Hayley Moorhouse, Donna Leny Hansen, Christina Nguyen, Nadien Chu, Erin Pettifor in Little Women, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price.
By Liz Nicholls, .ca
The March siblings, growing up in genteel poverty in Civil War America, might well be literature’s most famous sister act since Jane Austen’s Bennets. And ever since they stepped out from the pages of Louisa May Alcott’s hit 1868/69 coming-of-age novel Little Women, Jo, Meg, Amy, and Beth have gathered the stage and screen history to prove it.
In every kind of adaptation — plays, musicals, operas, ballets, movies, animations, TV series — there they are, teenage sisters jostling with each other and the expectations of their world. They’re a permanent temptation to writers of every age to use the bleached-out word “iconic” as the younger generation of March’s struggle, each in her own way, with the novel’s ever-renewable central question. What does it mean to be a woman? — a “little woman” or a big one for that matter — and claim a meaningful life?
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In the season finale production of Little Women at the Citadel, the characters are set forth by Jenna Rodgers’ excellent cast in a vivid, recognizable way. And they’re led onstage by a heroine for us to love. Jo (an amusingly brisk, abrupt, exasperated performance from Hayley Moorhouse) is the impulsive, fretful, difficult sister, chafing at the confines of her 19th century life and the way it squanders her talents and stifles her creativity.
Adapting Little Women doesn’t take virtuoso brilliance to ferret out contemporary relevance. It’s a self-renewing resource that way. For one thing it’s perennially war somewhere, as well we know. And as for family squabbling, or the tension between renegade feminine ambition and cultural expectation, well, they haven’t exactly vanished from the earth either. So it’s curious to find a stage adaptation so tied (the word might be shackled) to the novel, incident by incident, that it seems more like a very long series of vignettes than a play.
Donna Leny Hansen, Christina Nguyen, Hayley Moorhouse (rear), Erin Pettifor in Little Women, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price
Commissioned from the Canadian playwright Jordi Mand by the Stratford Festival (where it premiered in 2022), this Little Women unrolls, at three long hours (including intermission), as an exhaustive index of famous moments. And though they’re annotated by Jo, a narrator with an appealing skepticism about her as Moorhouse conveys, there an awful lot of them (Little Women was originally two novels). And they’re given more or less equal weight.
One scene ends, another begins: the Christmas breakfast, the skit, the skating episode, the curling iron fiasco, the hair-cutting incident, the scarlet fever near-miss, the grand party and ankle sprain, the Jo meets Laurie scene, the visit to Aunt March, the news from the front and the departure of Marmee, the gift of the piano from Laurie’s rich gruff Mr. Laurence (Troy O’Donnell), the return of father, Jo meets Friedrich, Jo visits a publisher in New York, on and on…. If you’re familiar with the book, or the book via an assortment of movies, you won’t feel shortchanged by the dutiful scene count. Au contraire. But it’s by no means an exciting build-up of momentum.
Erin Pettifor, Hayley Moorhouse, Donna Leny Hansen, Christina Nguyen, Nadien Chu in Little Women, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price
Still, there’s entertainment to be had seeing the familiar portraiture come to life in 3-D onstage. As played by Donna Leny Hansen, Meg, the beautiful and conventional sister who finds she wants marriage and motherhood, has Meg-ish charm. Erin Pettifor is suitably mild and conciliatory as poor doomed Beth. Christina Nguyen is an amusingly sulky whiner as self-centred Amy, who suffers from the family poverty more than anyone, as she’s fond of saying.
Hayley Moorhouse and Troy O’Donnell in Little Women, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price
And Moorhouse as the would-be writer (the Alcott stand-in), is appealing as the awkward sister, who never quite knows where to put her arms and whether to shake hands or salute, as men do, when she meets people. “I need to leave; I need to be somewhere else; I need to do something new.” By the third hour you may well feel the same.
Their fractious sibling dynamic is conveyed in scenes refereed by Marmee (Nadien Chu), the maternal paragon who advises her girls to be charitable, look within, and find a true self to be. It’s a tall order. She confesses to a continuous secret anger that you’d like to know more about. “I am angry every day of my life,” she says unexpectedly to hot-tempered Jo, who’s amazed.
Gabriel Richardson and Christina Nguyen in Little Women, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price. Costumes by Deanna Finnman
The smaller roles are ably filled: Gabriel Richardson as rich boy Laurie, Steven Greenfield as the kindly, bookish Friedrich Bhaer, the German professor Jo falls for in NYC; Patricia Darbasie as imperious Aunt March, Troy O’Donnell as gruff but generous Mr. Laurence, Paul-Ford Manguelle as the professional tutor. And Deanna Finnman’s beautifully detailed period costumes identify the nuances of soci0-economic class in a way that the dramatized scenes aren’t always able to do.
Robin Fisher’s un-atmospheric set, a skeletal house (lighted by Whittyn Jason) with beige walls — the writing is literally on the wall — is austere enough but seems rather vast under the March family circumstances.
In the end, this is a production that gives you what you need to remember a cherished book from your childhood (or conjure a prize story from your movie-going). That said, it won’t propel you into a fresh new engagement.
REVIEW
Little Women
Theatre: Citadel Theatre
Based on the novel by Louise May Alcott
Adapted by: Jordi Mand
Directed by: Jenna Rodgers
Starring: Hayley Moorhouse, Nadien Chu, Donna Leny Jansen, Erin Pettifor, Christina Nguyen, Gabriel Richardson, Patricia Darbasie, Troy O’Donnell, Steven Greenfield, Paul-Ford Manguelle
Running: through May 25
Tickets: citadeltheatre.com, 780-425-1820
