For those of us who love our Jane Austen adaptations, the coronavirus quarantine has been the best of times and the worst of times.
The new film of Emma migrated to streaming way ahead of schedule—but the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis canceled its world premiere of Kate Hamill’s stage adaptation, which had been scheduled to open last month.
The online performance of Paul Gordon’s musical version of Pride and Prejudice drew a robust international audience for its free premiere, and his earlier musical adaptation of Emma became available free to Amazon Prime subscribers (and to the rest of us twice last night and once more today at 2 pm, if you sign up). But the London run of Laura Wade’s much-praised theatrical version of The Watsons, a success at Chichester in 2018, was canceled.
You can stream Clueless on any number of platforms whenever you’d like, or just slot your old disc into your DVD player. But the twenty-fifth anniversary theatrical re-release, scheduled for this week, was postponed indefinitely.
It’s all entirely predictable, of course: If you can see it in the privacy of your own TV room, then it’s available. If you can see it only in company with a large group of potentially contagious fellow citizens, then it’s not. We know the drill. It’s just getting old.