This review by longtime Charlotte arts critic Lawrence Toppman was published by The Charlotte Ledger on September 4, 2025. You can find out more about The Charlotte Ledger’s commitment to smart local news and information and sign up for our newsletter for free here. Ledger subscribers can add the Toppman on the Arts newsletter on their “My Account” page.
Review: ‘Austen’s Pride’ is a muddled, overlong musical that unsuccessfully blends Jane Austen’s life with ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ leaving both storylines diminished
“Austen’s Pride” reimagines Jane Austen revisiting her early draft of Pride and Prejudice, with her characters coming to life and influencing both the story and her views on love. (Photo courtesy of Blumenthal Arts)
by Lawrence Toppman
I’d willingly watch a stage musical based on “Pride and Prejudice”—there have been many, plus at least two operas—or a tuneful biography of Jane Austen, who died at 41 without putting her name on the six novels that have preserved her fame for more than 200 years. (Those were published anonymously, in the fashion of her time.) But “Austen’s Pride,” a clunky hybrid of those two storylines now playing at Knight Theater, does honor to neither one.
If you have no idea what happens in “Pride and Prejudice,” surely the greatest novel written by a 21-year-old, you may wait eagerly for two hours and 40 minutes to see whether high-spirited Elizabeth Bennet will accept a proposal from stiff-necked Fitzwilliam Darcy.
But even fans of the book will be puzzled by the behavior of Austen’s character, who’s so embittered by romantic disappointments that she doubts the validity of happy endings for any characters. This rage, which comes almost out of nowhere at the end of Act 1, evaporates quickly in Act 2 and is forgotten. So is her protofeminist discontent with the roles society assigns to 19th-century women, who are valued only for marriageability and fecundity.
We meet Austen (charismatic, sweet-voiced Olivia Hernandez) in her mid-30s. “Sense and Sensibility” has just sold out its initial run, and the publisher wants something else. She resurrects “First Impressions,” an old novel, and wonders whether it would suit. As she reads over it and makes amendments, its characters come to life.
Now the story veers between Austen’s interaction with her real-life sister, the interactions of characters in the novel, and Austen’s conversations with people she created. Though she has already written their adventures, characters tell her what they want to happen, as if she were composing the book for the first time. They continually surprise her: Whenever Elizabeth says something clever, Austen dashes to a table to jot it down. This author-meets-heroine concept was the weakest thing about “Me and Juliet,” and it doesn’t work here.
Lindsay Warren Baker and Amanda Jacobs, who share credit for the book, music and lyrics, try to touch on all the high points of “Pride and Prejudice,” which means none of the characters except Elizabeth and Darcy get any development. Her parents are caricatures, her giddy sisters nonentities, the neighboring Binghams ciphers. Hissable villains—a buffoonish rich suitor, Darcy’s gargoyle of an aunt, the jealous Miss Bingham—have been exaggerated into cartoons.
Agreeable, interchangeable songs run together in memory without staying there, and they don’t help delineate characters: Austen, Darcy and Elizabeth all sing about love (and nothing else) in the same fashion. The strength of Dan Hoy’s plangent tenor and Delphi Borich’s warm soprano make us root for the fictional couple up to the inevitable ending, where Austen realizes love is a suitable subject for a book, after all.
“Austen’s Pride” has been around a while. It premiered in 2019 at A Contemporary Theatre of Connecticut, went to 5th Avenue Theatre in Seattle later that year, slept during the pandemic, woke up for a Carnegie Hall concert in 2023 and made plans for a pre-Broadway national tour, on which Charlotte is an early stop.
The book’s length and the number of songs (22 plus reprises) will have to be pared down for New York, if it ever gets there, but the fundamental problem in construction will remain. Austen’s prejudices against romance and the prideful battles of Darcy and Elizabeth just don’t fit comfortably together in the same musical narrative.
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If You’re Going
“Austen’s Pride” runs at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, 8 p.m. Friday, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday and 1:30 and 7 p.m. Sunday at Knight Theater, 430 S. Tryon St.
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Lawrence Toppman covered the arts for 40 years at The Charlotte Observer before retiring in 2020. Now, he’s back in the critic’s chair for the Charlotte Ledger — look for his reviews several times each month in the Charlotte Ledger.
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