Austen Lost in Translation on a Low-Budget Stage

Everything you learned about Pride and Prejudice in Lit Hum was dead wrong, at least according to the New York Musical Theatre Festival’s presentation of the comedy Austentatious. Jane Austen’s classic novel is now full of clog dancing, tap-offs on 42nd Street, bear assaults, and (spoiler alert) Darcy’s trysts with transsexual pirates.

This show follows a community theater group through the trials and tribulations of adapting a period piece into a low budget production for the stage. But the result isn’t plain failure—it’s an endearingly human catastrophe. It’s A Chorus Line gone horribly, horribly wrong.

The follies of the characters speak to everyone who has ever been in a stage production, and the humor in the script is not cliché but acute and always fresh. Austentatious recognizes the craziness of showbiz, with incidents ranging from a cast member sleeping her way up to the lead part, to the director’s absurd—and hopeless—trust exercises. The well executed script is certainly the strongest point of the musical.

The seven-member strong cast lives up to the words set before them. As Dominic, the director of the faux production optimistically points out, “It’s not the size of the cast in the play but the size of the play in the cast.” The well-developed characters provide the actors with ample and challenging material. There’s Blake, who could be your college roommate when he declares during a staging of the production in Amsterdam, “Dude, this made more sense when I was stoned!” There’s Emily, who is responsible for the massacre of Austen’s beloved tale with her decision to turn it into a “romance told through dance.”

The star of the night was undoubtedly, though perhaps predictably, Stephanie D’Abruzzo, famous for her role in the Tony winner Avenue Q, who plays the part of Sam, the dependable stage manager. Though the other actors were certainly professional, D’Abruzzo was clearly leagues ahead.

“This isn’t exactly Broadway,” one character states, but by Act 2, the audience hardly needed reminding. What the production showed off in originality and charm, it lacked in execution. While the acting was consistently excellent, the singing was on less even ground. During the song “Between the Lines,” George Merrick, playing the part of David, hit the low point of the evening and turned a potentially touching moment into an awkward one thanks to his nasally, shaky voice that was clearly ill-suited for the musical range.

Considering that this is a low budget production, the staging was quite sloppy, and while the costumes and some props appeared to be high quality, other aspects were overlooked by the set designers and stage manager. No attempt was made to conceal the back of the stage, the lighting went entirely out at one point and wires weren’t taped down. In short, it was a mess that would seem more at home in Carman than on stage.

Despite these amateur technical mistakes, Austentatious proved an amusing and impressive show. However, don’t try to substitute the musical for the novel—that Lit Hum paper might not go so well.