lip top 10: musical adaptations
I confess – I love a good a musical. Actually, not just the good ones. I love them all, even the god awful Rocky Horror Picture Show sequel, Shock Treatment. I can’t sing and I can’t dance, yet all I want to do is be Liza Minelli belting my lungs out in Cabaret. So, I go to Plan B, which is see a musical and think about what a talentless hack I am, then go back and research what I’ve just seen. Fun fact: some of the most successful musicals were adaptations. Here are a few.
1. Wicked: The Untold Story of the Witches of Oz
Currently in its 10th year on Broadway, Wicked is based on the 1995 novel, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire. Maguire’s involvement with the production ended with him releasing the rights, and several plot points were omitted or changed. Not that I care. I saw it twice because ‘Defying Gravity’ at the end of the first act is so amazing it makes me want to cry.
2. Chicago
Chicago started as a play in 1926, became a silent film in 1927, was reinvented as the film Roxie Hart in 1942, debuted as a musical in 1975, then became the 2002 film we all know. The original play was written by Maurine Dallas Watkins, a reporter for the Chicago Tribune. She was assigned to cover the trials of Beulah Annan, who was accused of killing her lover, and Belva Gaertner, a cabaret singer who was also accused of killing her lover. Watkins’ coverage in the paper of the separate trials was so popular that she turned them into the play.
3. The Lion King
I’m sure you all know the film came before the musical with this one. Not going to lie, I was a little disappointed with the inclusion of new songs, and the altered lyrics in ‘Can You Feel the Love Tonight?’, but, holy balls, the costuming and ‘Circle of Life’ number certainly make up for it.
4. Cats
Cats was based on a poetry collection by T. S. Eliot, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. The poems are about feline psychology and sociology, and were published in 1939. Andrew Lloyd Webber said the collection was a favourite of his as a kid. Most of the songs are just the poems put to music. Reading about musicals being taken from the news, or novels does not surprise me, but a poetry collection? Honestly cannot say I picked this one.
5. Les Misérables
We all know this was based on Victor Hugo’s 1862 novel, but there was no way it could be excluded because it is AMAZING. The novel, not so much. It’s a whopping 1500 pages for starters – not so easy to hold up in bed, and more than a quarter of that is made up of moral essays that don’t really have anything to do with the plot. Normally when it comes to adaptations the original is the best, but this time the adaptation is a massive improvement.
6. The Phantom of the Opera
This is based on the novel by Gaston Leroux, Le Fantôme de l’Opéra, first published as a serial between 1909 and 1910. It then appeared as a film in both 1925 and 1945, before Andrew Lloyd Webber turned it into the longest running musical on Broadway (10,000 performances as of February last year). Worldwide, it is has taken over US$5.1 billion at the box office.
7. Rent
Rent is taken from the Puccini opera, La bohème. I had never made the connection before, but now that I have I feel pretty stupid. Rent, simplified, is about a group of artists living on New York’s Lower East Side. La bohème is about a group of bohemians living in the Latin Quarter in Paris in the 1840s. It seems pretty obvious now.
8. The Producers
The Producers started as film in 1968, written and directed by Mel Brooks. Brooks then wrote the lyrics and music for the production which opened in 2001. Here’s a fun fact; Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick play the same part in both the musical, and the 2005 film.
9. Miss Saigon
Puccini must be a pretty inspiring guy, because Miss Saigon is based on another of his opera’s, this time Madame Butterfly. It goes deeper though – Madame Butterfly is taken in part from an 1898 short story of the same name by John Luther Long, the 1887 novel Madame Chrysanthème by Pierre Loti, and allegedly also from events that occurred in Nagasaki in the 1890s. The opera premiered in 1904. Although the opera and the musical are pretty similar, there is one main difference, being the nationality switch of the Asian woman abandoned by her American lover. In the opera she is Japanese, but the musical changes the setting to the Vietnam War, thus changing the nationality of the woman.
10. Fiddler on the Roof
Fiddler on the Roof is based on the story Tevye and his Daughters by Sholem Aleichem, one story in a series about the same character. Fiddler on the Roof premiered in 1964 and was the first musical on Broadway to surpass 3000 performances.
