I thought of a few of these on my head and went looking for a Wikipedia list to round it out. And then I remembered there are actually a lot of these. Musical theatre, even more than film and television, tends to be like a giant fanfiction, a collection of riffs on a particular preexisting theme. Nowadays the thing is to turn movies, originally musical or not, into stage musicals; I don’t inherently dislike this practice, good things can come of it, but some sort of silly things can come of it too. And silly isn’t bad. Silly is fine sometimes. Sometimes it’s not to my tastes personally, but it could be to someone else’s. Still, though, there’s a reason I freak out over truly original musicals: there really aren’t that many.
So tonight, I begin to discuss musicals based on the written word. In high school, when I fell in love with a musical and it was based in something written, I immediately set about acquiring the written, so I’m going to limit this list tonight to ones I have standing knowledge of. And most likely have personal experiences with.
5, 4. The Wild Party by Joseph Moncure March (musicals by Michael John LaChiusa and by Andrew Lippa)
I’ve discussed my Wild Party thing at length before, but not in these terms necessarily. I first got the Lippa album sophomore year because it had Idina Menzel and Taye Diggs on it, and I had been in a Rent phase for a year or more already. I’d decided I absolutely needed to acquire every obscure theatre album I could, and I’d heard “The Juggernaut” on Sirius satellite radio and swooned deeply. As I’ve before said, I fell in love with it; I then proceeded to check the poem out from the library. For my birthday that year, a dear friend of mine found the poem on the internet and purchased me my own copy, and because sophomore year was the year I routinely memorized things for fun (I wasn’t in any productions until the spring and didn’t yet have extraneous responsibilities to my school paper or a membership on the mock trial team, I needed a hobby) I spent a disproportionate amount of my spare time memorizing parts of the poem. It’s a long poem, the length of a small book, and the parts I did commit to memory were easily done; though all that remains is the couplet “the only one not on hand was Kate / she was Queenie’s red-headed running mate,” I did at one point have multiple limerick-type sections as well as the entire page and a half devoted to Kate’s entrance memorized. As I’ve said, the LaChiusa recording (which I got a few months later) is closer to the poem, dealing more with characters, though both have a reasonable amount of extrapolation. I can’t say how much this affects the plot, having not actually seen the show, but this also may have been my first successful attempt at appreciating source material and adaptation equally on different levels.
3. The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux (musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber)
The movie, as I’ve said, came out when I was a freshman in high school; I got my hands on the book a few months later. The above-mentioned friend and I read it around the same time and proceeded to be insufferable know-it-alls about it amongst our friends (we were those kinds of people, though harmlessly). Differences in plot were discussed frequently and with anyone (amongst our friends) who would listen; we regularly made reference to obscure details that weren’t in the musical, and though I’m not exactly proud of this, in more than one frustrating social situation did we turn to each other and then proclaim for the benefit of the others in earshot, “did you know that in the book of Phantom Christine tries to harm herself by repeatedly banging her head against a wall?” and then approximating said action ourselves. We and our social group as a whole were obsessed with Phantom, though the musical was always second (the book was darker, we liked darker), and I also committed to memory the phrase “il est ici, le fantôme de l’opéra!” (I spoke no proper French at the time, but I internet-translated that and liked to exclaim it at regular intervals.)
2. The Light in the Piazza by Elizabeth Spencer (musical by Craig Lucas and Adam Guettel)
Of all of these discussed tonight, this is the adaptation that would seem to be the closest. It’s a novella, so there was no need to condense plot or any such, really; it’s been years since I read it, so I don’t remember every detail. But Wikipedia just pointed out something to me, something that of course I knew, but I hadn’t really thought of in these terms: “it is also perhaps the only bilingual Broadway musical. Many of the lyrics are in Italian or broken English, as many of the characters are fluent only in Italian.” I think that, regardless of source material, this is one of the reasons the show is so special: it’s genuine. This show makes me feel quite a lot of feelings, as it were; I have never cried at it, but I’ve gotten fairly close to choked up, for sure. I remember the book being similarly affecting, so that’s something.
1. Wicked by Gregory Maguire (musical by Stephen Schwartz)
As I before discussed.
–your fangirl heroine.
partlydrawn 