Adapting Novels to the Stage

Overview

Plays are an older art form than novels, dating back to the ancient Greeks, but the theater often looks to the younger medium for new material. The most obvious challenge to adapting a novel to the stage arises from the fact that authors intend their novels to be read, whereas playwrights, except George Bernard Shaw, intend their plays to be seen and heard. A play is a visual and auditory experience, while reading a novel is literary and imaginative.

A significant advantage of adapting a bestselling novel to the stage is that there is a ready-made audience for it. On the other hand, this fact can be a disadvantage as well, in that the members of that audience may have strong views of what the characters should look like and how they should sound, and (inevitably) what portions of the plot and subplots should be retained or eliminated in the process of adapting a narrative originally designated for a different medium. When Andrew Lloyd Webber (music and book), Richard Stilgoe (book and lyrics), and Charles Hart (lyrics) adapted The Phantom of the Opera in 1988, both the advantages and disadvantages were even greater because so many people had seen one or more of the movies previously adapted from Gaston Leroux’s novel Fantôme de l’opéra (1910; The Phantom of the Opera, 1911).

Adapting a novel is no guarantee of success. Henry James attempted to adapt his 1876-1877 novel The American to the London stage in 1891. Unfortunately, it flopped, and he never tried again. Some of the most successful artists in theater failed miserably when they adapted novels. In 1928, Richard Rodgers (music) and Lorenz Hart (lyrics) adapted a now-unknown novel by Charles Petit called The Son of the Grand Eunuch. The reviews of Chee-Chee, as it was renamed, were mostly negative, and it was only performed thirty-one times on Broadway before closing. This was the shortest run of any Rodgers or Hart musical, and Chee-Chee has never been revived. Even Rodgers and Hart could not make a play about castration palatable to a theater audience, even if the subject allowed Hart to write witty puns and double entendres into the script. Moss Hart’s adaptation of Edgar Mittelholzer’s Shadows Move Among Them (1951) as The Climate of Eden closed after twenty performances on Broadway in 1952, the shortest of that director-playwright’s career.

An advantage of adapting a novel is that persuading financiers to back plays and musicals containing controversial material may be easier. One example is Edna Ferber’s Show Boat (1926), adapted into the 1927 musical by Jerome Kern (music) and Oscar Hammerstein II (lyrics and book). In an era of lightweight comedies and melodrama, this musical changed Broadway by utilizing fully developed characters, songs integrated with the story, and a plot that dealt with the subjects of bad marriages, miscegenation, and the exploitation of black workers.

There is no formula for successfully adapting a novel to the stage; every supposed rule has exceptions. In general, an adapter must simplify the story and reduce the number of characters. However, the theatrical medium also enables a playwright to take advantage of the theater's auditory and visual nature and explore aspects of a story that are impossible to examine in a novel.

Early Adaptations

Before the twentieth century, adaptations of famous novels in theater were more common because the concept of intellectual property was in its infancy, and adapters did not feel obligated to pay royalties to or get permission from the original authors. For instance, shortly after its publication, several playwrights adapted The Vampyre (1819), by John Polidori, to the stage in Great Britain and France because of an erroneous rumor that the famous Romantic George Gordon, Lord Byron, was the true author. James Fenimore Cooper’s novels were popular as well. Ten of his first fourteen novels were adapted to stages all over Europe. However, the novel most often adapted in the United States was Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852, by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Twelve known versions and at least four hundred touring companies played nothing else. The most famous adaptation was by George Aiken, produced in 1852. Six acts were performed over two nights and required extensive scene construction and painting. Polidori, Stowe, and Cooper never received royalties.

Paring the Story

The average novel is longer and has more scenes than are practical to perform onstage. With a few exceptions, such as Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh (pr. 1946) and Strange Interlude (pr. 1928), modern audiences will not sit still for more than three hours. When Shaw’s Back to Methuselah premiered in New York in 1922, it took three nights to stage and was a flop. Bram Stoker assembled a group of actors, including the famous actor Ellen Terry as Mina Murray, for a one-time reading of Dracula shortly after its publication in 1897. His production consisted of five acts and forty-seven scenes, lasting four hours. However, his purpose was to establish his legal ownership of the dramatic rights to the story, and he never repeated his attempt. In 1979, The Royal Shakespeare Company mounted an eight-and-one-half-hour production of Charles Dickens’s Nicholas Nickelby that achieved some success as a theater “event.” Still, the limitation of audience attention span seems unlikely to change, arguably because a twenty-first-century audience reared on the Internet and social media struggles to sit for long periods in a theater. 

One adaptation method is to strip the novel’s plot down to the bare essentials. One of the longest novels ever adapted to the stage is Victor Hugo's Les Misérables (1862). It is more than one thousand pages in the unabridged version. However, because the intricate plot threads sooner or later converge on the central character, Jean Valjean, the original French adapters Alain Boublil and Jean-Marc Natel chose to concentrate on him in their original 1980 adaptation. The lives of Fantine, the Bishop of Digne, Marius, and others before their meeting of Valjean are simply omitted in the musical. So, too, are the chapters devoted to the Battle of Waterloo because Valjean was still in prison at the time, and King Louis-Philippe, because he never has any contact with Valjean.

Another approach is to cut or extract sections of the novel. When Hamilton Deane wrote the first successful adaptation of Dracula (pr. 1924) in 1923, he deleted the beginning and ending sections in Transylvania and transferred all the Whitby scenes to London. A 1928 musical adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’ Les Trois Mousquetaires (1844; The Three Musketeers, 1846) produced by Florenz Ziegfeld with lyrics by P. G. Wodehouse used only the first half of that novel.

When Rodgers (music), Hammerstein (lyrics and book), and Joshua Logan (book and director) adapted South Pacific in 1949 from James A. Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific (1947), they originally were going to use only the chapter “Fo’ Dolla’.” However, when they decided it would appear too derivative of Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly (1904), they made it the secondary romance to the chapter “Our Heroine.” They included bits and pieces from the rest of the book.

Herman Wouk extracted one portion of his novel The Caine Mutiny (1951) as The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial (pr. 1953). It consists of two acts: Act 1 presents the prosecution, and act 2 presents the defense with a scene in a hotel banquet room to end the play. Using the courtroom testimony of the actors, Wouk was able to convey the information that readers of The Caine Mutiny would have learned before the court-martial section.

Alan Jay Lerner (lyrics and book) combined the two approaches when he adapted T. H. White’s The Once and Future King (1958) as Camelot in 1960, with music by Frederick Loewe. First, he began with Arthur as an adult, which eliminated the book's first part, “The Sword in the Stone.” Then he stripped the rest of the story down to the love triangle between Arthur, Guinevere, and Lancelot.

Sometimes, it is necessary to tighten a book’s plot. In Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific, which is really a series of interconnected short stories, Joe Cable and Émile de Becque never meet. In South Pacific, they are partners on a dangerous mission behind enemy lines, taken from another chapter in Michener’s book about a coast watcher. Nor does Nellie Forbush meet Bloody Mary, her daughter Liat, or Luther Billis in the book, but she comforts Liat over Cable’s death and sings “Honey Bun” to Billis in the musical.

Characters

Most novels have more characters than are practical to show on the stage. Unnecessary characters can be eliminated. Lloyd Webber and Stilgoe eliminated the character of the Persian from The Phantom of the Opera because they felt he muddled the story. In his rewrite of the Deane version of Dracula for its 1927 New York staging, John L. Balderston eliminated Quincy Morris and Arthur Holmwood, two of Lucy Westenra’s suitors. Boublil and Natel omitted the sister of the Bishop of Digne, Colette’s biological father, Marius’s entire family, and many other characters from their adaptation of Les Misérables because they have no interaction with the central character, Jean Valjean.

Sometimes, characters can be combined. In Dracula, Balderston combined the characters of Lucy Westenra and Mina Murray into a single character, Lucy Steward, for the New York version of the play. When Hammerstein and Logan sent Cable and de Becque on a dangerous mission behind enemy lines in South Pacific, they performed the function of the Remittance Man in Michener’s novel.

It is common to change minor characters. In Dracula, Deane changed the part of Quincy Morris to a woman. Then in his rewrite, Balderston changed John Steward, another of Lucy’s suitors, into her father. In South Pacific, Logan and Hammerstein promoted Ensign Harbison to commander, making him nicer. However, he was also less important to the story and not at all cowardly. They also made Luther Billis less competent but funnier than in the book.

On rare occasions, the adapter can change a major character. One reason to change major characters is to make them less passive. In the 1927 nonmusical version of Porgy, based on Dubose Heyward’s 1925 novel, Heyward and his wife Dorothy made the title character more action-oriented and less introspective, changing the ending. In the book, Porgy stares off into the distance when he learns that Sportin’ Life has taken Bess away. In the play and subsequent opera, Porgy follows them to New York.

Unless the playwright has a purpose, as did in En attendant Godot (pr. 1953; Waiting for Godot, 1954), audiences generally expect a title character to be the central focus. It is difficult to imagine two novels that are more different than ’s Mister Roberts (1946) and Dracula, but they are similar in that the title characters stay mostly in the background. When Joshua Logan and Heggen adapted Mister Roberts, they rectified that weakness by bringing him to center stage and giving him more dialogue. He was too good in the book to make an appropriate stage character. Logan and Heggen gave him the flaw of reverse snobbery by having him believe that combat officers are superior to those in logistical support like him.

The most spectacularly successful change of a major character was Dracula. Except for the early scenes in Transylvania, which Deane cut, Dracula himself seldom appears in the novel. Deane brought him into the center of the action and changed his appearance. In the book, Dracula has hair on the palms of his hands, his breath smells, and he is dressed completely in black. On the other hand, Deane made Dracula into a cultured member of the nobility and had him wear formal evening clothes and an opera cloak. The Deane conception of Dracula captured the popular imagination rather than Stoker’s, especially when combined with the thick Hungarian accent of Bela Lugosi, who played the character on the New York stage in 1927 and in the 1931 movie. In the 1977 revival starring Frank Langella, the romantic aspects of the Dracula character were emphasized. He wants to love women and be loved in return. In Stoker’s novel, he regards women as objects and property.

Dialogue and Music

Many novels have little or no dialogue, while a play is driven by and consists entirely of dialogue, with the exception of a few stage directions. When the Heywards adapted Porgy, for instance, they had to add dialogue because most of the novel consists of narrative.

It may be more important for dialogue to be faithful to the spirit of the original rather than to the letter, especially if the novelist’s purpose was satire. The dialogue for Herbert Field’s A Connecticut Yankee (pr. 1927), based on ’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), combined archaic English with 1920s slang, especially in the song “Thou Swell.” King Arthur’s lines are based on the utterances of President Calvin Coolidge, and Merlin’s speech sounds like a mixture of thirteenth-century Sir Thomas Mallory and twentieth-century New York journalist Damon Runyon.

Because a play is heard, one way the stage can add value to the original novel is to include music. Even if electronic books become commonplace one day, it is unlikely they will include original music of the quality of a Rodgers or Lloyd Webber production. Furthermore, since musicals generally have a larger budget than nonmusicals, it may also be feasible to include more characters and scenes.

In South Pacific, songs reveal the singer's character and take place logically within the action rather than interrupting it. Nellie Forbush’s songs, such as “I’m in Love with a Wonderful Guy,” are conversational, straightforward, and bright. Émile de Becque’s songs, such as “Some Enchanted Evening,” are complicated, passionate, and thoughtful. Marine First Lieutenant Joe Cable is a Princeton graduate, his fiancé attends Byrn Mawr College, and a job awaits him after the war at the family’s law firm of Cable, Cable, and Cable. However, he falls madly in love with Liat, a seventeen-year-old Tonkinese (northern Vietnamese) girl who would be unacceptable to his family and social circle back home. He expresses his internal conflict in the songs “Younger than Springtime” and “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught.” A recurring storyline in the book was the absence of female companionship, especially for the enlisted men. This is reflected in the song “There Is Nothin’ Like a Dame.”

Choreography and Spectacle

In addition to dialogue and music, a play's visual experience is essential. If scenes lend themselves to dance, the visual can enrich the experience. When Rodgers and Hammerstein adapted Margaret Landon’s novel Anna and the King of Siam (1944), based on the diaries of Anna Leonowens, as The King and I in 1951, they engaged Jerome Robbins. He staged “Getting to Know You,” “Shall We Dance?” and “March of the Siamese Children.” The latter had no words, yet the music and body language reveal the relationships between the king and his children. His biggest challenge was the ballet sequence “The Small House of Uncle Thomas.” Rodgers suggested he approach it from a comic perspective, and the result was the combination of Asian movements with the melodrama of the Stowe novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), on which the ballet sequence is based.

The so-called megamusical enjoyed a boom in the 1970’s, 1980’s, and 1990’s. Sometimes, the producers used novels as sources. They were characterized by spectacle, mobile scenery, and computer-generated special effects for light and sound. Special effects are nothing new. When William Young adapted Lewis Wallace’s 1880 novel Ben-Hur in 1899, the production featured a treadmill to simulate the chariot race. In Les Misérables, the stage revolved, and the sets included a barricade to simulate the 1832 uprising. The Phantom of the Opera required extensive modification of the Majestic Theater in New York. The stage had to have ninety-six trapdoors to move scenery. A chandelier descends from the ceiling and crashes onstage. Over one hundred candles rise from their little trapdoors in the Phantom’s lair. Other examples of megamusicals, which still draw crowds to theaters even in the age of the Internet and social media, include Beauty and the Beast (pr. 1994), Sunset Boulevard (pr. 1994), Wicked (pr. 2003), and Hamilton (2015). 

The technology-fueled twenty-first century has posed novel changes to society, making adapting a book to the stage increasingly challenging. The Internet has allowed for more informed audiences who may have certain expectations about the characters and plot of a work. It is more important than ever for producers to find a way to condense the plot of many works for audiences who are used to receiving information quickly and efficiently. The visual expectations of twenty-first-century audiences have also increased. Finally, producers may need to consider that audiences are used to interacting with content and may need to seek out different ways to engage the audience. 

Bibliography

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