'Jane Eyre' Makes Way to Broadway

NEW YORK (AP) _ You can't keep a good Bronte heroine down. Especially one as plucky as Jane Eyre, who despite her modesty and self-effacement, has had her eye on Broadway for more than five years.

Thursday, December 7th 2000, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

NEW YORK (AP) _ You can't keep a good Bronte heroine down. Especially one as plucky as Jane Eyre, who despite her modesty and self-effacement, has had her eye on Broadway for more than five years.

``It's the show that just won't go away,'' says co-creator John Caird of ``Jane Eyre'' _ the musical _ which finally has landed in New York after a lengthy journey that included stops in Kansas, Canada and Southern California.

According to Caird, producers and other theaters were demanding it have a commercial life because, ``They say it is the best thing they have ever seen. So we haven't been allowed to let it go, even if we've wanted to.''

Sounds like the initial reaction to Charlotte Bronte's novel, first published in 1847. The book was an immediate best seller. It still does well. In fact, a new Modern Library edition came out this month, tied to the current musical and with its logo on the cover. Then there are the various film and television adaptations, including the 1944 film version starring Joan Fontaine and Orson Welles.

Whatever the medium, the story has endured: a sweeping romantic epic about an orphan, raised in a bleak boarding school, who accepts a job as governess to a young girl at forbidding Thornfield Hall. Jane's relationship with Edward Rochester, the dark, melancholy master of Thornfield, forms the heart of the novel and the musical.

It was the novel that caught composer Paul Gordon's eye in an airport bookstore nearly a decade ago, and he immediately saw its possibilities as a musical. Gordon is best known as a pop composer of hits such as ``Friends and Lovers'' and ``The Next Time I Fall.''

The composer eventually hooked up with director John Caird, who, from his collaborations with Trevor Nunn on the stage versions of ``The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby'' and ``Les Miserables,'' has had considerable experience in adapting mammoth stories for the stage.

Jane's travels to New York have been circuitous, but every time it seemed as if the musical would be permanently sidetracked, something pushed it forward.

The detours proved valuable.

``They helped us a great deal because it's allowed us to refine the show in the presence of the public,'' Caird says. ``We have been able to show the piece to audiences and, not so much take their advice about it, as to see the effect of the show on them as they are watching it. That informed our decisions about rewriting, which always is the best way of working.''

For its initial incarnation in December 1995, the show, with music and lyrics by Gordon and book, direction and additional lyrics by Caird, found its way to Kansas where it was done at the Wichita Center for the Performing Arts.

``Wichita was the perfect place for it,'' says Caird. ``I wanted to develop the show in a place which was really private. No New York critic would dream of getting on a plane to go to Wichita.''

The Kansas production led to another in Toronto, where the show was presented the following year by Ed and David Mirvish at their Royal Alexandra Theatre. When the father-and-son producing team decided to concentrate on their Canadian theater empire and not work in either New York or London, ``Jane Eyre'' was a casualty of their pullback.

Yet the musical rose again in the summer of 1999 when it found success at the La Jolla Playhouse in California, where the show became the theater's biggest hit in years. The hiatus was helpful creatively, Caird says. What La Jolla audiences saw was very different from the Toronto production.

For one thing, the show was redesigned by John Napier, a veteran of Caird's ``Les Miserables'' and ``Nicholas Nickleby.''

``We got bored with the old idea,'' Caird says. ``The old set was based on a very inexpensive design, which we made for Wichita _ a rudimentary timber set. When we took it to Toronto, we blew it up slightly bigger because we had no time to do anything else. It worked all right, but it was a bit post-`Nicholas Nickleby.'''

For La Jolla, Caird thought, ``Jane Eyre is telling the story from the point of view of somebody remembering a series of images from her life, images which float past her. And I said to John, `Wouldn't it be wonderful to do a design which was the visual equivalent of a Chagall painting? Jewel-like settings that can come and go, vivid and colorful, then disappear and be replaced by another setting and then another.'

``John invented this extraordinary new set where things not only fly in and out but circle as well as flying in and out.''

The score has changed, too. Originally, ``Jane Eyre'' gave the impression of being sung-through because almost the whole evening was underscored. Now the musical starts in silence, and there are parts of the show that are spoken without any musical accompaniment at all.

``Paul's music is intensely beautiful and melodic, and one of the reactions we got to the show in Toronto was that the music was a bit same-y _ that there wasn't a really good tune in it, which completely astonished me,'' Caird says.

``If there's music running all the time, you never felt a real lift when you got to a marvelous tune. Now that we've cleaned out the underscoring, when the music kicks in, you really get the sense that you are listening to a beautiful melody.''

Those melodies are now available on the musical's original cast recording, released by Sony Classical, even before the musical's opening in New York at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre in a $6.3 million production.

The Brooks Atkinson, one of Broadway's smaller theaters, doesn't usually house musicals, but Caird wanted a theater where the audience could get close to the characters.

``It is a show that is peculiarly good for the women. There is one wonderful male part, Rochester, and there are eight wonderful female parts. It's very much a woman's show,'' he explains.

The role of Jane Eyre is one of the best every written for a woman in the musical theater, Caird says. No wonder Marla Schaffel has stayed loyal to the show, appearing in all its incarnations as Bronte's heroine. James Barbour, who was one of the ``Beasts'' in Disney's ``Beauty and the Beast,'' co-stars as Rochester.

''`Jane Eyre' is basically a love story about a man and a woman and how they fall in love with each other. It's very emotional, but very real,'' Caird says.

``Put a work like that into a much bigger musical house, and there's a tendency for the performers to blow up their emotions to an operatic level or to jack up the mikes. If you do that, you end up with amplified feelings instead of real feelings,'' the director adds.

``Jane Eyre'' is actually very introspective. It's thoughtful and essentially real. And you've got to feel that you're living through the emotions of the characters rather than having the actors thrust the emotions out at you.''