Jane Eyre in Concert

Manhattan Concert Productions

Wu Tsai Theater, David Geffen Hall, Lincoln Center

Sunday, February 15, 2026 at 8:00 pm

Manhattan Concert Productions’ Broadway Series returns with a one night only concert performance of Jane Eyre, the sweeping musical based on Charlotte Brontë’s classic novel. Under the direction of Tony Yazbeck (Stage Director) and Brad Haak (Music Director), experience Paul Gordon and John Caird’s moving adaptation brought to life by the New York City Chamber Orchestra and a 400-voice chorus. With a lush, symphonic score and soaring vocals, this powerful story of resilience, passion, and self-discovery shines in concert form.

Featuring Broadway stars Erika Henningsen (Just in Time, Mean Girls) as Jane Eyre and Ramin Karimloo (Les Misérables, The Phantom of the Opera) as Edward Fairfax Rochester, alongside Natalie Allen, Clara Bishop, Caroline Bowman, Runako Campbell, Robert Curtis, David Michael Garry, Jada German, Marc Kudisch, Ada Manie, Austin Scott, Emily Skinner, Elizabeth Stanley, Christianne Tisdale, and Brittany Nicole Williams, this special event celebrates one woman’s indomitable spirit and quest for love and belonging.

Gone is the ghost story — Cathy, tap, tap, tapping on the window. Fennell is less interested in the metaphysical aspects of the tale than the straightforwardly physical: men are whipped and women are bridled. Characters plunge their fingers suggestively into jelly, dough and egg yolk. Fennell is after — and gets — giggles, not gasps. During the love scenes you half-expect the camera to pan and reveal Leslie Nielsen caressing a potter’s wheel like the Naked Gun spoof of Ghost. (...)

Like her other films, Promising Young Woman and Saltburn, Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” is a work of posh-girl provocation: intent on pushing as many buttons as it can, mistaking Brontë’s effect for her intent. Provocation is just people-pleasing upside down — it has the same empty rattle. A wind whistles through the centre of this film, and not the Brontëan kind. (Tom Shone)

Keith and the Movies: (2 out of 5 stars) 

 The rest of the story erratically bops from point to point, force-feeding us a wild array of emotions that always feel more contrived than organic. Following along is never easy because there’s never a steady measurement of passing time. Worse are the gaps in the story that lead to bizarre character shifts with little buildup, as well as undercooked relationships that never make sense. This is especially true for the increasingly mopey second half. (...)

Whatever the goal, it’s hard to see 2026’s “Wuthering Heights” pleasing longtime fans of the novel or drawing new fans to it. But even if you take away its literary inspiration, Emerald Fennell’s latest even fails as a simple melodrama. The choppy storytelling impacts everything, including the characters who are left shuffling through ambiguity and absurdity. This despite the efforts of Robbie and Elordi, and great supporting turns from Alison Oliver and Hong Chau. (Keith Garlington)

 The book’s influence is only a tiny whisper behind the big spectacle of making a classic shiny, sexy and new. That feels like the only point to the film – to shock the audience by being raunchy and flat-out strange. Oddity can make an already interesting film great, but here it overpowers the story until it stops having meaning.

There were parts of the film that evidently tried to make the audience shed a tear or two, but the writing was ridiculous. None of the characters’ struggles are made substantial enough for the audience to care if they achieve their wants or not. This loose adaptation turns powerhouse actors like Robbie and Jacob Elordi, who plays the rugged adopted brother turned love interest Heathcliff, into laughable soap-opera-esque characters that only young teenagers could relate to. (Bela Parrett)

The same student newspaper publishes a much more positive review of the companion album by Charli XCX: 

It’s Not Wholesome. It’s Not Healthy. But ‘Wuthering Heights’ Is Incredibly Romantic.

What was once shocking becomes quaint: That’s how it goes. The Charleston now looks like a silly dance, Elvis is just a sweaty guy, nobody’s fainting while watching screenings of “The Exorcist” anymore and jazz is now the province of turtlenecked nerds. We’re assured there was a time when van Gogh’s paintings horrified audiences, but today reproductions of them hang in college dorm rooms. This process is not tragic; as these things lose their power to shock, they reveal new virtues. Nothing stays boundary-pushing forever — except “Wuthering Heights.”

 If Heathcliff and Catherine are too wicked for heaven, at least they will not be alone in hell. Their love destroys everything in its path, but it is also their redemption. Neither can live among other human beings without lashing out at them, but they can live together in the wilderness. Brontë gives them as happy an ending as they can stand, implying that their ghosts are reunited in death.

Is this story healthy? No. But is it romantic? Very. (B.D. McClay)

To unpack the Saltburn director’s take on Wuthering Heights, as well as the role of decadence in the novel and why it is so misunderstood, Georgina Godwin was joined on Monocle on Saturday by Dr Jessica Gossling and Dr Alice Condé of the Decadence Research Centre at Goldsmiths, University of London. (...)

Mariella Bevan and  Georgina Godwin: How true is the film to the book? And does it matter?

Jessica Gossling (JG): Adaptations are really interesting because of what they tell us about their cultural moment, and so what Fennell has decided to leave out or keep in is quite fascinating. If you’re going to watch this film because you love the novel, you’ll be disappointed. But if you want to watch it because you love the vibes and the essence of what we think of as Victorian – this kind of oversexed, bodice-ripping lusciousness – then I think it’s a great film.

Alice Condé: I agree. It’s not a faithful adaptation, and I don’t think Fennell has claimed it is such. But she says that she was trying to adapt the novel to correspond with her first reading of it at age 14. It’s a complex, nuanced novel, which actually at its heart is not a romance. It’s incredibly harrowing to read. Every page you turn, something more horrible happens to the characters. But what Fennell has done is take forward the enduring romantic appeal of Heathcliff and Cathy’s doomed relationship, and that is something that many younger people might respond to on first reading.

M.V & G.G.: Do you think the novel is capable of doing psychological damage to little girls or teenagers who found Heathcliff incredibly sexy and the story just compelling?

AC: That trope has persisted. Personally, that wasn’t what I took from it at all. What endured with me was the ghost scene at the very beginning of the novel, where what we see is Heathcliff’s outpouring of emotion. For a century very much known for its [particular] kind of emotional restraint, it’s incredibly groundbreaking and quite sensitively done on Brontë’s part. 

M.V & G.G.:What about the controversial race-blind casting?

JG: It’s so different to the novel that the casting decision is the easiest thing to latch on to in terms of what’s problematic about this adaptation. But also, Fennell strips out the sibling rivalry, incest and animal abuse, so there are lots of other important topics that are also removed. The only thing that remains [of the novel] in the film are some Sparknotes quotes and everything else is very much about how we feel Wuthering Heights should be. For example, there are references to Kate Bush in there. Fennell’s Heathcliff is completely chastised; he’s not the wolfish creature that Brontë describes at all.

It was Lovesong by Ted Hughes that helped the Australian actor Jacob Elordi perfect his Yorkshire accent. The poem in question is not an account of soft affection: this love is all-consuming, violent, dysfunctional. (Xavier Greenwood)

Locals like poet Mark Ward and dialect experts praise the film's accent work for capturing Yorkshire essence without overly broad dialect that might alienate viewers, noting historical shifts from industrial grimness to modern tourism spots like the Brontë Balti House. Ultimately, it argues that passion trumps accent authenticity in the story's enduring appeal of lust, jealousy, and betrayal.

Emily Brontë’s only novel, Wuthering Heights (1847) is one of the great one-offs of English literature — a ferocious story of all-consuming childish love, told in fierce, attacking prose. This gothic melodrama set on the Yorkshire moors has inspired generations of rich reveries and wild interpretations, from Laurence Olivier to Kate Bush to the latest by the director Emerald Fennell, whose screeching bodice-ripper will surely send a new wave of drama girls north in the footsteps of Cathy and Heathcliff.
Wuthering Heights was the book that made me a serious reader. My English teacher gave it to me when I was 11 years old, and I was intoxicated by this account of love as a terminal illness. Yet that’s not what I remember drawing me in; it was the picture conjured of two families, the Earnshaws and Lintons, separated by four miles of moorland but entangled — for generation after generation — in a web of revenge. I devoured the book in three days, relishing its landscape of sweeping heather, blanket bog and acid grassland.
More than thirty years later, on a wet and foggy January day, I climb the steep cobbles of Haworth, the little market town near Bradford in West Yorkshire that formed the Brontë sisters’ imaginations. One of Emily’s great achievements is to have forever transformed the grotty weather here. Conditions that elsewhere may be deemed a bit drab, if not depressing, feel the ideal romantic backdrop. (Johanna Thomas-Corr)

  “Wuthering Heights,” originally published under the male-sounding pseudonym Ellis Bell, was slammed by reviewers, who denounced it as coarse, brutal and irreligious. After her death at 30, Emily was "defended" by her older sister Charlotte, who resorted to claiming that her sister was just a child of nature, living secluded in rural Yorkshire. She really "didn’t get" polite society.

But Emily has had historical payback after those disapproving reviews. “Wuthering Heights” stays reliably in print, thanks to people like me, who teach it, and thanks to the filmmakers, who periodically boost it lucratively into the headlines.

The new film beckons. But I hope that moviegoers will turn again to the book: a real Gothic shocker, which entertains while inviting us to ponder the dangerous and wonderful strength of human feeling, to consider the possibility that individual human identity is permeable, and that we may really be able to live in each other’s hearts and minds — perhaps forever. (Rosemary Haskell)

SATURDAY AM UPDATE: Warner Bros/MRC’s Wuthering Heights is heading to an $80M opening around the globe. On the foreign side with an expected $40M in 79 territories, that’s slightly ahead of the likes-for-likes start of The Housemaid‘s ($34.8M) in its first foreign weekends. Some rivals believe the Emerald Fennell-directed take of the Emily Brontë novel will fall into the mid $30M range at the end of four days stateside, but the see-saw between domestic and foreign is expected to land at $80M, which is the same exact price that Warners won the Margot Robbie-Jacob Elordi package for over Netflix. Last night was $11M (including $3M previews). Warners sees a path to $40M in four days. The question in North America remains walk-up business and an expansion of the audience as 55% of the audience bought their tickets in advance. Also, men only gave the pic a 39% definite recommend next to 54% women. (Anthony D'Alessandro)

Alex Ritman: Had you read the book already?

C.M.: I had not read the book. I probably should’ve. I got a copy of it but I think I started the first page and my eyes started to swim. But it’s Emerald’s version of “Wuthering Heights.”

A.R.: Have you read it now?

C.M.: Ha! No. But when I was auditioning I did try to watch some of the other on-screen versions!

The Wrap lists all the songs in the film. 

P. Claire Dodspn: What did Emerald Fennell tell you about how each of your characters is supposed to be when they're a young teenager?

Charlotte Mellington: Cathy's so sassy. She bosses everyone around, she owns the place. Because her dad i

Owen Cooper: I think Emerald just mostly said, "Look vulnerable." And there was a scene where I meet Cathy's dad for the first time, and it's got the two maids there, and then Cathy (Charlotte) grabs my hand, and we'd run. **~~into the thing.**I always remember Emerald saying, "These people could be doing anything to you. They could be planning to kill you. You don't know." Because [my character doesn't] really know how to speak, read, write anything then, I was just new to it all. I thought it was a bit weird to act at first, and then Emerald—being an amazing director—she just helped me through it.

CM: Also in that scene, to you, I'm this psychotic child. I'm like, "Ugh, can I dress him up?" He's like, "What the hell? Who is this kid?" I'm quite frightening, honestly, in that. I would be frightened anyway, because it seemed really weird. (...)

P. Claire Dodspn: : The ending scene: We come back to Heathcliff and Cathy as kids again. What did that feel like to have it end right where we began?

CM: I think it tries to keep the innocence of their love. They do love each other. All these things have happened, and they're trying to get revenge, and it's all quite messy. But when you strip it down, they do love each other. I think that reminds you of the innocence and how they were.

But I soon found much to enjoy, not least the sheer confidence of Fennell’s exuberant, uninhibited film-making.

It may be Robbie (who Fennell starred with in Barbie) and Jacob Elordi (who was in Saltburn and here plays the glowering Heathcliff) who take centre stage, but do look out for Martin Clunes being rather marvellous as Cathy’s mercurial, hard-drinking father and Shazad Latif, who brings a dignity and indeed libido to the often rather wet role of Edgar, the poor man Cathy marries.

Libido? Yes, there is quite a lot of sex in Fennell’s version, as you may possibly have heard, one or two moments of which might actually frighten the horses.

But this is a 21st-century woman’s reworking of a 19th-century woman’s novel, and if romping in the heather is not quite your cup of tea, there’s always the costumes and production design to admire, which, from the fateful wedding onwards, are magnificent, albeit in the same over-the-top style as the rest of this fabulously fearless but slightly bonkers production. (Matthew Bond)

Visually, Fennell was equally ambitious. The cinematography features some of the most visually pleasing shots I’ve seen in a while, including sweeping landscapes, perfectly detailed interiors, and stylized compositions that lean into the story’s 'fever-dream' quality, as described by Fennell herself. She embraces color and texture, creating a mystical world for the film that feels almost surreal at times. [...]

Ultimately, Robbie and Elordi proved their acting skills once again, even if the movie itself wasn’t for everybody.

The new Wuthering Heights may not replace the novel in Brontë fans' heart, but as a bold reimagining, it delivers. (Kathleen O'Boyle)

Obviously, I loved it.

Forget about the source material, which, if we're being brutally honest here, wasn't the lightest read of junior year English class. Heavy on the incest, unbridled violence and generational trauma, "Wuthering Heights" was the only novel written by Emily Brontë, who died a year after it was published. The text was inordinately cruel for its time, particularly coming from a female writer. [...]

Damned if you do, derided if you don't. The "Wuthering Heights" purists need to unknot their knickerbockers and give writer-director Emerald Fennell a break. She takes her scissors to the storyline and cuts out characters and plot points (and maybe an entire half of the book, who's counting). What could be called an unadaptable novel finally gets a big-screen rendition with balls.

Naturally, it took a woman to give it to us this good.

"Wuthering Heights" is a loosey-goosey reinvention of Brontë's work, simplifying the otherwise complicated relationships and convoluted societal undercurrents to bring modern audiences a taste of the original with a sumptuous, spellbinding twist. [...]

Maybe this film was made for us, by one of us. It doesn't need to make perfect sense by every viewer if it makes those of us willing to give it a chance feel something more. (Candice McMillan)

‘Wuthering Heights’ Is Delightfully Perverted. (...)

None of that matters when you’re watching this campy bonbon unfold, transfixed by the pure chemistry of the star-crossed lovers that Fennell has framed so freakily. Sure, it’s bright, and so visually exquisite that the plot occasionally collapses under its own weight, like an overfrosted wedding cake. Half the frames look like a cover from a ’90s romance paperback, but who, exactly, doesn’t want to gaze upon the moving version of that?

By the end of the movie, everyone around me was openly sobbing, some clutching their chests. I had to ask a group of professionals—four girls, who were all actors and around 19—what they thought of what we’d just seen. “I don’t have words, really,” said one. “The colors!” said another, “The red. The white. The green!” “The green!” the others concurred. The green, indeed. (Suzy Weiss)

A gut-punch exploration of love gone feral, it feels oddly relevant at a time when there seems to be no end to the stories involving crimes of passion.

Fennell chooses to focus on the erotic undercurrents and psychological torment. (...) This results in a taut runtime that not only feels propulsive but also avoids the drag of some prior versions. However, if you have read the novel more than once, you may balk and bristle at the liberties taken: characters having been combined, timelines shuffled, and key events reimagined for shock value. Fennell takes a subversive detour, declaring her intent to play by her own rules. All this makes the film less an adaptation and more a fever-dream reinterpretation. (Nawaid Anjum)

KGET:

The simple act of stating that the new film “Wuthering Heights” is “based” on the classic Emily Brontë novel gives those involved immunity from the criminal way the story has been adapted. Gone is all the textured structure of love and revenge that Brontë beautifully crafted. What’s left in its place is a barbaric and sadistic tale of lust and sex that replaces the original romance. (...)

Fennell makes a last-minute effort to pull the film back to being a romance with the last moments between Cathy and Heathcliff. Instead of that being a heart-touching moment there is nothing but a joy the film has mercifully ended.

It is painful when someone writes an original script and it becomes a horrible movie. That’s bad but it is a superficial kind of pain because the production will be quickly forgotten. There is some leeway because there was an effort to be original.

The crime is taking a masterpiece of literature – while hiding behind the plausible deniability the movie is only based on the original – and making a product that goes beyond bad to insulting. Fennell’s version of “Wuthering Heights” is criminally insulting. (Rick Bentley)

The dialogue of the film is simplistic. Whilst obviously, people speak the way they do in classic literature novels (formal, lots of big words to mean a few short ones), it’s as if the writers looked for excuses to say undertones out loud, to literally connect the dots for us. It came across as patronising and dryly humorous, though I still can’t tell if this was the intention. 

It’s a fashion movie that tries so hard to be revolutionary, sexually taboo, and arousing. But it never hits the spot. It brings a whole new meaning to the word anti-climax. It’s made for Pinterest, in the idea that someone who pays for Letterboxd is going to make a poster of it that makes it look so much cooler than it actually is. It’s visually stunning and (aims for) sexy, but that’s all it is. (Jess Urquhart)

Well, as they say, the third time’s the charm. Maybe now people will finally see Fennell as she truly is: not a whip-smart auteur, but a professional ragebaiter. (Serena Smith)