Playwright: music & lyrics by Paul Gordon, book by John Caird
At: Circle Theatre,
7300 W. Madison St. in Forest Park
Phone: ( 708 ) 771-0700; $24
Runs through: Dec. 19
For most of the twentieth century, a 'musical' was a play comprised of dialogue, occasionally interrupted by characters breaking into song. And while the vaudevilles of Bertolt Brecht and Brendan Behan might require some additional description, they still largely adhered to the formula of two-thirds talk to one-third warble. But with the rise of the superstar composer ( Webber, Sondheim, Boublil and Shönberg, et al. ) , song-and-dance became more prominent, reducing the time allotted to the spoken-word text.
It would take upstarts more audacious than John Caird and Paul Gordon to mess with Charlotte Bronte, however. But while their adaptation of Jane Eyre consists chiefly of singing, occasionally interrupted by characters breaking into speech, the music, far from crowding Bronte's eloquent prose off the road, instead clears a path for its progress. Choreographed movement expedites narrative exposition to lead us smoothly into scenes employing language drawn verbatim from the novel, subtextually enhanced, rather than diluted, by melodic themes introduced and reprised. Thus is a literary classic refitted to the abbreviated running time of modern drama with minimal distortion of the qualities inspiring its translation.
The story of an isolated young woman in search of freedom, independence and love demands an environment configured to suggest suppressed passion and intimate introspection ( a factor perhaps explaining its cool reception at its Broadway premiere ) . In Circle Theatre's bandbox-sized space, however, the swift exchange of energy between performer and audience creates an empathy in the latter responding immediately to Gordon's lush, feverish score ( its turbulent soliloquies tempered by a pair of comic patter-pieces for Derrelyn Marx's fussy housekeeper and a showy coloratura ditty for Alison Kelly's frivolous belle ) .
At the center of the action, however, is Sarah Swanson, who projects heroic dignity and effortless vocalization in the title role, ably supported by Marc Pera as a Rochester of suitably melancholic, if somewhat less than Byronesque, proportions. Robert Knuth's direction keeps the stage picture clean and uncluttered, even when he has no less than six couples waltzing in a space measuring less than 15 X 35 feet, while keyboardist Jon Steinhagen conjures a universe with enough scope to satisfy the most exacting romantic.