Some say that theater is dead, and that’s probably because most playhouses the world
over are closed at the moment owing to a worldwide pandemic. And yet the musical lives on…
on Disney plus -- as the nation has been rapt with a filmed version of the Broadway smash
hit, Hamilton But this show wouldn’t have even been a
twinkle in Broadway’s eyes if it weren’t for the fact that composer/lyricist/human
embodiment of theater kid energy Lin-Manuel Miranda hadn’t stumbled upon a copy of the
biography he used as the basis for the show--Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton.
Hamilton, the musical, is not based on the life of this guy, it is based on this book.
Though it seems an unlikely topic for a musical, Miranda had this to say about the process
of adapting it in a conversation with legendary broadway composer Stephen Sondheim:
“Well, that leads me to a really good bit of advice you gave me early when I was writing
"Hamilton." I was drowning in research. And what you told me was, "Just write the parts
you think are a musical." And that forms its own spine.”
And it had us come to the realization that a lot of the bread and butter of musical theater
is built off of books! And so, like every television program that
starts looking for new ideas, it has finally come to this: The It’s Lit! Musical episode
Why do people like Musicals?
At its best, a musical uses all its mediums to maximum effect - writing, dialogue, singing,
dancing, lighting, and so on. It knows when to use a song, and when to pull back. It knows
when to go ham on the acting, and when to not do that.
But since you have to be a master of so many schools, it could be argued that’s why musicals
are so difficult to pull off, and are so often cheesy and hamfisted rather than packing the
emotional punch they’re going for. You could argue that it hits you in the fee fees in
a more quick and potent way, so a good book adaptation will distill the novel’s emotional
core, and turn it… into song! A successful musical will find the emotional
core of the story, and use music to express that emotional core. Kidnapping a young soprano
through the means of deception and hypnotizing--MAKE IT A ROMANTIC SONG.
According to New Yorker staff writer Adam Gopnik on “Les Misérables”: “...the
real absence from novel to musical is rooted in the DNA of the musical theatre, which welcomes
big emotions but not always to complicated or ambivalent ones.”
While the rent-bemoaning, gravity defying musicals of today seem like the product of
a relatively young artform, musical theater comes from a long tradition of storytelling
that has its roots in opera (where plot and dialogue are moved primarily through sung
music) and operetta (more dialogue driven and lighter/usually comedic in tone)
But even some of the most popular operas were adapted from books, such as Puccini’s La
Bohème and Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor Not to mention the scores of opera based on
Shakespearean works, like Verdi’s Otello, Gounod’s Romeo and Juliet… you get the
idea. Flash forward to the 1920s, when the vaudeville,
vignette-style of musical theatre was in vogue and the songs rarely moved the plot forward
and were more showcases for dancing/singing. In comes Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein
II’s 1927 musical, Showboat, based on Edna Ferber’s 1926 novel of the same title. Record
fast turnover there. Here, songs like “Ol’ Man River” and
“Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man”, drove the story forward, discussing complex themes
of tragic love and racial prejudice, and without the promise of just being popcorn entertainment.
From there, the “book musical”--ie, a musical play where songs and dancing are integrated
fully into a story with emotional and dramatic goals--exploded into popularity.
And it is from this era that we get many classics of the genre adapted from books
However it’s starting in the 1980s, we really
start seeing shows veer into THING YOU’VE HEARD OF: THE MUSICAL! Territory, where musicals
are not just based on books, but that adaptation is a selling bad, musicals based on books
continue to be big business -- Even Love Never Dies, the famous disaster sequel to Phantom
of the Opera is based on a book. Oh yeah. It’s called The Phantom of Manhattan and
it was written by acclaimed mystery writer Frederick Forsythe.
Also, shout out to Lestat the Musical, based on Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles and yes
I paid to see. Twice. Best $20 I ever spent. So despite the incredible popularity of musicals
based on books, it must needs be remarked that when we talk about musical theater and
its relationship to books, there is something of a lingering… snobbery.
In his 1936 essay ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’, Walter
Benjamin claimed that every original work of art has an aura of authenticity that is
gradually stripped away by the processes of copying and reproduction.
Film scholar and… my advanced project professor at NYU Robert Stam has argued, literature
will always have "axiomatic superiority" over other forms of adaptation because of its seniority
as an art form. This hierarchy also has something to do with what he calls "iconophobia" (the
suspicion of the visual) and the concomitant "logophilia" (the love of the word as sacred).
From this perspective, adaptations are, by definition, "belated, middlebrow, or culturally
inferior.” However, other scholars have argued that there
is a middle ground or a place for adaptation in other forms of media. In her essay “On
the Art of Adaptation”, professor and literary theorist Linda Hutcheon, says:
“While no medium is inherently good at doing one thing and not another, each medium (like
each genre) has different means of expression and so can aim at certain things better than
others. [...] if the artist has a paintbrush, his or her vision of the same landscape will
emerge as masses instead. A poet, by the same analogy, will be attracted to representing
different aspects of a story than the creator of a musical spectacular”
If we did an in-depth analysis of this topic with a lot of different musicals, this episode
would be as long as, well, Les Miz --but this is PBS, it’s a nonprofit we don’t have
that kind of budget So let’s look at some musical adaptations
that turned into big hits - what did they change, and what did they keep?
Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel Wicked makes for a great example of how adaptation can
completely change the tone of the original source material while still retaining the
plot elements that made it compelling. Based on L. Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz books, Wicked
is told from the point-of-view of the Wicked Witch of the West, or as she is referred to
in his novel, Elphaba Thropp. While the musical is a bubbly, high-energy pop pastiche about
her backstory, the novel is way more nihilistic, detached, and much more concerned with the
racial subtext of Oz and Elphaba’s fight against injustice.
Stephen Schwartz’s musical adaptation takes that and completely changes the tone - recasting
Elphaba and Galinda, the Good Witch of the North, as two young women exploring how their
friendship changes as they grow up together. Wicked smartly understood that while the source
material was compelling, what people want in a musical is slightly queer coded femme
stories between a dark haired woman and a blonde with songs about being a magical #girlboss.
Which is to say that it is basically a Disney musical complete with an “I Want Song”
a “Power Ballad,” tacked on unnecessary hetero love story, animal fun times and a
happy ending! That was not there in the novel. But where Wicked seems like an obvious pick
for a musical adaptation, what could seem less obvious than a musical based on the life
of the United States’ first treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton?
Well if the musical feels extremely biased towards Hamilton, a lot of that is because
Ron Chernow, who wrote the biography on which the musical is based, is extremely biased
towards Aelxander Hamilton. So while the show is about this one guy’s
life as written by Chernow, it’s expands on that by way of the theme “who lives who
dies who tells your story” - knowing and accepting that you can’t control how people
will frame your place in history after you’re gone
Miranda’s major change is focusing on the exploration of legacy as an emotional experience
rather than an intellectual/academic one Miranda worked closely with Chernow, to bring
in the multi-racial casting as a specific feature of the theatrical production--Miranda
says his intent was to tell a story "about America then, told by America now" -- using
different styles of music and dance, specifically hip hop, in a way that you can’t do with
a book. According to Miranda - “we want to eliminate
any distance — our story should look the way our country looks. Then we found the best
people to embody these parts. I think it’s a very powerful statement without having to
be a statement.”
But if we’re going by sheer ambition vs execution, perhaps the biggest success story
is Boublil and Schonberg’s 1985 musical, Les Misérables. Or as we call it in the theater
kid community - Les Miz
According to the Oxford Handbook of the British Musical, a thing that exists: “The novel’s
spiritual and sentimental tones necessarily become simpler and more forceful in a sung-through
musical that is played out on a theatrical stage. The musical echoes Hugo but understands
that his narrative range and depth could not be merely recited if it were to succeed as
a modern opera…
Based on Victor Hugo’s book of the same name which is approximately 60000 pages
long - how does one distill the emotional core of this book, and render it in song?
1. The revolutionary subplot 2. Jean Valjean’s personal journey
3. Young Love™
What is telling is what is cut out - the book is very concerned with French history, the
musical, less so. There is a huge chunk in the second half of the novel that goes back
to the battle of Waterloo, explains that history for a few hundred pages
In the musical, it gets a passing mention - Thenardier “picking through the pockets
of the English dead” - but that’s not the focus. The show keys in on the big emotions,
both macro--the political movement embodied with songs like “do you hear the people
sing”-- and the micro, the personal emotional journeys of the characters
To again cite that Oxford musical handbook: “Whether personal taste accommodates the
megamusical genre or not, the fact remains that Les Misérables has become the foremost
example of this musical form by successfully intensifying the original novel’s melodrama.”
And of course it would not be an episode I co-wrote without a mention of our sadboi,
our favorite trashcan, the phantom of the opera.
Andrew Lloyd Webber claims that a chance finding of Gaston Leroux’s 1910 novel was the thing
that inspired what would become the most successful broadway musical in history
This novel has everything -- kidnapping, extortion, a fallen chandelier, a torture chamber in
the guest bedroom The musical cuts that out.
But although he saw incredible potential there, since the novel was originally serialized,
it was also kind of all over the place. Said Lloyd Webber, “The Gaston Leroux [novel]
is a very confused confection – sometimes a faux history story, then sporting a touch
of George du Maurier’s novel, Trilby, next a horror story, then it’s French detective
time, now and then it’s spiced with Beauty and the Beast with a dash of satanic Paganini.”
Also, the Phantom’s name has GOT to go--in the very first treatment Lloyd Webber wrote
for the musical, he notes “also in the novel he’s called Erik! no way — “Erik!”
The Musical, bad title” So what does Lord Andy horn in on in this
somewhat tonally inconsistent novel with an underwhelming name for the lead? Simple - it’s
a tragic romance about unrequited love The novel has the seeds of this story of unrequited
love among many other things, but Lloyd Webber decided that should be the primary focus
So the musical makes the Phantom, in Lord Andy’s words “no monster” but “a handsome
hunk.” Michael Crawford, sex adonis. he has this hypnotic power and christine is drawn
to his musical genius Lloyd Webber also took elements that happened
offscreen or were teased in the novel, and turned it up to 11 for maximum musical melodrama
Again, Lord Andy: “Here was the plot I could fashion into the high romance I had been longing
to write. [...]. The Phantom has composed his own passionate opera for Christine to
perform. Come its performance, the Phantom acts out his wildest fantasy by taking the
lead opposite her himself. Christine publicly shames him by unmasking him in front of the
entire opera house.[..]And when did Christine give the Phantom back the ring? It’s not
in Leroux’s novel.” So while Erik (the Phantom) was always a tragic/sympathetic
character, the major change here is making him relatable. Arguably the audience is meant
to relate more to the phantom than to anyone else in the show.
In revisiting his opinion of Les Misérables 25-years after the show opened , The Guardian
theatre critic Michael Billington, who originally trashed the show, had this to say in retrospect:
What I find intriguing is that we think we live in a very cool, smart, cynical age. Yet,
when the chips are down, what we really crave is a contest of good and evil, and lashings
of spectacle.”
It is easy to be down on a musical adaption of a book, just in the same way it’s easy
to be down on a film adaptation. But literary and media studies have been making a case
for the power and art form of musical adaptation for years.
As Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times theatre critic Brooks Atkison put it: ”As an art
form, the musical stage is entitled to serious consideration.[...] By the richness of its
medium, which blends music, dance,verse, costume, scenery and orchestra, the musical drama makes
complete use of the theater. It is the one element left in a form of literature that
was all poetry originally.”
So while it is sad that broadway has been dark for the longest time in its history
If the success of Hamilton on Disney tells us anything,
The love is still there.
and the Lightning Thief? Good and is still there.