Now that the COVID-19 pandemic has forced stages in New York City and around the world to close until further notice and much of the world remains in lockdown, many theater companies are offering productions online through various social media platforms. Many of these events are free or available for a limited time. Streaming Musicals recently presented a “virtual opening night” of Paul Gordon’s musical adaptation of Jane Austen’s classic novel, “Pride and Prejudice,” originally produced at TheaterWorks Silicon Valley in Palo Alto, California in December 2019.
The event was introduced and hosted by Tony nominee Laura Osnes (Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella), Tony winner Beth Leavel (The Drowsy Chaperone), and Julie James of Sirius XM Live on Broadway. The show is on available on the Streaming Musicals website.
While professional and competent enough under Robert Kelley’s smooth direction, this iteration of Austen’s beloved story of the bumpy romance between independent-minded Elizabeth Bennett and the haughty Mr. Darcy in Regency-era England is only mildly entertaining at best. Gordon, who also adapted another classic, Jane Eyre, to the musical stage with lukewarm results, mixes generic Broadway and pop sounds and simplistic lyrics in his score, producing pleasant but familiar expressions of the protagonists’ raging emotions under their formal exteriors. Gordon also wrote the book which sacrifices Austen’s revolutionary feminism for the familiar push-pull love story.
The novel is indeed the ultimate romantic template with the individualist Elizabeth battling against hooking up with the dashing but snobbish Darcy. Eventually, each conquered the titular failings of pride and prejudice holding them back. But Austen also informed her work with a powerful rage against the patriarchal society in which she lived. Elizabeth is one of five daughters whose family home will be taken from her upon her father’s death because he has no male heirs. Marriage is her only salvation, and Gordon’s cheerful, perky book downplays this vital critique of an oppressive environment of Austen’s classic.
The leads have marvelous voices and charismatic stage presence. Mary Mattison is a delightfully spunky Elizabeth, and Justin Mortelliti makes for a dashing, disdainful Darcy, but there is very little sexual chemistry between them, a necessary connection if we are to buy Darcy’s irresistible attraction for Lizzie and Lizzie’s gradual falling for him. The large supporting cast includes many lovely vocal performances such as Sharon Rietkirk’s Jane, Elizabeth’s elder sibling who laments the loss of her intended Mr. Bingley in the tender ballad, “A Man of My Acquaintance.” But only Melissa WolfKlain’s deadpan Mary, the bookworm Bennett daughter, and Monique Hafen Adams’s sarcastic Caroline Bingley, emerge as vivid characters.
