Manchester Online’s Diane Bourne welcomes the touring production of “Pride and Prejudice” with a new twist - a focus on Chloe Newsome, former soap opera star and current Elizabeth Bennet:

IT’S hard to believe, but it’s almost 10 years since former Coronation Street star Chloe Newsome last graced our screens on the soap as feisty Vicky McDonald.

So it will be nice to finally see the actress return to Manchester next week when she performs in the city for the first time since her Corrie heyday, as Elizabeth Bennett in the Palace Theatre production of Pride And Prejudice.

Bourne’s article is a welcome relief after the plethora of articles on the production’s Wickham, who is allegedly just as infamous as the character he portrays. John Leslie, however, is not entirely ignored - he is featured in an accompanying image alongside Newsome. Perhaps the editor forgot that however famous Leslie is, Lizzy does not pair off with his alter ego? Maybe we can send our lovely Editrix over to Manchester to straighten them out!

The indystar.com webstite has announced a production of “Pride and Prejudice” at North Central High School in Hamilton County, Washington township:

The show will be at 7 p.m. April 14-16 in the auditorium.
Tickets are $5 for adults and students, $3 for children under 12 and $3 pre-purchased for groups of 10 or more paying with one check and sitting together.

Our adept AB reporters have worked diligently to find out more information about this production, but sadly to no avail. This particular reporter has fond memories of high school theatre and encourages everyone who can to see the production!

The Winnipeg Sun reports that filmmaker Danny Boyle, who directed Trainspotting, 28 Days Later and Millions, received early inspiration from excellent teaching of Jane Austen.

Boyle mentions one particular teacher who put him on the road to storytelling. “This man made us all devotees of Mansfield Park. It was at a boys’ school. How you get 16-year-old boys to love Jane Austen I do not know! He’d put on plays, and I’d act in some of them and I took his advice and did drama and English at university. Years later, I directed a play at the Royal Shakespeare and I wrote to him and asked him if he wanted to come. He did. And the play was successful, thank God.”

Considering my boys run screaming from the room at the mere mention of Miss Austen, that is an accomplishment indeed.

Writing for the Virginian-Pilot, Jacey Eckhart describes her daughter’s reading, watching and listening assignments when studying Pride and Prejudice in her high school English class.

THINK all this “media generation” stuff is making my daughter’s English teacher work much too hard. The woman assigned the class to read Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” and watch the miniseries on DVD. Fine. But the teacher is also reading the book aloud. With voices.

What next? Is she going to send text messages about how a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife? Is she going to e-mail everyone about how Elizabeth Bennet’s mother is appearing this week on “Nip/Tuck”?

So, one assumes this teacher either assumes that her class will a) ditch the reading assignment and b) watch only the first fifteen minutes of the miniseries, or this teacher believes you can never get too much of a good thing. Or both.

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