Jane Eyre Rehearsals, Toxic Heathcliff, Genius Costumes and Weird Emily

Broadway World publishes a couple of videos (Sweet Liberty and Sirens) of the rehearsals of the Gordon & Caird Jane Eyre concert next Sunday in Broadway:

The one-night-only concert event will bring Paul Gordon and John Caird’s musical adaptation of Charlotte Brontë’s novel to the stage with the New York City Chamber Orchestra and a 400-voice chorus.

Henningsen will star as Jane Eyre opposite Karimloo as Edward Fairfax Rochester. The cast will also include Natalie Allen, Clara Bishop, Caroline Bowman, Runako Campbell, Robert Curtis, David Michael Garry, Jada German, Marc Kudisch, Ada Manie, Austin Scott, Emily Skinner, Elizabeth Stanley, Christianne Tisdale, and Brittany Nicole Williams. Casting is subject to change.

Directed by Tony Yazbeck, with music direction by Brad Haak, the concert staging places emphasis on the score’s orchestration and vocal writing while presenting the sweeping narrative in symphonic form. The newly released videos highlight moments from rehearsal as the principals, orchestra, and chorus prepare the story of resilience, passion, and self-discovery for performance. (A.A. Cristi)

And still with Gordon & Caird's Jane Eyre, Broadway World also announces that the 2024 chamber version of the musical is now available to license:

This re-imagined chamber adaptation of the piece premiered in 2024 at Theatre Raleigh in North Carolina. The updated version features a smaller orchestra size, a slimmed-down cast (with opportunities for doubling), and changes to the lyrics and book. 

Paul Gordon and John Caird were eager to make this updated adaptation the definitive version available for licensing, as it hues closer to their original vision of the piece and is more accessible to theatres because of the flexible casting and orchestration options.

“We are so happy this new chamber adaptation is now available for licensing,” shared Gordon and Caird. “In these uncertain times we believe audiences want to feel uplifted when going to the theatre. Jane Eyre might take some dark turns, but the story is infused with such feeling, such passion, it restores the soul. If it makes you cry, we trust it will be for all the right reasons.” (Nicole Rosky)

Los Angeles Times wants Kate Bush's Wuthering Heights to have a big comeback.

 As a reader, I’m more of a “Jane Eyre” girl than a “Wuthering Heights” girl. Of course, I first devoured the novels at an age when I was too young to understand the Heathcliff-Catherine ourobouros dynamic; lonely, bookish orphan Jane was more my speed.

But when I got to college and fell madly in love for the first time, I was primed for the Kate Bush version of “Wuthering Heights,” an avant-garde musical number, all shrieks and pleading. Somehow Bush, that Ur-diva of the ’80s, wrapped up the plot of Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel better than any SparkNotes could (this was long before AI). Swathed in lyrics and melody instead of chaptered prose, I got it: Here were two people who embodied the idea behind can’t live with or without you.

I’m still a reader, one who spends some of my reading time professionally, as a book critic. Talk about wild and windy moors, temper and jealousy! Yet I come back again and again like Cathy, to my own “only master,” stories, words and their creators. In the words of Kate Bush, I can’t “leave behind my Wuthering Wuthering Wuthering Wuthering Heights ...“ (Bethanne Patrick)

The Washington Post has an article about Heathcliff in Emily Brontë's novel and the film, but mainly the novel. About the birth of the toxic boyfriend trope and many other things, but there is one that we found particularly interesting. We don't really fully agree, but it has a point: 

You know what this issue is? It’s an Old Testament/New Testament problem. The Heathcliff in the first half of the novel is a brute, but a comprehensible one. His actions aren’t good, but they exist on a spectrum of human emotion that you can wrap your brain around. Yes, one would be furious if one overheard the love of one’s life tell someone else that marrying you would “degrade” her. Yes, it would suck badly if you went off to make the fortune required to be worthy in her eyes, but by the time you’d done it, she’d married someone else.

(We’re not going to speak of the mistreatment of Isabella’s dog, which also occurs in the first half. We’re going to assume Brontë understands she literally screwed the pooch on that one and would change it if she could.)

But Heathcliff’s malevolence really peaks in the second half of the novel, which I hadn’t remembered until I reread it last week. Catherine dies and there’s still 200 pages left. Heathcliff uses those 200 pages to ruin the lives of the next generation of Earnshaws and Lintons. He punishes Catherine’s daughter because her father was Edgar, not him. He punishes his own son because his mother was Isabella, not Catherine.

He repeats the abuse that he suffered as a child, he seizes property, he’s monstrous. Nobody gets a moment’s peace until he dies, a full three decades in the future.

The new movie doesn’t show any of this, nor do other cinematic adaptations. It cuts off at the novel’s midpoint and for good reason: because when Catherine dies, any sympathy we might have had for Heathcliff dies too. Now he’s not a sexy man propelled by love and longing, he’s an absolute weirdo who needs whatever the 19th century version of therapy is. (Leeches?)

The people who create posts on Reddit about Heathcliff being a monster seem to remember that the second half of the novel exists. The people who love him anyway might have done what I did: quietly forget it. Treat it as a collection of ideas for a sequel that somebody accidentally published. Treat it as apocrypha, not canon.

Treat it as the escapism your silly heart occasionally longs for. It’s fiction, after all — the idea that somebody is so madly in love with you that they would rather your decrepit, annoying ghost shamble after them for all eternity than live even one minute alone. (Monica Hesse)

Hello! Fashion finds the costumes in Wuthering Heights 2026 no less than genius:

Durran’s costumes are clever because they work psychologically, not just historically. Just like the movie. Emerald recently said the upcoming film is not tied to a specific, rigid time period, but rather acts as a "fantasy of a fantasy" that focuses on the emotional experience of the story rather than historical accuracy. 

Instead of romanticising the period, the clothes reflect power, repression, and emotional states. Catherine’s shifts in dress throughout the narrative mirror her movement between wildness and social constraint. The use of latex-looking fabrics and bold colour is genius because it quietly modernises Wuthering Heights without breaking its gothic core. The latex adds an unnatural sheen, suggesting control, restriction, and something almost suffocating, while the colour choices signal emotional states and power shifts rather than strict realism. Together, they make the characters feel trapped in their desires, turning costume into a visual language for obsession and repression instead of mere period accuracy. (Olivia Lower)

CNN also goes for the costumes, but finds them kind of derivative: Omar Kiam's Wuthering Heights 1939. 

Cathy’s costumes in Fennell’s film veer into [William] Wyler territory often: she teases fellow character Isabella Linton about her doomed crush on Heathcliff in the Thrushcross Grange manor, while wearing a white tulle frock with velvet appliqué vines that looks strikingly similar to a dress actress Merle Oberon wore on-screen in 1939. Then there is the blood-red, velvet hooded cape and white fur hand-warmer Robbie wears when Cathy visits Wuthering Heights for the first time since marrying Edgar Linton. Oberon, too, donned a velvet, fur-trimmed hood and fur handwarmer in Wyler’s version. The number of jewels adorned on Robbie don’t look as out of place when you see Oberon wearing a near-identical tiara, drop earrings and floral diamond necklace some 87 years earlier.

“When I’m asked about why the costumes are a particular way, I find that really difficult to answer,” designer Durran said in London. “It’s a kind of instinctive, emotional reason.” Fennell agreed: “It’s not connected to the period, it’s connected to the emotional truth.” (...)

Ultimately, Fennell is referencing a period in history, just not 1847, when Brontë wrote the novel, and not the late 1700s, when it is set. By choosing her references from the big screen rather than history, she’s made a film for cinephiles, not the bookworms. The result might be as shallow as a puddle on a sunny day — but it certainly caught the light. (Leah Dolan)

Finally, Dazed has something to add:

It goes without saying that extensive research and understanding of the era is imperative – it’s the foundation of any good costume designer. However, when we’re (mostly) already dealing with works of fiction, who’s to say that costume designers can’t add a few flourishes of their own? Ultimately, it’s about the story that the director is trying to tell. And if a pair of Converse, a diamond grill, or Margot Robbie wrapped up in cellophane helps to communicate that story, then why the hell not? (Isobel Van Dyke)

Vanity Fair tries to unveil the mystery of Emily Brontë, the weirdest of the sisters:

 Of literature’s “three weird sisters”—as writer Ted Hughes famously dubbed the Brontës—Emily is the weirdest, probably because history knows so little about her. Sandwiched between bestselling Jane Eyre author Charlotte, the family’s press-savvy manager and myth-maker, and Agnes Grey writer Anne, the sweet and pious peacemaker, was Emily Jane, the elusive middle sister whose personality still evades readers nearly two centuries after her untimely death.

“The strange one,” as she’s often called, may have been autistic, antisocial, agoraphobic, and/or anorexic. She may have been a lesbian, or in an incestuous relationship with her brother. In any case, the author of Wuthering Heights—arguably the horniest Gothic novel ever written—was probably a virgin with a vivid imagination. As a soaking-wet Heathcliff on horseback rides over wild moors and onto movie theatre screens yet again in Emerald Fennell’s reimagining of the novel, here are some burning questions biographers are still asking about the strangest Brontë sister. (...)

Modern armchair psychologists have inevitably diagnosed Emily Brontë with a revolving door of diseases and disorders, from “neurosis” to agoraphobia to social anxiety to—the most popular pick of recent years—neurodivergence or autism. “She was probably somewhere on the spectrum, like lots of people are,” says Brontë biographer Nick Holland. “Autism would certainly explain a lot.” But the meaning, if any, of a modern-day diagnosis is debatable. “The idea of autism didn’t even exist in the 19th century,” says [Deborah] Lutz, “so it’s not very helpful.” (...)

But Branwell was one of so few men in Emily Brontë’s world that historians have considered him to be a possible inspiration for Heathcliff, Catherine’s adopted brother turned love interest. Another possibility is William Weightman, the flirtatious curate with whom the 2022 film Emily imagined a torrid affair. Robert Heaton was a neighbour said to have planted Emily a pear tree, which embarrassed her. In Sexual Personae, Camille Paglia argued Emily was a lesbian, and she herself is Heathcliff—yearning for love she cannot have.

Another once perfectly reasonable explanation for the Brontës’ monstrous literary talent? Witchcraft. Ted Hughes likened the trio to “three weird sisters,” the witches whose prophecy begins Macbeth—invoking an old theory with deep roots. “That they were witches with some kind of elemental power came from the late 19th-century idea that women couldn’t be intellectuals or craftswomen, they were just channels receiving and transmitting information,” says [Graham] Watson. It’s “all nonsense, of course,” he adds, though perhaps not entirely undeserved—Emily was eternally fascinated with superstition and the occult. (...)

Even after she got sick, Emily went about her days as she always did, such that no one realized how close she was to death. Legend says she refused to retire to her bed, as is customary, and died on the sofa in the dining room instead. True or not, some 80,000 Brontë devotees still visit annually their former home in Haworth, now a Brontë museum, to see the sofa that once held the strangest Brontë—a defiant enigma until her very end. (Rosemary Counter)

Rayo quotes one of the many interviews with Margot Robbie when she recalls one of the scenes that never reached the final cut: 

"There was a scene where she was sort of reading a sexy book at one point," Olivia began, before Margot clarifies: "Yeah, Emerald found 18th Century p-rn... and the scene didn't make the movie but it was like Isabella saying her prayers before bed, and then getting to bed and pulling out this 18th Century p-rn - which exists, it's really weird." (Priyanca Rajput)

Ara explores why 'yearning' has become fashionable in series and cinema. Marie Claire explores the (many, many) differences between the Wuthering Heights 2026 film and book. Daily Mail goes straight ahead for the good stuff: How racy is the film and let's dissect all the raunchy scenes. Secret Manchester and The National explore some of the shooting locations of the film. The Toronto Star interviews Emerald Fennell.