The perils of adapting plays to musicals
The perils of adapting plays into musicals
Watchingthe Tommy Owens character singing God Save Ireland in the Abbey production of Shadow Of A Gunman set me wondering how the play might go as a musical. Musicals are monstrously expensive to produce yet one O’Casey play, Juno & The
Paycock, has already been turned into a musical though it has struggled to survive.
It was first performed on Broadway in 1959 as Juno, originally titled Daarlin’ Man, with Jack McGowran as Joxer. O’Casey himself approved of the adaptation and of the music, which was composed by the distinguished composer Marc Blitzstein. American theatre writer Ken Mandelbaum, in his book Not
Since Carrie, lavished praise on the score, calling it ‘the greatest ever heard in a post-war flop’. It was well cast but it went through three directors, got poor reviews and lasted just 16 performances, which in Broadway terms is disastrous.
It seems the relentless gloom of the story didn’t appeal to audiences. It was twice revived in the Seventies, as Daarlin’ Juno, with Milo O’Shea and Geraldine Fitzgerald, but it still never caught on. In 2008, Druid’s Garry Hynes directed a performance in New York to one rapturous review and one very mixed one from The New York Times.
Considering the financial risk of mounting musicals, how much would you be willing to invest in a musical adapted from a Shakespeare tragedy, that contains a song called He Got It In The Ear?
The show was Rockabye Hamlet by Canadian composer Cliff Jones. Rock fans loved it in out-of-town locations but it was panned by the critics when it reached Broadway in 1976, with Meatloaf cast as the priest; it ran for just seven performances. He Got It In The Ear refers to Hamlet’s father having poison poured in his ear.
The Broadway production was gigantic, staged like a rock concert, with plenty of scenic gadgetry and actors holding hand-held mikes. The fair Ophelia didn’t die gently by falling ‘in the weeping brook’. She committed suicide by using the cord on her hand mike to strangle herself. Polonius’s advice to his son Laertes included the lines: ‘Good son, you return to France/ Keep your divinity inside your pants.’
One reviewer called it ‘ flashy and trashy’, adding that ‘the costumes looked as if they were ransacked from Sonny and Cher’s wardrobe.’
But the writer didn’t give up and a revised version in 1981, renamed
Something’s Rockin’ In Denmark, ran for a year in Los Angeles.
Jones was so incensed by what the critics wrote about Rockabye
Hamlet that he considered taking a $5m dollar lawsuit against the New York Times critic for what he called ‘personally libellous statements’.
He might have been better taking the great singer Kathleen Ferrier’s approach to criticism.
Desmond Shawe-Taylor in The New Statesman once referred to her as ‘that goitrous singer with a contralto hoot’. But Ferrier was not one to wilt and weep. She just called Shawe-Taylor and his friend ‘a couple of dried-up, inhibited fairies’. That sort of gutsy give-and-take would, unfortunately, have both of them up before the law nowadays.
Adapting plays and books is always a risk. Possibly the riskiest book adaptation ever was the Rodgers & Hart 1928 musical comedy Chee Chee, about a young married man in ancient China who has to undergo castration to become the Grand Eunuch.
Rodgers added a musical joke of his own to it. As the young man was marched off for the operation, his music included an excerpt from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker ballet. But not many people got the joke and the show ran for just 31 performances. All things considered, maybe Shadow Of A Gunman is a safer bet as it is. The Shadow Of A Gunman
‘Juno was the greatest score ever heard in a post-war flop’