There is a lot that I love about The Highland Arts Theatre’s brand new musical See Jane Run, with book and lyrics by Lindsay Thompson and music composed by Suzanne Doane. The musical is very loosely based on the story of Jane and Tarzan, first written by Edgar Rice Burroughs in 1912. It plays at the HAT in Sydney until March 17th, 2019.
The first thing that I love about this show is the fact that The Highland Art Theatre is developing new Canadian musical theatre. This is a gigantic, but also incredibly exciting and rewarding, undertaking! Musicals take years to continually evolve and really benefit from having a place that serves as an incubator, so it’s wonderful to have such a vibrant, creative and encouraging place in Sydney where shows like See Jane Run can grow and thrive.
The second thing that I love about this show is this specific adaptation of the Jane and Tarzan story. As the title suggests, this story is centred around Jane, a young Victorian girl, the eldest of four sisters, who has a deep love of bugs, a huge scope of knowledge, and ends up subverting expectations when she becomes stranded on an island in Sierra Leone, and meets up with a young man who has been raised by apes. Jane’s mother represents all the repressive aspects of Victorian Society ,and the musical shows how, even at eighteen years old, Jane has already internalized her mother’s judgemental attitude and her blind acceptance of misogynistic norms. Jane has to actively fight against this conditioning more and more as the play progresses, especially when she realizes that she is unwittingly passing these toxic concepts on to the innocent Tarzan. Jane’s sisters, the poetic Ada (Mea Tonet), Suffragette Nellie (MacKenzie Sechi), and young Olive (Rachael Murphy), who is still trying to find out what sets her apart from her sisters, all rebel in their own way against the Patriarchy and support Jane in her journey toward finding the confidence in her voice and sense of self in a world that devalues her in every way.
There are lots of great performances in this production. I love the chemistry between the four sisters, you really get the sense that they love one another intensely, while also driving one another a bit up the wall. Thomas L. Colford gives a sweetly nuanced performance as Tarzan, and Wesley J. Colford is extremely likeable as William, Jane’s often hapless fiancé. There is also some business with a Dung beetle (Geoffrey Lee-Dadswell), which is really weird and hilariously funny. Lesley MacLean plays Jane beautifully. She reminds me of a teenaged Victorian Kimmy Gibbler, with all the charm of the girl next door, and a strong dose of quirkiness, and sharp sense of comic timing. The singing is uniformly beautiful, and Thompson and Doane’s songs have a lot of fun imagery, lovely harmonies, and some really catchy melodies as well.
I hope that this musical will continue to be developed further, and I have a few dramaturgical suggestions for Thompson. I find the dialogue works really well when the focus is on the characters’ speaking in their own voices and saying whatever they would be moved to say in the moment, without worrying, necessarily, about whether the audience is getting “the message” or “the point,” or enough backstory. That’s all inherently there; what’s really interesting is seeing how Jane’s relationships with each of her sisters, with her mother, with William, with Tarzan, are all nuanced and unique, and continually growing and changing. Lyrically, as well, the songs work the best when Thompson has the characters’ expressing themselves with the same voices and the same depth they do when they speak, and when she has the comedy coming inherently out of the characters (like with the Dung Beetle song), rather than jokes being superimposed on top of them. One of the biggest obstacles in this story is needing to dramatize Tarzan learning the entire English language from scratch. It’s a genuine challenge, but I wondered, given the way this play is adapted, whether it was necessary for us to see Tarzan being able to read and to express himself in complex terms? The way Jane teaches him about “boundaries” is so sweet and funny, I feel like Tarzan only ever needs to learn the most basic and essential English words, and that it may be a great opportunity to force Jane to abandon her penchant for grandiloquent verbosity, to strip her own vocabulary down to the bare necessities too. Jane’s connection with William is rooted in her constantly feeling the need to show off her superior knowledge, it would be nice to see her friendship with Tarzan allowing Jane to find a way to connect where she doesn’t feel the constant need to prove her intellect.
Thomas L. Colford’s choreography is great fun and I loved all the magical elements to Alison Crosby’s direction and the ways that she created the ambiance of travelling on the ocean and then ending up in the jungle. The way the musical is written and directed oscillates between being very Brechtian, Carol Anne Gillis (as Jane’s mother) is basically in a pantomime, she directs all of her lines straight to the audience, and embodies The Victorian Era as a larger-than-life villain, but at other times the fourth wall disappears and the musical becomes more subtle and firmly rooted in a sort of magical realism. The Brechtian aspects of the musical, of course, pull the audience out, encouraging us to look at everything from a critical distance, but I found I cared so much about Jane and her sisters that I wanted to stay in the world with them, and that I didn’t need the more didactic elements in order to feel the beating heart and the strong Feminist messages in the show.
In all, See Jane Run is a very exciting adaptation of Burroughs’ characters that makes this story very relevant for contemporary society. There are many moments of empowering triumph here, a lot of silliness, and a strong sense of heart. I hope to see this show developed further and to see a future incarnation again. I think it has a lot of amazing potential.
See Jane Run plays at the Highland Arts Theatre (40 Bentinck Street, Sydney) until March 17th. Shows are at 8:00pm. For tickets please call 902.565.3637 or go online.
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