Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Being dead is no barrier to productivity these days \u2014 particularly if you are Jane Austen. The great English novelist, who would have been 250 this year, continues to pop up in endless new forms. Austentatious, in which performers improvise an Austen novel from audience suggestions, is playing the West End and on tour; Isobel McArthur\u2019s ingenious comedy Pride & Prejudice* (*Sort Of) is touring the UK; and new musical Austenland waits in the wings. To name but a few.\u00a0\u00a0And here is Clueless the musical, a distant cousin of Emma, derived via Clueless the movie, Amy Heckerling\u2019s peppy, popular 1995 film that wittily spliced Regency matchmaking and friendship angst with the hormone-fuelled politics of an LA high school drama. Heckerling\u2019s stage version had a 2018 US outing as a jukebox musical. Appropriately, it arrives in London after a makeover, with all new songs from singer-songwriter KT Tunstall and lyricist Glenn Slater, channelling 1990s nostalgia. (Yes, shockingly, any show set in that decade now classes as a period piece \u2014 way harsh, as the show\u2019s central character Cher Horowitz might say.)So Emma Woodhouse, Austen\u2019s matchmaking heroine, becomes Cher, an irritating but adorable Beverly Hills schoolgirl with a rich litigator daddy, a perfect wardrobe, poor driving skills and an obsession with micromanaging her friends\u2019 love-lives \u2014 whether they like it or not.\u00a0 She transforms grungy New York new girl Tai into an LA babe and tries to hitch her up with uber-wealthy, uber-obnoxious Elton (disastrously). Cher also convinces herself that, because new boy Christian shares her passion for fashion, he is her perfect match (rather than gay). Meanwhile, true love is lurking at home in the shape of her serious ex-stepbrother (not related), Josh, who like cares about the environment and stuff.\u00a0\u00a0On paper, it\u2019s a nice fit with the classic high school musical, combining a breezy, bubbly surface with a wholesome moral about self-knowledge. But, as Cher so often discovers, nice fits sometimes chafe. What emerges here is an enjoyable, upbeat show, driven by Tunstall\u2019s evocative songs, but one that never quite wriggles free of its celluloid origins. Lines that work because they drop so casually and so nippily in the film \u2014 high school boys are \u201clike dogs. You have to clean them and feed them\u201d \u2014 feel framed and underlined here and there\u2019s an overall sense of working too hard to convince. Rachel Kavanaugh\u2019s staging has heart and vitality, but struggles to turn the material into something original for stage.A talented young ensemble keeps the show bubbling. Emma Flynn is perfect as Cher \u2014 a lovely mix of sweet and smug \u2014 and there are tight, funny performances too from Romona Lewis-Malley as Tai and Max Mirza as Elton (who specialises in impressive eyebrow action). Lizzi Gee choreographs some fizzingly enjoyable dance sequences, riffing on 1990s moves, and Tunstall hits the heights with \u201cReasonable Doubts\u201d, delivered with terrific zing by Keelan McAuley, who is great as Josh. But despite all this, and a stronger second half, the show never really finds anything new to say. It\u2019s charming and fun but, in the end, I fear this is one result even Cher might struggle to negotiate up to an A.\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2606\u2606To September 27, trafalgartheatre.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Being dead is no barrier to productivity these days \u2014 particularly if you are Jane Austen. The great English novelist, who would have been 250 this<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":240589,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-240588","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240588","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=240588"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240588\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":240590,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240588\/revisions\/240590"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/240589"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=240588"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=240588"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=240588"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}