The Creation of a New Musical - Part 3: Preproduction: The Writi

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

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