The March sisters gather around as Jo March weaves one of her melodramatic tales for them in the Lyceum theater production of "Little Women: The Musical." From left, Vanessa Claire Smith as Beth, Mallory Hawks as Jo, Amy Schwarz as Meg and Courtney Elise Brown as Amy. (Contributed photo) [Click to enlarge]

The seats at the Lyceum Theatre are not lonely these days.

Back-to-back shows of old favorites have kept the box office plenty busy. And the opening matinée of "Little Women: The Musical" even exceeded the opening of the previous show, "Arsenic and Old Lace," which had been one of the best in memory.

Every seat was sold Saturday, Aug. 23, according to Artistic Director Quin Gresham, as fans crowded in to renew their acquaintance with the March sisters, who this time get to tell their story in song.

Any production of "Little Women" has a lot of history to live up to.

In addition to the classic novel by Louisa May Alcott, there are three film versions with illustrious casts, including Katharine Hepburn (1933), Elizabeth Taylor, June Allyson and Janet Leigh (1949), Winona Ryder and Susan Sarandon (1994), each with Oscar nominations and awards to its credit.

For the uninitiated, like me, the Lyceum production succeeds more than it fails in living up to the story's legacy.

Mallory Hawks rules the stage as Jo March. Although the original story was about the March sisters as they come of age, the musical version is clearly driven by Jo's singular personality.

Hawks does a fine job expressing Jo's complex character, which ranges from self-centered extremes of ambition, petulance and pride to exuberant creativity, independence, eventual humility and tenderness.

Some of the most delightful and illuminating scenes occur when Jo is telling -- and acting out -- one of her stories, with actors visible behind a screen portraying the scene she's describing, her characters matching her gestures in a kind of narrative dance that eventually spills out onto the main stage.

Through much of the play, Jo's stories are rambunctious and romantic -- swashbuckling "blood and guts" as she calls them -- but her final literary achievement, a novel inspired by her relationships with her sisters and her growing understanding of how they help make her who she is. And it's the contrast between the two literary styles, the first boisterously enacted, the second only implied, that illustrates Jo's growth over the course of the story.

Her progress from impetuous teen to more seasoned and thoughtful woman is compressed, though, by the time available in a play, and it may seem to lurch a bit for fans of Alcott's novel. It's the curse of the cross-over that few works of this type entirely escape (ask me sometime about Peter Jackson's "Lord of the Rings" film trilogy).

A great deal of the original story is inevitably left out or given only glancing treatment when novels appear on stage or in film, so it's only fair to be as forgiving as possible and understand that switching media involves trade-offs.

Still, writers have to make good decision about what to keep and what to leave. And that is the main flaw in the show: It's inefficient. Most of the songs consume precious time without significantly contributing to the story that already has too little time to be fully told.

The songs are fine in themselves, and are delivered with great feeling by the talented cast. Several of them -- especially "Operatic Tragedy," "Our Finest Dreams," "Take a Chance on Me" and "Off to Massachusetts" -- are quite fun and seemed to contribute more to the portrayal of Jo's character and her relationship with her sisters. "Off to Massachusetts" is the exception there, but it is also the most authentic-sounding song, one we can believe would have been sung at the piano in the late 19th Century.

The more modern sound of the other songs wasn't a problem for me, mainly because while the musical version makes clear that the time frame of the action is during and just after the Civil War, the period did not strike me as being as essential to the story on stage as it might have been to the book.

But several other songs, especially two sun by Marmee, "Here Alone" and "Days of Plenty," are a bit too maudlin, with lyrics verging on trite. "The nights seem so much longer / now that I am here alone." Well, yeah. I can see that. If there was time to spare, bringing a mother's cares into contrast with her headstrong daughter's ambitions could be touching. I just don't think we need to take a time out from the story of the sisters to hear the mother's lament.

It's just not her story.

It is Jo's, and Hawk brings Jo alive so well that the inefficiency effect of some of the music is only a minor irritation. The opening performance earned a standing ovation, which began the moment Hawk arrived on stage to take her bow, and that seemed appropriate to me, given that she brought her character to life so well.

Contact Eric Crump at marshalleditor@socket.net