Abstract
Sharon Weltman's magnificent Victorians on Broadway identifies in twentieth-century musical theatre a long-running interest in nineteenth-century texts. The proposition is unexpected in several ways. Musicals have become an emblematic art form for the twentieth-century United States and were received from their inception as a purely commercial art: a light, even frothy amusement. The form delights in its own artifice, highlighted every time a speech turns into a song or a song into a dance. The popular image of Victorian culture, on the other hand, is aligned with realism, not to mention Britishness, seriousness, cultural authority, and even elitism. Scholars in both areas have long contested such stereotypes, but as this book shows, Broadway's Victorians have also done this kind of work for years.
The book offers detailed studies of One Touch of Venus (Kurt Weill, Ogden Nash, and S. J. Perelman; 1943); The King and I (Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein; 1951); Oliver! (Lionel Bart; 1960); Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler; 1979); The Mystery of Edwin Drood (Rupert Holmes; 1985); Goblin Market (Polly Pen and Peggy Harmon; 1985); Jekyll and Hyde (Frank Wildhorn and Leslie Bricusse; 1997); and Jane Eyre: The Musical (Paul Gordon and John Caird; 2000). These draw variously on nineteenth-century fiction, plays, poems, and memoirs, whose status runs the gamut from popular favourites to the off-beat and arcane. Most obviously, they draw on Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist and The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1838; unfinished 1870); Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847); Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1887); Christina Rossetti's poem Goblin Market (1859); F. Anstey's The Tinted Venus: A Farcical Romance (1885); Anna Leonowens’ The English Governess at the Siamese Court (1870); and The String of Pearls (1846-7), an anonymous serial variously attributed to Thomas Peckett Prest and James Malcolm Rymer, and adapted for the stage by George Dibdin Pitt.
In itself, this line-up takes us through some major developments in the history of the Broadway musical. One Touch was a kind of intermediate form between the musical comedies of the 1930s and the full sung-through musical, of which the first example is usually taken to be Oklahoma!, which arrived in the same year. Oliver! was the first British musical to be taken seriously on Broadway (and the most successful before Cats, in 1981). Sweeney Todd and Drood represent the heyday of the ‘concept musical’, in which theme became at least as important as story. And Jekyll and Hyde and Jane Eyre follow the rise of the ‘mega musical’, the union of a pop sound with expensive production and a melodramatic style.
This is a form in which many different ‘authors’ may collaborate – on the book, lyrics, music, and choreography, for a start. Victorians on Broadway reads all these aspects of the art and also comments at times on casting, costume, singing, and arrangement. It offers close readings of multiple forms, so that, for instance, it identifies the musical cues (klezmer rhythms and cantorial riffs) which encode Fagin's ethnicity in Oliver!, and the technical challenges (the very high and strong soprano) required to sing Blanche's part in Jane Eyre. As both historical and contemporary research, it offers the fruits of archive discoveries, performance analysis, and interviews with practitioners (Stephen Sondheim, Polly Pen, and Rowan Atkinson).
But that is only the beginning. Tracking the intertextual, transatlantic, and cross-period relationships implied in these musicals produces a bountiful critical harvest. The exercise reveals a great deal, not only about musical theatre and the texts it revisits, but also about adaptation, Neo-Victorianism, transnational imaginations, and such topics in cultural history as parlour singing, women's underwear, men's shaving tools, and panics about adulterated food. Marshalling all this is a feat in itself, but the book is also pitched to multiple potential audiences, generously explaining what is at stake in different disciplinary landscapes to, amongst others, Victorianists, adaptation theorists, and musical theatre buffs. It also highlights some unexpected aspects of the allocation of canonicity and cultural prestige. Take the anomalous status of musical theatre itself. Broadway musicals are expensive to mount and to see, but they were largely overlooked in academia until the early 2000s, dismissed as ‘middlebrow’ in a critical economy that, as Weltman points out, has close parallels with British theatre's historical divisions between legitimate and illegitimate genres. This book should put a full stop to all that: Weltman insists that musicals do significant cultural work, of which even students in other fields should be aware. It has long been understood that film has shaped popular and critical interpretations of the past; Weltman makes the case for musical theatre's parallel, but distinctive, record of translating the nineteenth century to other times and places.
Weltman's next major point, introduced via an interview with Stephen Sondheim, is how thoroughly and variously Dickens permeates the twentieth century's idea of the Victorian. Aside from the musicals directly derived from Dickens, most of the others owe their landscapes, characterisation, and tone to an idea of nineteenth-century Britain that traces back not only to the novels of Boz, but also to their contemporary illustrations and adaptations. (The major exception is The King and I.) So the author (or authors) of The String of Pearls wrote in self-proclaimed imitation of this famous contemporary, adopting the nom-de-plume, ‘Bos’. Similarly, the grimy streets and gloomy mood of Stevenson's Strange Case clearly owe a debt to Dickensian images of London. And Sondheim borrowed, for Sweeney Todd, a venal beadle from Oliver Twist, just as the musical Jane Eyre features a comic butler, who sounds less like a Brontë character than one from Pickwick.
This Dickensian profusion obviously has a bearing on adaptation studies. Musicals do get a mention in two of the field's formative books, Julie Sanders's Adaptation and Appropriation (1999) and Linda Hutcheon's A Theory of Adaptation (2006), but Victorians on Broadway demonstrates that they are at least as complex, as adaptive agents, as film, the genre in which adaptation studies has tended to be based. Weltman's examples amplify many of the contentions that adaptation studies have hitherto located in film, such as adaptations’ role in shaping and fixing canonicity; their multiple and indirect genealogies; and the convergence in any adaptation of tangled intertextual webs. For instance, Sondheim's idea of Dickens can be traced back through Lionel Bart's Oliver!; both Stevenson's Strange Case and Jekyll and Hyde carry traces of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray; One Touch recalls at one point The Importance of Being Earnest; and the hapless barber in The Tinted Venus recalls his demon forefather from The String of Pearls.
The adaptive process also pays dividends for literary critics, as musicals themselves offer readings of their nineteenth-century sources. In several places, Weltman argues that they identify an inherent ‘musical theatricality’, revealing why texts offered themselves for adaptation in the first place. Holmes’ Drood highlights the creepy and controlling attention involved in Jasper's piano accompaniment of Rosa's singing. Polly Pen remarks on the way Christina Rossetti's lines in Goblin Market could have been created as lyrics, the poet opting instinctively for vowel combinations that support the transition to song. The musical treatment makes evident the fascination in The Tinted Venus with London's show culture and entertainment economies. Elsewhere, musicals beg to differ from literary critics. The class consciousness and feminist rebellion that have delighted so many academic readers of Jane Eyre are translated in the musical into recognisably twentieth-century (and American) notions of individual liberty. The King and I flattens Anna Leonowens’ picture of the complex position of women in the Siamese court. On the other hand, musicals can do exciting and redeeming things to their progenitors. Weltman suggests that Sondheim injects a social critique into Sweeney Todd, a Dickensianism absent from the original, while Lionel Bart's joyous transformation of Fagin recoups some grace from the vile racism of his first incarnation.
Beyond these local differences, Victorians on Broadway points to a fundamental kinship between the interests of academics and those of the musical. Weltman identifies One Touch as a transitional case: the first of these adaptations, it is the only one to update its source text chronologically, by setting it in the present. It asserts its own modernity over the original and also its American-ness. Thereafter, Weltman surmises, post-war American global dominance endowed the Broadway musical with the confidence to embark on its Victorian turn. At about the same time, the academy was embarking on a reappraisal of the Victorian, rounding on the Modernist rebellion of the previous generation. Foundational readings of nineteenth-century culture and society appeared in books by Jerome Buckley, Kathleen Tillotson, and Richard Altick, heralding the arrival of Victorian Studies. What Victorians on Broadway demonstrates is that musical theatre has been doing analogous work all along, though until now its significance has scarcely been recognised.
