On Adaptation

What does it take to make a musical? How do we approach making art out of other art?

It’s been entirely too long since I posted here, and for that I’m sorry; the book has been taking up too much of my time. Readers might be interested in a piece I wrote last month for Commonweal about the very weird “He Gets Us” Super Bowl ad.

But I wanted to write again because a couple of weeks ago I saw perhaps the worst piece of musical theatre that I’ve ever sat through live. Real fans know about the illegal Christian production of Hamilton, and Diana: The Musical on Netflix was a couple hours of my life that I’ll never get back. But it’s been relatively rare for me to leave a live theatrical production incensed and insulted rather than merely disappointed; usually there’s at least some element of humanity or visible effort that redeems it for me. Last night was not one of those occasions, because last night, thanks to a free ticket from a friend, I was in the theatre for the entire runtime of the musical adaptation of Mrs. Doubtfire.

Mrs. Doubtfire is an interesting movie to talk about because, on the one hand, it absolutely would not be made today for extremely good reasons and, on the other hand, it’s one of the better showcases for the absolutely world-historic comic improvisational talent of Robin Williams. The movie has a number of narrative weaknesses: the protagonist Daniel is basically only likable in Williams’s hands, because he plainly doesn’t consider his wife’s requests reasonable. Meanwhile, Daniel’s wife Miranda only manages to be sympathetic because of the talents of Sally Fields: for a lesser actress, the script would be far too stacked in Daniel’s favor to allow her to be human. The movie works in the end, but it’s held together far more by the talent of its cast (including a superb Harvey Fierstein in a short but excellent montage scene) than by its writing.

And for these reasons, it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever that somebody thought adapting this for a stage musical was a good idea! How do you watch a movie like that and think “oh yeah there’s a good musical in this”? You can’t; I refuse to believe that anyone did. And the proof of this is in the way they adapted it: they made light edits to the script but kept it essentially identical, with some nods to modernity because it isn’t 1993 anymore. In no sensible universe is this a good formula for writing a musical. The tried-and-true formula for musicals goes like this: you talk, and when the emotion becomes too big for talking you sing, and when it becomes too big for singing you dance. There are variations to this, of course, but it remains sound as a basic principle. This demands a certain shape to the script, a requisite buildup of emotional tension that finds its outlet in the musical portion of the drama. A film script is just not shaped the same way; you need to be able to make some pretty strong changes to the dialogue, the pacing, and probably the entire plot if you want to make a decent musical out of it. Most good shows are adapted from little-known or less successful properties, like Hello, Dolly! being taken from Thornton Wilder’s The Matchmaker or A Little Night Music being adapted from Ingmar Bergman’s only comedy, Three Smiles of a Summer Night. You want something that people aren’t super attached to so that you have the freedom to play with it and mold it into the right shape for a piece of musical theatre.

This is about five times as true for opera, by the way. A while ago there was an operatic adaptation of Tony Kushner’s gigantic seven-hour magnum opus, Angels in America, by the Hungarian composer Peter Eötvös (who passed away just a few days ago). Personally, I think Kushner is basically unadaptable: his plays are logomanic feasts, their speeches and dialogues so dense that you feel you could slice off pieces to serve with fruit and port. Speech is much faster than singing, and musical theatrical singing is faster than operatic singing, and it just isn’t possible for that play’s interplay of registers—snappy contrapuntal New York conversation, long mellow vowels from the Utah Mormons, Old Testament prophecy—to make the leap. What makes the play thrilling is, first, its intellectual scope and second, Kushner’s ear for the registers of language that accompany different ways of living. It is not necessarily impossible to translate this into a different medium, but it would take a world-historic musical genius who is also a powerful literary intellect, and I’m not sure that world-historic musical genius affords you the time to do much else.

The problem of adaptation is like the problem of translation, only more so. I’ve thought a lot about translation lately, having just finished R. F. Kuang’s wretched, overhyped mess of a novel Babel, which tries to use a magic system based on translation to talk about colonialism and devolves into adolescent didacticism and genuine historical slander. I’ll have more to say about that later, possibly in collaboration with my friend the excellent

Lyta Gold

, whose newsletter you should definitely read if you take fantasy and science fiction seriously. In any case, translation is easiest on unremarkable language: you probably aren’t losing anything from a quick-and-dirty translation of a business memo because there isn’t really anything to lose. Translating poetry or truly artful prose is much harder, to the point that “you can’t translate poetry” is a widespread and respectable opinion. I wouldn’t go that far, but I would say that, to the extent that a translation truly does justice to a poem, that translation increasingly becomes a work of art in its own right and becomes less legible as translation. Dryden’s Aeneid is sort of the paradigmatic example of this. Is it a faithful rendering of what Vergil wrote? Definitely not. Is it a phenomenal work in its own right? Absolutely. And the greater the original, the more the translation must depart from faithfulness in order to remain worthy of the source. The logical end of this view is that the greatest translators of Homer into English are not Chapman or Pope or Lattimore but Joyce and Ellison and Walcott. This is the kind of weird crank opinion held by an eccentric professor who publishes very little but teaches life-changing classes, which is to say that yes, I do kind of believe it, because even if it’s wrong it generates conversations worth having.

There’s something similar at work, I think, in Stephen Sondheim’s observation that first-rate poetry makes for poor lyrics. In a song the music and the lyrics complement one another, enhancing one another’s meaning so that the result is something greater than the sum of the two. First-rate poetry is so tied to its form, drawing so heavily on the resources of pure language, that there’s nothing that music could add; a composer could, in fact, do a lot of damage by being numb to prosody, which is not the same as musical rhythm. This is why there are so few good settings of Walt Whitman’s poetry and so many of A. E. Housman’s; Housman is just easier to wrap one’s head around, because he doesn’t marshal every resource of language the way Whitman does. Incidentally, one of the few composers who knows how to set Whitman is David Conte: you can hear his choral setting of part of “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” here under the title “Dance.” It isn’t Whitman and it isn’t trying to be Whitman; it’s drawing on Whitman, commenting on him, inviting the listener into his words and exploring what they can mean. The best commentary on art is other art, which is why the greatest commentator on Vergil is Dante, and conversely, there are commentaries that themselves rise to the level of art, which is what makes Eduard Fraenkel’s commentary on Aeschylus’s Agamemnon such a feast. All this is to say that all our thinking is both derivative and creative: we think alongside and after others, and as we rise to meet them, we become properly ourselves and make something properly our own. This is ultimately a theological point, and I’ll expand on that some other time.