Readers, you’ve got to know: we at Austenacious read what might be considered a lot of Jane Austen stuff on the internet. For everything that appears on this site, there’s an awful lot that doesn’t make the cut—and it’s all due to that wonder of the postmodern world, the Google Alert. The whole concept of this is pretty mind-boggling, when you think about it: every time anybody anywhere says anything about Jane Austen, we know about it. That’s insane! But what is equally insane to me is this: fully a quarter of the links that come through our inboxes have something to do with stage productions of Austen works, usually Pride and Prejudice.
My Beloved Sisters and I saw some live-theater Jane action once, in opera form at a weekend workshop at San Francisco State University. It was delightful, and we all came out wondering why nobody’s made their millions on Universally Acknowledged: The Musical, or whatever. So it’s not the concept or the general appeal that confuses me, exactly; it’s just that I have so many questions! Such as:
- Are there really that many theater troupes doing Jane at one time? I mean, I love Pride and Prejudice as much as (probably more than) the next girl, right? But the numbers on this just seem unreal. It’s gotta be some kind of conspiracy. By which I mean a conspiracy of sweetness and relational equality, but still.
- Is it all the same play? There are two options here, more or less: either somebody wrote the definitive Pride and Prejudice stage adaptation and I missed it, or many, many people have written un-definitive versions and are having them performed worldwide. This seems like a bizarre duplication of effort, but hey. More playwrights making it, I say! Congratulations to all of you! Enjoy your name in lights!
- Musical, or no? I’m just saying: I need my singing Mr. Collins, stat.
- Why has Jane On Stage never made it to the big time? If that many people in Cleveland/Yorkshire/Manitoba/Tallahassee are making the regional/local/village-wide production worth it, just think how many tickets Broadway could sell! I’m calling it out now: I don’t know who Neil Patrick Harris is going to play, but we’ll get him in there somewhere.
Readers, have you ever seen a Jane work on the stage? Please advise.
Tagged: Jane Austen, Neil Patrick Harris, opera, Pride and Prejudice, theater on Wednesday, July 20, 2011 · 4 Comments »
Yes! I saw Pride and Prejudice performed on stage and it was brilliant. High schoolers, but they were so well trained they trumped any community theater troupe.
You can see a slideshow of the pictures here: http://www.cbproductions.org/pride.html
Perhaps this makes me an inferior Austen fan, but I didn’t realize there were stage productions out there! Now I have to go. I need to find a baby sitter, get a hotel, and drive straight to Manitoba to see this play. Sure, it might take me 15 hours to get there, but these are the sacrifices we make for the sake of art & culture, right?
I saw P&P at the Utah Shakespeare Festival a year or two ago; it was adapted for the stage by J.R. Sullivan and Joseph Hanreddy, and I think that may have been its first performance. It was . . . fine. It brought nothing new to the table, but I didn’t dislike it.
Then last year, I saw Persuasion at Brigham Young University, adapted by a local playwright named Melissa Leilani Larsen. I thought this one fared better. One interesting device they used was that two actors played Anne and Wentworth 8 years ago, and every so often they’d show up and act out a flashback while present-day Anne and Wentworth looked on angstily. That, at least, made it slightly more than a bunch of college students acting out the movie on stage.
In general, though, I felt that both adaptations suffered from the fact that the theater doesn’t allow you to get quite so intimately up in the character’s business, and Austen is nothing if not intimate. So much of Persuasion (and slightly less of P&P) is characters thinking, and shooting veiled glances, and NOT doing things. That works in a book, where the narrator tells you details, and in a movie, where the camera can do a closeup of someone’s face, but it’s tough in a play, where the people on row 25 aren’t going to catch subtle facial expressions.
Many of them are different. I’ve seen three or four different stage productions of P&P. One is a musical (and will receive a staging at the New York Musical Theatre Festival in Sept/Oct! Can’t wait). Jon Jory’s adaptation seems to be the most popular these days. I saw that recently at the Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival. It was pretty good but I like the musical better.
Many of the groups have someone in their company adapt the novel afresh, so there are MANY versions out there, but I see the Jory one often. He is supposedly writing adaptations of all six novels. I’ve seen Emma (meh) and I know S&S is out there.