Playwright: music and lyrics by Paul Gordon, book by John Caird. At: Northlight Theatre at the North Shore Center for the Arts, 9501 Skokie, Skokie. Phone: 847-673-6300; $35-$55. Runs through: Oct. 24
You see, there’s this gruff prematurely-fossilized misogynist who takes an interest in bettering the lot of a humble young woman, only to fall in love with the smart, self-assertive lady she becomes. No, it’s not Shaw’s Pygmalion, nor Lerner and Loewe’s My Fair Lady, but Jean Webster’s 1912 protofeminist Daddy Long Legs—a milestone in a literary genre dating to Louisa May Alcott, but blossoming during the pre-World War I years with the notion of Horatio Alger principles applied to girls as well as boys.
In this pre-Broadway variation on the reliable rags-to-riches formula, orphaned Jerusha Abbott is rescued from institutional regimentation by a trustee who proposes to finance a college education for her, on condition that she write him letters apprising him of her progress and never seek to learn his identity. Little does the grateful child suspect that her benefactor—whom she addresses as “Daddy Long Legs” after glimpsing his lanky shadow on the eve of her deliverance—is not the nonagenarian she imagines, but a wealthy young playboy of philanthropic bent, barely older than herself.
Fans of Jane Austen, Colette, and Georgette Heyer will recognize this dynamic immediately. Adding a modern flourish to the formula is our plucky protagonist’s plan for a future free of charitable or marital subsidy, rendering the handsome prince merely reward for her unselfish goals. The problem in adapting Webster’s epistolary tale—even when essayed by seasoned page-to-stage romantics like composer/lyricist Paul Gordon and bookwriter John Caird—is that a score representing two characters talking to themselves leaves little room for variety. Future incarnations might include, say, echoes of urban ambience (buskers, Salvation Army bands) in Jerusha’s impressions of city visits, or the hymns of her church-going country hosts.
That said, those seeking the American counterpart to L.M. Montgomery’s Anne Shirley will find plenty to satisfy them in this Northlight Theatre production. Megan McGinnis radiates the bubbly candor required of period ingenues for two hours of almost non-stop warbling, while Robert Adelman Hancock makes a suitably stiff-necked swain (despite a tendency to rely too heavily on vocal technique). Scenic designer David Farley’s gloomy library magically opens into a sunny New England meadow and scholars of an age commensurate with the fictional arachnid of the title can sigh nostalgically at Paul Tobin’s cursive-hand supertitle projections.