Therapeutic Jane

Our Quad Cities News features the production of Jane Eyre the Musical opening today in Moline.

“This is the biggest production we have brought to the Black Box stage,” said director Lora Adams, BBT artistic director and co-founder.

There are 14 in the cast (pared from the original version of 34 characters). Each performer (except Martin and Urbaitis) plays multiple parts, with ensemble and at least one named role. [...]

“It’s brilliant the way Lora has it set up, because anyone who’s offstage is behind the scrim and they can all sing,” music director Amy Trimble said this week. “It’s a beautiful way of maximizing a small cast in a big production, where we need voices.”

Trimble – who’s married to Urbaitis, whom she met putting on a Music Guild show in 2016 – brought the idea of doing “Jane Eyre” to Adams. She previously music directed “Clue” (when Urbaitis was Professor Plum) and “I Love You Because” at BBT, pre-pandemic.

Trimble fell in love with the sweeping, dramatic music of “Jane Eyre” before it was on Broadway, in a Canadian recording, after it was her favorite novel of all time.

“It has over 24 years, a couple times a year I would just need my soul filled with music and its songs just always did it,” she said Tuesday. “I have found it’s one that I go back to…It has so many songs, they’re simple and complex – which is exactly like the story and exactly like our set.”

She remembers having an abridged, illustrated “Jane Eyre” when she was in 3rd grade, and also has seen several filmed versions.

“There’s a romantic in all of us,” Adams said. “Especially when it’s hard to come by. Not every relationship you’re in works out.”

She greatly admires how modern Jane is in speaking her mind and that she finds her happy ending.

There’s a beautiful contrast between bigger-than-life Blanche (played by Shelley Cooper) and Jane, Trimble said.

Blanche is a rival for Rochester to Jane, and Martin loves the story being focused on women. At the start of the show, Jane is constrained by society and years to be free, after being a captive bird.

“She’s thrust into the world, forced to be strong and independent,” Martin said. “She always cares and has that soft spot inside her, but she has to be strong and independent to keep herself safe and make sure that she survives her circumstances, able to push through, see the world, and find her purpose.”

Trimble and her mother owned and operated WaterMark Corners in downtown Moline, which closed Feb. 10 after 25 years in business. “Jane Eyre” helped Trimble to recover during the transition.

“We started rehearsals in January and I would leave work emotionally exhausted,” she said. “It would be two and a half hours later, and it was the most beautiful, heartwarming experience. It came so easily – I know the show so well, I just knew it in an intimate way.”

“It was absolutely therapeutic,” Trimble said. “It really gave me like, during rehearsal for two and a half hours a night, nothing else existed. Very rarely does that happen.” (Jonathan Turner)

Apropos of the new book James by Percival Everett, The Economist wonders about the latest craze for retellings.

So begins “James”, a novel by Percival Everett that reimagines Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” from Jim’s perspective. Mr Everett, a professor of English literature at the University of Southern California, is known for producing genre-defying works, ranging from a satire of the publishing industry that inspired the film “American Fiction” to a murder mystery about lynchings in the American South. (“The Trees” was shortlisted for the Booker prize in 2022.)

In retelling Twain’s classic American tale with a twist, Mr Everett joins a long tradition of writers who have dragged marginalised characters into the centre of new (old) tales. The modern trend began with “Wide Sargasso Sea” (1966), when Jean Rhys gave a voice to Mr Rochester’s wife, the “madwoman in the attic”, from “Jane Eyre” by Charlotte Brontë.

The Guardian also lists Wide Sargasso Sea as one of 'Five of the best books inspired by classic novels'.

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

A passionate, feminist prequel to Jane Eyre, Rhys’s final novel gives a voice to the madwoman in the attic. Before she became Bertha Mason, Rochester’s first wife was we learn, the beautiful, troubled Antoinette Cosway. Dramatic and painterly, Rhys’s narrative captures the beauties of the landscape of Jamaica, Cosway’s childhood home, as well as the ugliness of historical guilt and complicity. Groundbreaking on its publication in 1966, Wide Sargasso Sea has lost none of its charge. (Sophie Ratcliffe)

The New York Time asks bookish questions to writer Kate Zambreno.

What kind of reader were you as a child? Which childhood books and authors stick with you?

Probably revealing that I devoured the romances when I was too young to understand them — “Gone With the Wind,” “Wuthering Heights.”

The Irish Times features comedian Frank Skinner.

Now 67 years young, the West Midlands native – who became a household name during the heady days of 1990s lad culture and Three Lions – loosely frames his new show around the idea that however much he reaches for loftier artistic goals, the juvenile “knob jokes” somehow always find him.

The former English literature scholar likens them evocatively to Catherine shouting “let me in!” at the windows in Wuthering Heights. “That’s what knob jokes are like in my life,” he laments.

It is a clever conceit that enables him to litter the show with his beloved smutty jokes, while approaching the material in a more thoughtful way in keeping with the times. (Aoife Moriarty)

Her Canberra features the new stage production After Rebecca and interviews the playwright behind it, Emma Gibson.

What inspired you to write “After Rebecca”? 

I’m a big reader and was raised on the classics. Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca is (was?!) one of my favourite books, alongside Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre – so I am drawn to atmospheric, gothic novels. (Ginger Gorman)

The New York Times reviews the documentary Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus.

Included in the musical selections are some numbers that Sakamoto hadn’t previously performed as solo piano arrangements, like “The Wuthering Heights” (composed as the theme for the 1992 film). (Alissa Wilkinson)

Jane Eyre is recommended in the latest episode of The New Yorker's podcast Critics at Large. Brussels Brontë Blog has a post on a recent talk on The Brontës and fake news.