Jillian is bold and health conscious, which is fine, but is a bit incongruous to the Jane Eyre tradition.
I know, Jeschke did not want to do a story exactly like the old one. I think she did a terrific job of creating a unique enough novel, which was definitely inspired by the old classic. I just think the atmosphere of the old would have lent itself very well to modernization, in fact it would have been even more gothic than gothic.
Bear in mind it is my opinion, but I give this one two stars. It is mildly interesting. Perhaps that is because the old classic was so tremendously good that the retelling of it falls rather flat. (Gina Burgess)
Whether it's James Bond, Mr. Rochester from Jane Eyre, Nick Stokes from CSI or an actual actor, we all do it from time to time. There is nothing physically wrong with loving someone who is two-dimensional as long as the fine line between fantasy and reality can be seen. (Noorain Shethwala)If you're in Lakewood, Ohio, then you may have a date with that Mr Rochester tonight and see if you can help falling for him. The Lakewood Public Library has a Knit and Lit evening centered around Jane Eyre, according to The Lakewood Observer.
Barbara and David Lumb, of Hightown, Liversedge, also attended. Mrs Lumb said: "The estate is absolutely beautiful. This area featured heavily in Charlotte Bronte's novel Shirley, which I really enjoyed. (Suzanne Rutter)There is also a more remote Brontë connection, as one of Patrick's brothers, James, on a visit to Haworth from Ireland, visited the area as well for its Robin Hood connections. Apparently he proved the legend that says that if you try the helmet that supposedly belonged to Robin Hood and is kept there you'll lose all your hair.
Wuthering Heights ***The writer of this production, Deepak Verma is interviewed on Kirk Originals Eyewear:
Following the success of Bride and Prejudice, loosely adapted from Jane Austen's novel, it was only a matter of time before one of the Brontë sisters was given the Bollywood treatment.
Tamasha, a theatre company which has already had success with productions like East is East, decided on Wuthering Heights, taking the action from the Yorkshire moors to the desert of Rajastan, swapping the snobbery of Victorian England for the caste system of India and including a few songs and dance numbers on the way.
The result is very much a Brontë-lite production. Cathy is the headstrong Shakuntala, Heathcliff the street urchin Krishan, but both lack the original intensity and as their love story turns to tragedy, there's a distinct lack of emotional impact.
Certainly there is a lot of room from improvement. The score is occasionally woeful, the acting at times a little wooden and the lack of a big Bollywood number at the end is unforgivable
However, it's a production which is also easy on the eye. The choreography is seamless, the set, if someone has managed to fix an erratic door, simple and beautiful and the story, which makes no claims to be a faithful adaptation, entertains from start to finish.
For all the minor flaws, the real problem for Tamasha may well be the theatre in which they decided to premiere their new show.
In a town as wealthy as Harrogate, there's really no excuse that its only theatre has been allowed to become an unloved museum piece.
Buildings like it are costly to maintain, but even when it has had the cash, it seems to have spent it unwisely. Whichever bright spark decided turquoise velvet seats were just the thing to sit against the traditional plush red colour scheme has hopefully now exited stage left. Sadly, against this backdrop of chipped plaster and an auditorium which is as hot as Mumbai, a sumptuous Bollywood production can only ever sit uncomfortably. (Sarah Freeman)
Did you just wake up one morning and decide to write and direct a Bollywood style musical?Opera News reviews the recent Midsummer Night by Kate Royal and makes the following statement (with which this half of BrontëBlog cannot agree more):
No! I’ve always been fascinated by the character of Heathcliff. He was the “outsider” who had to work ten times as hard as all those around him – like me in a way.
Why did you pick Emily Brontes ‘Wuthering Heights?’ instead of, lets say, Jane Austen’s ‘Pride and Prejudice’?
Mainly for the Heathcliff’s character. Also, Jane Austen is not passionate of dark enough for me.
Have you ever been to Yorkshire Moors?
No – but doing Bronte Goes to Bollywood has given me a real yurning to go and explore the Moors.
Are you a romantic at heart?
Yes. Very much!
Do you think Emily Bronte would give ‘Bronte Goes to Bollywood’ the thumbs up?
Yes. Its loyal to the characters and their journeys – and we are all very affectionate towards the story.
Bollywood film productions are usually BIG affairs. Did you find it easy to translate into a live stage performance?
No. It was a long process but with the collaboration of the Tamasha Theatre Company and lots of research we have a fabulous project on our hands.
The stage version is a great success. Is that why you headed off to the Oscars earlier this year? Is there a film version in the pipeline?
Yes there is. It’s only at the “talking about” stage at the moment so who knows!
Listening to Royal's fine performances of Britten's tower scene from The Turn of the Screw, the magnificent "At the haunted end of the day," from Walton's Troilus and Cressida, and "I have dreamt," Cathy's moving aria from Bernard Herrmann's woefully underperformed Wuthering Heights, one can't help but be reminded of a time when those who were in the business of presenting new opera put the music first. If the audiences weren't always there for them, if the academic establishment was too busy castigating them because they weren't serialists to notice that they were producing some really fine music — well, the composers shouldn't be blamed. (Brian Kellow)The Mirror interviews ITV boss Peter Fincham who says the following about the period drama ITV crisis:
In these tough financial times, drama is a harder genre to commit to at the levels we have been used to as it's so expensive to make (Heartbeat, The Royal and Primeval have been axed while a planned adaptation of A Passage to India was also canned). But we will do more period drama. Wuthering Heights will be shown later this year and I had a meeting yesterday about an important new period drama series. (Nicola Methven)As Kelly pointed out on a previous post it is rather strange that Wuthering Heights 2009 appearance on DVD and Blu-ray in the UK is apparently scheduled for next September 7th when everything seems to point to a later British airing.
There is verisimilitude in the book's form as well, with an intricacy and sentimentality worthy of Dickens; alternating narrators reminiscent of a Brontë; and a satirical eye as sharp as Thackeray's. (Melissa Katsoulis)The Basingstoke Gazette reviews the Basingstoke comedy night at Jan Jack’s latest Laughter House in The Red Lion Hotel, Basingstoke. One of the participants is the Irish Grainne McGuire whose routine includes an Emily Brontë impersonation:
The Irish Grainne McGuire had a chummy style and ironic wit, and created wonderful image of Emily Bronte writing letters in praise of people she hated when she was drunk.Christopher Caldwell talks about copyright issues and sequels (still following the recent Salinger affaire) in The Financial Times:
Many novels deploy other writers’ characters: John Gardner’s Grendel, Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (a spin-off of Jane Eyre), the late George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman series, which draws from Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays, and Charlie Higson’s Young Bond books, to name just a few.It seems that Kristina Foden-Vencil, from the Oregon Public Broadcasting News, cannot be considered a Brontëite as can be deduced from this comment on the English, Baby! website:
It’s different from the English lessons you might remember at school. But that’s the point. It’s meant to be fun and perhaps a little more engaging than Charlotte Bronte’s ‘Jane Eyre.’Exactly the opposite of Tara Entwistle-Clark from the Boston Books Examiner who chooses Wuthering Heights for her summer reading recommendation list:
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte: Twilight fans! This is for you. Here is the original story of the bad boy and the woman who loves him, despite all of the forces of the world around them working against them.And the author Hazel Statham, who is interviewed on Blogcritics Books:
What is your favorite book at the present?El Diario Vasco interviews author Tamara Cadena. Another Brontëite (romantic, no capital R, faction):
Can I cheat and tell you my three favorite books? At 16 I found Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and it has remained my absolute favorite throughout the years. Then came Georgette Heyer’s These Old Shades, and more recently Laura Kinsale’s Flowers From The Storm. These three books are my main ‘comfort’ reads and have traveled all over the world with me as well as into hospital on several occasions. They’re very well traveled books and I have more than one copy of each of them. (Dorothy Thompson)
Y mira que si nos ponemos a hablar de 'Cumbres borrascosas'.In La Nación (Argentina), Juana Libedinsky comments on the recent edition of Wuthering Heights targeted to Twilight fans connecting it with the recent casting of Ed Westwick as Heathcliff:
- Por Dios, ¡me muero! De hecho, que sentí morir cuando un compañero de trabajo me dijo después de leer mi novela: «De ahora en adelante tú serás mi Emily Brönte». ¿Te lo puedes imaginar? ¡Me estaba comparando con la escritora de una historia de amor que atraviesa no sólo el tiempo sino la frontera entre la vida y la muerte.
- Heatchliff y Cathy... Son de los nuestros, ¿verdad?
- Para siempre. Te lo repito, me fascina esa capacidad de decidir que la pasión que te quemaba por dentro cuando estabas viva te seguirá quemando después de muerta. (Begoña Del Teso) (Google translation)
Si uno se acerca a la estantería de best sellers de literatura adolescente, entre los libros de la serie de vampiros Crepúsculo -el gran éxito de Stephenie Meyer, fenómeno cultural que fue comparado con el de Harry Potter-, aparece una novedad que realmente a muchos pone los pelos de punta: Cumbres borrascosas , presentado con un diseño gráfico en negro y colorado, con letras góticas para que parezca parte del conjunto de libros de Meyer cuyas tapas son en ese estilo.Nu.nl finds Brontë echoes in C.E. Morgan's All The Living:
Para que no haya ninguna duda sobre la estrecha relación, en la imagen de la portada se aclara: "¡El libro preferido de Edward y Bella!", en referencia a los protagonistas de Crepúsculo , que citan frases del clásico de Emily Brontë en la tercera entrega de la historia de amor entre el joven Nosferatu y la adolescente del noroeste norteamericano.
Si bien Meyer misma confesó inspirarse en el clásico, y Bella puede ser vista debatiéndose entre Edward y Jacob (el hombre lobo confiable) de la misma manera que Cathy se siente tironeada entre Edgar (el candidato que prefiere su familia) y Heathcliff (a quien consideran diabólico), puede ser difícil ver parecidos reales. Aun así la maniobra publicitaria, que comenzó en Francia y que ahora se ha trasladado del otro lado del Canal de la Mancha, ha resultado increíblemente efectiva. Según The Guardian, las ventas de Cumbres? ( Les Hauts de Hurlevent ) aumentaron en un 50% en el país galo desde que, el año pasado, se lo ubicó en las librerías junto a los libros de Crepúsculo y continúan en ascenso. En el país de origen de las hermanas Brontë, el efecto no fue tan marcado, pero los vendedores aseguran que Crepúsculo ha despertado un renovado interés por el gótico victoriano.
Todo esto se enmarca, naturalmente, dentro del debate de cómo acercar los clásicos a los adolescentes. Poco tiempo atrás, un autor contaba que su interés por la literatura había despuntado al encontrar un estante alto en el que sus padres habían intentado poner fuera de su alcance El amante de Lady Chatterley , Trópico de Cáncer y demás obras subidas de tono. Aseguraba que de haber estado La guerra y la paz allí lo hubiera leído también, porque nada despierta más el interés que lo que parece prohibido.
Sin embargo, la forma más tradicional de todas de acercar un clásico a los adolescentes (o las adolescentes) ya está también puesta en marcha respecto a Cumbres borrascosas . Hollywood ha anunciado una nueva versión en la pantalla grande con el galán de la serie televisiva "Gossip girl" (sobre un sofisticado secundario de chicos ricos neoyorquinos) en el papel del salvaje Heathcliff de los lúgubres páramos de Yorkshire. (Google translation)
En Aloma staat qua gevoelsleven beslist op één lijn met personages uit het werk van Jane Austen of de gezusters Brönte ― zij als een Jane Eyre en Orren als Rochester. (Google translation)The Frisky begins an article about YA novels and teen series like this:
There’s lots of literary esteem to be held for classic coming-of-age stories like Little Women or Jane Eyre. (Leonora Epstein)Jane Eyre is, of course, much more than a coming-of-age story, but we get the point.
In the spirit of wresting back control of her destiny, perhaps it's time she pitched some new Aniston projects to the studios:On blogs: Cup-Bound and Scalding (the blog of Sian Griffiths whose first novel Borrowed Horses, still unpublished, is a contemporary retelling of Jane Eyre) posts a poem inspired by Jane Eyre. Precisely, Simplicitas has read Charlotte Brontë's novel. Finally, Maud Newton reviews Lilian Pizzichini's The Blue Hour on The Second Pass.
Jane Eyre in Malibu
Brad Rochester locks his raven-haired, tattooed and quite mad former lover in the attic and rekindles his romance with Jen Eyre, the governess with lovely hair whom he stupidly jilted in favour of the lady in the loft. (Julia Raeside)
