Chicago Tribune - Recommended
"...The score, like the rest of the ballet, feels like a cohesive snapshot of the Victorian era made for 2019, a macabre manifestation of a beloved story that plunges unabashedly into dissonance as the mysteries of this time-honored tale unfolds."
Chicago Sun Times - Highly Recommended
"...If Charlotte Bronte's "Jane Eyre" shuns fairy-tale magic and a glass-slipper ending, the Joffrey's production deserves much credit for being another kind of magic entirely. English choreographer and director Cathy Marston has envisioned a singularly haunting piece of dance theater that celebrates a young heroine's quest to inhabit a brutally tough world on her own terms, using a vocabulary of movement artfully created for the task."
Stage and Cinema - Recommended
"...Joffrey Ballet’s Chicago premiere of Cathy Marston’s literally moving 130-minute version reaffirms a once and future fictional breakthrough: Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 mistresspiece (strangely the original author is never mentioned in the credits) delivers a role model for today. Indeed, this vision of Brontë’s work is more faithful to the future than to the 172-year-old novel."
Around The Town Chicago - Highly Recommended
"...Marston’s production deserves much credit in its haunting, intense portrayal of a young orphaned girl from pitiful circumstances desperately trying to create a life for herself in an often harsh and brutal world. She shies away from “fairy-tale magic” and high-tech gimmicks in favor of another kind of magic, that of creating dance movements based on words and quotes derived directly from the novel. Marston’s visionary approach to this work means that every movement on stage has a very specific meaning or intent, allowing the dance and the dancers themselves to physically tell Jane’s harrowing tale."
WTTW - Highly Recommended
"...Throughout, Assucena’s dancing is sweeping and flawless, including when she is haunted by memories of being bullied by a group of men in creamy topcoats who torment her and toss her from one to the other with terrifying force until she finally learns to fight back. But it is the easy radiance and complexity of Assucena’s inner life, and the most natural ways in which she embodies Jane’s growth and change and ever-shifting confidence, anguish and confusion, that make the crucial difference. And she and Greig make a most interesting pair."
Third Coast Review - Recommended
"...This is a masterwork and it is set to a score by Phillip Feeney that breathes with the dancers and is like a film score evoking emotion, played live by the wonderful Chicago Philharmonic led by Scott Speck. This ballet is on all counts beautiful and approachable like a Masterpiece Theatre drama. It evokes the legacy of the great British choreography of Frederick Ashton and is a marvelous night in the theater of athleticism and grace. I do hope though, with the move to a new home, that we will soon see stories that speak to the brave new world we live in."
Chicago On Stage - Highly Recommended
"...For two extraordinary hours on Wednesday evening, the Joffrey Ballet’s Chicago Premiere of Cathy Marston’s Jane Eyre drew the audience to the edge of their seats to bear witness to ballet’s potential to strip the human experience down to its most visceral base elements."
Picture This Post - Highly Recommended
"...There is not an aspect of stagecraft that seems less than brilliant. A large curtain with crisscrossing lines greets as you walk in. It later becomes the Thornfield countryside that Rochester traverses to make his galloping entrance. And, as the story unfolds, this curtain's pattern also becomes a muted echo of the dancers' poses. The changing lighting accentuates all these effects(Lighting Design: Brad Fields)."