Preproduction: the period of time during which work is done on a show prior to the first rehearsal.
If you dig deep into the inner recesses of your brain, you may be able to come up with a handful of "original" musicals, meaning those that were not adapted from another source. Chances are, though, that as you're digging you'll come up with many more shows that were derived from other media. Consider most musicals and you'll find a preponderance of this second category. For instance:
Showboat was based on a novel by Edna Ferber. South Pacific was based on James Michener's Tales of the South Pacific, Les Miserables on the Victor Hugo novel. Randy Courts and Mark St. Germain's Gifts of the Magi was based on, not one, but two O. Henry short stories, and Into the Woods was a freeform retelling of a number of well-known fairy tales. Rodgers and Hammerstein's Carousel came from Ferenc Molnar's play, Liliom and Marc Blitzstein's theatre-opera Regina was culled from Lillian Hellman's play The Little Foxes. While they may have come from a number of source materials, the musicals Evita, Fiorello!, and Teddy and Alice (as well as this author's Chamberlain) were based on the life stories of their title characters. The unsuccessfully premiered but regionally and internationally very successful Fame and Arthur were based on films of the same names, as were Sunset Boulevard and Victor/Victoria. Hell, even Cats was based on poems of T. S. Eliot. And every musical with "Phantom" in the title was based on a book by Gaston Leroux.
Although the actual method of derivation may vary in degrees, you'll find that the source material is most often subject to transformation in one of two ways: a free, creative, "loose" adaptation, or a strict, "literal" translation.
Take My Fair Lady as an example of the latter. Hold George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion side by side with the script for Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe's My Fair Lady and you'll find more than a few similarities -- until you get to the very end of the musical's script which was changed to give the contemporary audiences a better high to leave the theatre with. But other than the ending, you'll find that not only are they the same in form and structure, but that for much of the time the dialog is exactly the same. And in places where dialog in the original was replaced with songs, you'll see that many of the lyrics are taken directly from Shaw's original lines. Now, this may have been a response to Shaw's loathing to give the rights of his plays to writers of musicals (he'd had a bad experience early on), or it may just have been the adaptors genius in recognizing that the very best route was a near slavish faithfulness to their source. Whatever lead to their decision , the show went on to become one of the most successful musicals of all time.
West Side Story epitomizes the idea of the "loose" adaptation. Although the musical -- with book by Arthur Laurents, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, music by Leonard Bernstein, and conception and direction by Jerome Robbins -- is known to be based on Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, you'll find no reference to the Montagues or the Capulets in its script. The musical moves the setting centuries into the future and across the ocean, replaces the original's feuding families with rival street gangs of different ethnic backgrounds (necessitating a swap of sabres and foils with switchblades and zip-guns), and merges, melds, and mixes the characters to suit its needs. There are some structural similarities. For instance, the musical does have a "Balcony" scene, but it takes place at a different point in the piece with an entirely different set of undertones, and the important deaths occur at the end of each (awh, have I spoiled it for you?) -- except that in the musical the ingenue gets to walk away (not necessarily unscathed). The musical's lack of conspicuous fidelity to its source did not prevent it, too, from becoming a huge success.
And, of course, neither of the original works had half as much singing and dancing.
Originally published at Suite101.com Theatre, 2/18/97
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