Austen on stage

My favorite quote from my recent interview with Los Angeles composer and writer Paul Gordon: "I didn't want to be the composer who always did the 19th-century novel with the woman's name in the title."

Hmm. Well, he did do the music for the 2000 Broadway musical version of "Jane Eyre" and is now taking on Jane Austen's "Emma." (Still kicking the kinks out, "Emma" gets its first staged reading soon in Mountain View, at TheatreWorks' Spring Festival of New Works.)

So why put on an "Emma" show? "It was too good a story to pass up," Gordon told me. "It's happy, it's positive, and it's got several love stories. It's just good musical theater fodder."

It's also less epic than "Jane Eyre," which affected how he worked. "With 'Jane Eyre' I made myself read the entire novel before I wrote a note," he said. "With 'Emma' I wrote it as I went along; I came up with my own way with each scene or each chapter."

"Emma" may be simpler, but when Gordon talked to me last week before going into rehearsals his creation had 22 songs. Yep, he was expecting to make a cut or two.

Gordon says his music is swayed both by Stephen Sondheim and by pop styles. "Period pieces tend to reflect the time, but I'm not married to the idiom," he says. You can hear threads of both in "Jane Eyre" -- give a listen to the samples on Amazon.

We'll see how many of the "Emma" songs escape the cutting-room floor, but they could include the ballad "Emma," which Mr. Knightley sings to his dear after she has swept into the ball. There's also an ensemble number while a group of aristocrats is out picking strawberries.

No, honey, I don't think it's called "Strawberry Fields Forever."