The San Francisco Chronicle likes the musical production of Emma currently playing at TheatreWorks, though its praise is in terms that disturb us not a little.

All right, all you keepers of the Jane Austen flame, get over it. The new musical adaptation of “Emma” that’s onstage at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts almost certainly won’t conform to those burnished ideas of the 1816 English novel that Austen acolytes cherish.

Oh, hush. As long as it’s good, we’ll put up with a few inconsistencies…but only if it’s good.

You may well resist this take on a bright and ambitious young woman’s maturation that plays more like “Legally Blonde” - or “Legally Brunette” in this case - than it does some respectful PBS adaptation with period music.

Oh, heaven forfend an adaptation be respectful. Snotty yuppies the world over might have their moderne mellow harshed, and illiterate teenagers (and adults!) might actually learn something.

The show’s strongest suit may be its score. First, Gordon has the undervalued knack for writing memorable melodies. Some are ardently lyrical (Mr. Knightley’s impassioned “Emma”); others are sweetly comic (Harriet’s reverent love hymn “Mr. Robert Martin”). Second, in his Sondheimian mode, the composer can musicalize more complex emotional states, such as paradox (”The Conviction of My Indifference”) or emotional detachment and self-deception (”This Is How Love Feels”).

Now, that’s better.

The modernization that this reviewer so liked is disparaged, however, by the National Examiner.

Classics can be updated, sometimes with great success, but changing a comedy of manners into a musically bland piece of 21st century lack of manners is rather strange. The original Emma was already a too-modern figure in pre-Victorian England, matchmaking blithely and disastrously, shocking and charming the reader.

And yet, Austen’s Emma has almost nothing to do with the element-of-nature actress playing her in Mountain View — the sensational Lianne Marie Dobbs, who channels Barbra Streisand, Ethel Merman and Olga Korbut all in one. In directing her, Kelley must have remembered the words of his beloved Stephen Sondheim: “She twitters/She floats/Isn’t that alarming? What is she, a bird?”

Olga Korbut?

The rest of the large, hardworking cast is given over the Gordon’s excessive modernization, acting too large, in an un-British in-your-face amplification.

Thanks to Alert Janeite Lisa for the links.