Jane Austen , Emma , Repertory Theatre of St. Louis , Paul Gordon , musicals So much visual splendor provides an apt setting for the ebullience of Paul Gordon’s music and lyrics, which are readily accessible on a first hearing. In tune with the show’s rustic motif, a small chamber quartet (piano, oboe/English horn, cello, violin) perches in a sort of bird’s nest above the set. The orchestrations are graceful and civilized; lightness is the order of the evening.

In addition to composing the pleasant songs, Gordon also wrote the script. Here he has not been so successful. For in seeking to wedge so much of this tangled plot (about a rambunctious, egoistic young girl who ruins the lives of her friends for little reason other than that she has too much time on her hands) into a musical comedy book, the adaptor has made some dubious choices. For starters, Gordon’s libretto is too faithful to the novel.

In order to cram in so much exposition, we are restricted to snapshots rather than drawings of too many characters. For instance, on the page the insufferable Mrs. Elton (the minister’s pretentious wife) sucks the very air out of any scene in which she appears. Onstage, because she is relegated to the background, she is more of a nuisance than a termagant.

Then there is Miss Bates, surely one of Austen’s most memorable creations: a garrulous spinster, a dreary bore, yet lacking a single mean bone in her body. Emma’s unthinking public humiliation of Miss Bates should be a climactic, breath-stopping moment of piercing pain. Yet as written and staged here, this potentially pregnant moment is merely another incident in a checklist of incidents, to be gotten through as quickly as possible so that we can move on to the next dramatized incident.