And after the reviews . . . came opening night!

I LOVE YOU BECAUSE, the new off-Broadway musical, officially opened this past Tuesday (Valentine’s Day, appropriately enough), and BroadwayWorld was there to capture it all.

(We apologize for the lack of snark in this post. We sat here in front of our screen for a good half-hour before realizing it was a lost cause. We choose to blame Jane, because that’s what Mrs. B would have done.)

The reviews are rolling in for I LOVE YOU BECAUSE, a new off-Broadway musical loosely based on Pride and Prejudice. The reviews are mixed but tend toward the positive.

Alert Janeite Sarah sent us a link to the review in the New York Times, which she thought had some snarkworthy content.

The authors, both out of the New York University graduate program in musical theater writing, bill this as “a modern-day telling of ‘Pride and Prejudice’ with the genders reversed,” but don’t let that scare you away; no CliffsNotes needed.

Because we couldn’t expect people to go to a production that might make them have to, you know, think. Horrors!

We found the AP review a trifle confusing.

Austin, our uptight Republican, coat-and-tie-wearing hero, writes verse for greeting cards. On the rebound, he meets Marcy, a distant relative perhaps of Jane Austen’s Mr. Darcy.

She’s a free-spirited would-be photographer, who tries to teach Austin, among other things, not to always order his coffee black. Experiment with cream and sugar. Maybe even a latte.

Um. The genders are reversed how? Darcy the free spirit? The mind boggles. Tho’ we suppose that while genders are being switched, personality traits might be switched back for further fun and games.

The Broadway.com review discusses the songs in more detail, and we think they sound like fun.

Diana is an actuary, so she sings the amusing “Actuary Song,” in which she does the math of breakups and rebound time. It’s followed by a fun duet for Austin and Marcy, “But I Don’t Want to Talk About Her.” A few first-act songs–like “Coffee” and “The Perfect Romance”–are rather drab, but “We’re Just Friends” is endearingly nutty (”I didn’t have to pay for my Szechuan tofu/And it’s all because of you”).

The commenters on the NYT review are all clamoring for the original cast recording, so maybe they’re on to something.

Two Valentine’s Day articles discussed the new Headline editions of Jane Austen’s novels, and considering the date, we suppose it is not especially wonderful that the authors discussed the novels’ relationship with “romance,” not in the sense of “non-reality-based” as it would have been in Jane Austen’s Day (to wit, the work of Walter Scott), but in the sense of torn bodices and heaving bosoms. Normally we might be tempted to bring out the Cluebat of Janeite Righteousness, but luckily for the perpetrators we are sufficiently magnanimous to give them a bit of leeway for Valentine’s Day and also we are tired from staying up late to watch the Winter Olympics (and that Cluebat is heavy!)

The Oregonian does a pretty good job of discussing Jane Austen’s work in a short article, though perhaps it is the short length that forces the writer into broad strokes of description.

Austen’s novels, like “Seinfeld,” are about nothing, and everything — courtship, romance, family, foibles, friends and self-deception.

John Murray sent Emma to Walter Scott to review in the Edinburgh Review, stating, “It wants romance and incident, does it not?” John, son, that would be “the point” that just went flying over your head.

If she were around today, Austen might even stick up for romance novelists. She’d surely agree not to make fun of them, at least not for the entire duration of Valentine’s Day.

We agree with this; after all, if the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard? Jane might mock their more ridiculous works in private, perhaps in a letter to Cassandra.

In the Telegraph, Amanda Craig expands the definition of romance novels to include not only Jane Austen’s novels but pretty much anything to do with romantic relationships. That covers an awful lot of books, but she argues that all books are “genre.”

No book is easy to write. There are bad writers in every genre, just as there are great ones; and while many will object to Jane Austen being repackaged as the godmother of romantic fiction, complete with pastel covers, the idea that all great literature must, by definition, escape genre is snobbish and wrong. Great literature plays with genre, extends it, inverts it and subverts it - but it cannot, ever, be wholly independent of it.

“Genre” has a specific meaning in publishing, and Jane Austen would never be published in the romance genre today. Her books are too long, have too much telling and not enough showing, and there are no shagging scenes.

For the record, the Editrix’s official position on the pretty new editions is “mostly harmless” until we have the opportunity to personally inspect them for heretical and blasphemous forewords and other extraneous materials.

Joe Wright was part of a group discussion with his fellow BAFTA nominees, published in The Guardian.

JW No different from making Charles II for TV. For me it was very much a job, and whether it would have been my first choice if I hadn’t needed a job, I don’t know. I’d never read Pride and Prejudice when I was sent the script, so I went away and read the book and was shocked to find it really excited me. It felt like a youth novel that had been reappropriated by the fusty literary people - and I wanted to make a youth film of that youth novel.

DB Did you watch the TV series before you shot it?

JW No, and I tried not to think about that stuff. I got some ideas in my head - and as a director, once you get some ideas into your head, you feel like you know a secret about something that you just need to have realised.