When did you first read Jekyll & Hyde?
Well, being Scottish I was brought up with an innate respect for Robert Louis Stevenson, but really fell in love with his books when I was about 17; Kidnapped and Catriona were my first reads. I was becoming really attracted to the romantic and gothic novels — The Mysteries of Udolpho for example — and so turned to Jekyll and Hyde feeling pretty confident of what to expect. It left me shocked. Being a novella it has the ability to really absorb you but with an economy of style and a necessity to get to the essence of the action that leaves you feeling slightly stunned. You are thoroughly immersed in the world and then spat out feeling dazed and, without sounding too melodramatic, grief-struck. I went straight back to the start and read it all again, desperate to re-visit the people and places, and seek to understand more of the hows and whys of Jekyll’s downfall.

Do you think gothic fiction translates naturally to stage adaptations?
There are definitely elements of gothic writing which lend themselves to a theatrical context; strong characterisations and the hugely atmospheric settings for a start. There is always a latent sense of danger too, whether that is danger from an outside source, or an inner conflict within our hero or heroine leading them into nail-biting situations. The fact that Jekyll and Hyde is a gripping thriller, full of suspense, certainly helps to keep an audience on the edge of their seats.

Do you think it is possible to be completely good or evil? Is it as simple as Jekyll is the hero and Hyde is the villain?
No — is the simple answer! Stevenson puts man’s evil nature centre stage (excuse the pun) and not only that, he makes it flesh; gives that evil a face, a name, and even feelings. It is Hyde who weeps in fear of the gallows in his last few days, Poole the butler even feels pity, so is Stevenson asking us to feel pity for a murderer and abuser? It is a complex interpretation of the baser elements of man’s character — shocking even now. In making Jekyll such a flawed hero, Stevenson forces the reader to question the pillars of society. The letters after Jekyll’s name signal him as a man of the highest achievement and learning in British society and if those at the top can court their evil nature, encourage it, and let it loose on society, then whom can we trust? Stevenson digs deep into the most pressing fears of Victorian Britain and strips it of the facade of gentility. In many ways Jekyll is the villain for giving Hyde life and then shielding his deeds, Hyde is just being Hyde.

What do you think is Stevenson’s conclusion on the concept of good and evil?
Well I reckon Stevenson was a canny Scot and knew that a book too overtly controversial would end up banned and he wanted a bestseller. Of course there is the moral at the end, that man trying to play God and dabbling with evil can only lead to doom and great unhappiness. But he raises so many questions within the book that it is impossible to suggest where his sympathies lay. It would take a thesis to break down these arguments fully but I would tentatively suggest that Stevenson was trying to raise the lid on repressed feelings in a society where people cannot be self-expressed leading to internalisation, festering desires, and therefore greater moral depravity. Early on in Jekyll’s confession he states that his desire to be respected amongst his peers led him to hide his true nature; in essence and quite by accident he became innately a liar and a fraud in all his relations. Stevenson lays the blame at the feet of a society rigid in its conformity. I think it’s a call for change and a call to re-evaluate the nature of man and desire.

What are your thoughts on the physical representation of Hyde written by Stevenson, and how will it be portrayed in your adaptation?
Well, it is a tricky one as there have been so many interpretations of the story over the years. Particularly successful are the film adaptations as the outward transformation is a make-up artist’s and designer’s dream. But I think the challenge in production is to capture the inner essence of Hyde. Stevenson mentions physical traits such as ‘troglodytic’ and ‘deformed’ — although no-one can say quite what the physical deformity is — but what is more important to Stevenson is the feeling Hyde evokes in people. It is almost as if buried deep in our human nature we can sense evil, like a dog can smell fear. Also, Hyde walks the streets of London, he takes hansom-cabs, goes to the bank. (In today’s banking establishments one could argue he would fit right in!) The point is he is not so physically repugnant that he can’t function on a day-to day basis. Utterson summarises that it is the ‘radiance of a foul soul that thus transpires through and transfigures its clay continent’ — so not too much of a challenge for the actor!

The novel is very descriptive of the Victorian era. How is this incorporated in your adaptation?
It is a brave picture of London that Stevenson paints: brave in that it is very unflattering. It is an isolated, overcrowded, seedy heart of the Empire; the great and the good living cheek-by-jowl with the lowest of the low. It is a dangerous London where a young man can lose himself in the dead of night; absently wandering abandoned streets. It is also a London that is a playground for Hyde to act out all his debased, violent impulses and as Jekyll describes, ‘Pleasures which…soon began to turn towards the monstrous’. So it is that dangerous London, a London that undercuts the Victorian image of middle-class pleasantry that I want to evoke. In a way London becomes a metaphor for Jekyll’s problem, how he wants to appear, and how he really is.

Creation Theatre’s new production of Jekyll and Hyde will be held in Blackwell’s Bookshop from 8 June-6 July 2013.

Robert Louis Stevenson was a Scottish novelist, essayist, poet, and traveler. The Oxford World’s Classics edition of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Tales is edited by Roger Luckhurst, Senior Lecturer in English, Birkbeck College, University of London. Stevenson’s short novel, published in 1886, became an instant classic. It was a Gothic horror that originated in a feverish nightmare, whose hallucinatory setting in the murky back streets of London gripped a nation mesmerized by crime and violence.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics onTwitter and Facebook.

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Image credit: Official poster for ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ provided by Creation Theatre.

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By Hal Gladfelder

The opening-night audience at John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera—first performed on 29 January 1728 at the Theatre Royal, Lincoln’s Inn Fields—can’t fully have known what sort of theatrical experience awaited them. The play’s title, for a start, must have struck them as nonsensical. What could a beggar have to do with an opera? To London audiences of the time, opera was a form of entertainment for the elite: prohibitively expensive to attend; composed and performed by foreign artists in a language, Italian, which few understood; musically and dramatically over-sophisticated and abstruse. Meanwhile, far from the heroic and mythic realms in which operas of the time were set, beggars belonged to the squalid realm of the modern city—especially, the megalopolis of London, with its poverty, violence, hubbub, and filth. To bring those realms together was absurd. Even Gay’s close friends Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, and William Congreve were unsure what he was up to, and uneasy as to how this “odd thing” The Beggar’s Opera would be received.

As things turned out, they needn’t have worried: Gay’s odd, hybrid work was to prove the hit not just of the year but of the century, running for a record-breaking sixty-two performances in its first season, and revived countless times since, including performances by a troupe of child actors, “The Lilliputians,” in season two. What drew audiences may at first have been the mere novelty of the piece, its incongruous mix of elements from disparate pre-existing forms, which is reflected in the name of the genre Gay had invented: the ballad opera. As Gay conceived it, the ballad opera alternates spoken dialogue with songs set to familiar tunes, chiefly folk tunes or street ballads, but also songs stolen or parodied from other, current plays and operas. In formal terms, the ballad opera was the model for all those later works that combined spoken and sung elements: the German Singspiel, the Savoy operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan, and the Broadway musical. But one of Gay’s cheekiest, and most commercially astute, moves was to use melodies his audience already knew and loved. Doing so not only saved him the expense of hiring a new composer but allowed playgoers the pleasures of the familiar. The music offset the harshness of the play’s satirical equation of high and low life, whereby the underworld of thieves and whores is just a mirror image of the elite world of politicians and courtiers, both of them run according to a system of mercenary betrayal. Building his story around some of the most popular tunes of the day, Gay created not only the first musical but the first jukebox musical: precursor, unlikely as it may seem, to such theatrical hits as Mamma Mia! and Jersey Boys, and such television and film works as Dennis Potter’s Pennies from Heaven and the Gene Kelly-Stanley Donen classic, Singin’ in the Rain, all of which reused songs that were already well known in other contexts.

A scene from The Beggar’s Opera painted by William Hogarth [public domain]

In such moments of cynicism and disquiet, The Beggar’s Opera exhibits affinities not only with the satire of Gay’s cronies Pope and Swift, but with the seeming misanthropic darkness of such later musicals as Brecht and Weill’s The Threepenny Opera (unsurprising, as this is an update of Gay’s work to reflect the social conditions of 1920s Berlin) and Stephen Sondheim’s bloody horror show Sweeney Todd. Sondheim’s musical might seem an extreme case of late twentieth-century angst, with its homicidal mayhem and cannibalism, and its vision of London as a hellish city of night. As he puts it in one number, “There’s a hole in the world / Like a great black pit / And the vermin of the world / Inhabit it, / And its morals aren’t worth / What a pig could spit, / And it goes by the name of London.” But these darker elements were already vividly present in The Beggar’s Opera, set in the shadow of Newgate Prison. Gay, too, sees cannibalistic predation as integral to modern urban life: in the words of Lockit, Newgate’s jailor, “Lions, Wolves, and Vulturs don’t live together in Herds, Droves or Flocks. —Of all Animals of Prey, Man is the only sociable one. Every one of us preys upon his Neighbour, and yet we herd together.” But it is not all darkness: in both plays, humor and especially music are sources of pleasure, by turns touching and exuberant. Sondheim has called Sweeney Todd a “love letter to London,” and Gay could have said the same of The Beggar’s Opera, with its comic vitality and anarchic spirit of fun.

Hal Gladfelder is Senior Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century English Literature and Culture at the University of Manchester. His books include Criminality and Narrative in Eighteenth-Century England: Beyond the Law (2001) and Fanny Hill in Bombay: The Making and Unmaking of John Cleland (2012), as well as the Broadview edition of Cleland’s Memoirs of a Coxcomb (2005) and the Oxford World’s Classics edition of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera and Polly (2013).

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics onTwitter and Facebook.

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Image credit: A scene from The Beggar’s Opera, by William Hogarth [public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

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One of Mozart’s most enduringly popular operas, The Magic Flute has captivated audiences since its premiere in Vienna in 1791. Centered on the struggles of the heroic Prince Tamino, his beloved Pamina, and the wise Sarastro (with help and comic relief from the birdcatcher Papageno) against the Queen of the Night, we know The Magic Flute as a classic tale of the battle between good and evil, or perhaps between enlightenment and ignorance.

Mozart’s Autograph Manuscript of The Magic Flute

But it hasn’t always been that way. Depending on who we ask, and when we ask them, The Magic Flute might be a very different work. In might not involve the same characters, or it might be about a clichéd love triangle. Some of the music might be taken from other Mozart operas, or some of it might not even be by Mozart at all. We tend to assume that audiences in the past saw the “classic” operas just as we see them today, but for many years that was the exception rather than the rule. So how did we get from there to where we are now?

Schikanader in the role of Papageno. This image is from the front page of the original published libretto for the opera.

At that time, it was common to heavily adapt theatrical works to conform to their own dramatic standards, remaking older works into forms that audiences would easily understand and appreciate. As hard to imagine as it might be today, in an age when most theaters go out of their way to be as faithful as possible to the music and text of “classical” works, that tendency extended to Mozart’s works, including The Magic Flute. In fact, it actually wasn’t until the early 20th century, over a century after it was written, that The Magic Flute appeared in anything like its original version in Paris.

The first attempt to bring this work to Parisian audiences was in 1801, a decade after it was composed. Appreciation for Mozart’s music, and for Viennese classicism in general, was on the rise in France, and it seemed an opportune moment to begin exposing French audiences to his theatrical music. The many memorable tunes of The Magic Flute made it an ideal choice, but the plot, by Emanuel Schikaneder—who also owned the theater and played the first Papageno—was a bit more esoteric than the standard fare.

And so Les Mystères d’Isis (“The Mysteries of Isis”) was born. The original text was scrapped, although the new story did borrow a few characters and general concepts. Musically the adapters applied a lighter pen to the work; the point was bringing Mozart’s music to Paris, after all. Still, some music was cut, and some from Mozart’s other operas—still unknown in France at the time—was added in. Even odder, the work also contains some music by Haydn, another master of the Viennese classical tradition.

Title page of Les Mystères d’Isis.

Les Mystères was a modest hit, if not quite a blockbuster, and it was occasionally repeated until 1827. Over the next few decades the French mostly lost interest in The Magic Flute, preferring instead to hear adapted French (and occasionally Italian) versions of Mozart’s other operas, especially Don Giovanni, which was a Parisian favorite for most of the nineteenth century.

It wasn’t until 1865 that The Magic Flute reappeared (now called La Flûte enchantée), in a new version commissioned by the director Léon Carvalho, who was renowned as a “faithful and devoted restorer” of eighteenth-century operas, in one critic’s words. And, true enough, Mozart’s music was treated with obvious respect here—the composer was just too famous by the 1860s for any director to do otherwise. The extra music found in Les Mystères disappeared and the cuts to the score were restored.

Title page of the 1865 French version of The Magic Flute (piano/vocal score). Note that the name of the original librettist (Emanuel Schikaneder) is never mentioned, but the French translators are.

Yet the opera’s text was another matter entirely. Schikaneder’s name was nowhere to be found on the published title page (above), and the plot still had much more in common with nineteenth-century French operas than with his original text. The central drama was a love triangle between Tamino, now a humble fisherman/musician; Pamina, recast as the beautiful and chaste girl next door; and the seductive and magical Queen of the Night. (Echoes of Wagner’s opera Tannhäuser are almost certainly intentional…)

Critics and audiences were wowed by this new translation. People unfamiliar with Schikaneder’s text assumed it was “authentic,” and those in the know claimed this “translation” was much better than the original, anyway. This version appeared again in 1875 again to great acclaim, but a third production in 1893 prompted more questions than cheers.

By the 1890s, a number of critics—including many of the most famous composers of the day, like Fauré, Dukas, Saint-Saëns, and Debussy—were calling loudly for more historically informed versions of earlier operas, including Mozart’s. Eventually they found a theater director who was clever or crazy enough to follow their suggestions: Albert Carré.

A front-page picture of Edmond Clément as Tamino in the 1909 Magic Flute production, taken from the French magazine Musica.

In 1909 Carré commissioned a new and highly publicized French translation of The Magic Flute that would bring the work as close as possible to the German original. And he more or less got what he asked for, which was both good and bad for his production. While those in favor of historically informed performances were thrilled, others were much less so. Some of the latter group were genuinely fond of the older version, and others found the original plot to be either ridiculous or simply unintelligible.

But as skeptical as some critics and listeners were about the “faithful” 1909 version, they mostly realized that historically informed performances of Mozart’s operas would soon become the new standard. In just over a century, audiences approached “classic” operas in a totally different way. Before, they had adapted older operas to their tastes; now they had learned to adapt themselves to these older works.

William Gibbons is Assistant Professor of Musicology at Texas Christian University. This blog post is derived from his recent Opera Quarterly article, “(De)Translating Mozart: The Magic Flute in 1909 Paris.” His book on this general topic, Building the Operatic Museum: Eighteenth-Century Opera in Fin-de-siècle Paris, is forthcoming in June 2013.

Since its inception in 1983, The Opera Quarterly has earned the enthusiastic praise of opera lovers and scholars alike for its engagement within the field of opera studies. In 2005, David J. Levin, a dramaturg at various opera houses and critical theorist at the University of Chicago, assumed the executive editorship of The Opera Quarterly, with the goal of extending the journal’s reputation as a rigorous forum for all aspects of opera and operatic production.

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Image credit: all images courtesy of William Gibbons.

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Answers can be found by using a combination of the following resources:
(1) The Oxford Scholarly Editions Online (OSEO) “10 interesting facts about Shakespeare” post
(2) The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography article on Shakespeare – free to view until 20 May 2013

Oxford Scholarly Editions Online (OSEO) is a major new publishing initiative from Oxford University Press. The launch content (as at September 2012) includes the complete text of more than 170 scholarly editions of material written between 1485 and 1660, including all of Shakespeare’s plays and the poetry of John Donne, opening up exciting new possibilities for research and comparison. The collection is set to grow into a massive virtual library, ultimately including the entirety of Oxford’s distinguished list of authoritative scholarly editions.

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The twenty-third of April 1564, or a day or two earlier, saw the birth of William Shakespeare, and on that same day fifty-two years later, also in Stratford, he died. This congruence of dates lends some credibility to the account given by the local vicar many years later of the way the playwright spent his final hours:

Shakespeare, Drayton, and Ben Jonson had a merry meeting and it seems drank too hard, for Shakespeare died of a fever there contracted.

These fellow poet-playwrights were close members of Shakespeare’s social circle. Drayton is recorded receiving treatment in the medical diaries of Shakespeare’s son in law, Dr. Hall, and it was Ben Jonson who composed the leading epitaph on the ‘sweet swan of Avon’ for the complete edition of his plays. There is good reason, then, to imagine this company toasting Shakespeare’s fifty-second birthday on or around 23 April 1616.

Shakespeare and His Contemporaries by John Faed

Pure talent will only take us so far as an explanation for this special position. Jonson was a great poet, but grumbled that ‘of all his plays he never gained two hundred pounds’. Professional writers of the age, popular or otherwise, suffered continually from a lack of money. Almost all had acute financial troubles and even successful playwrights such as Drayton or Jonson left no substantial wealth at the time of their death. The reason that Shakespeare would have been able to celebrate his fifty-second birthday in style (and leave a very substantial inheritance afterwards) can be traced to a decision that he had made twenty-four years earlier.

Unlike any of his contemporaries, Shakespeare had invested in London’s public theatre. In an age before copyright, this was arguably the smartest financial decision that an artist had ever made. In the summer of 1594 (already established as a famous poet) he had bought a one-eighth share in a company of actors, becoming a Fellow in the newly formed Lord Chamberlain’s Men. He became a joint decision maker at their meetings and a joint owner of their costumes, performance properties, and plays. Before this time Shakespeare (like Drayton or Jonson) had pitched his plays to multiple acting companies, getting a fixed fee when he made a sale. Afterwards, as a shareholder, he had a continuing income from the performance receipts of his plays and those of others. No literary playwright had ever been in this position. Though Shakespeare must have laid down the equivalent of around a year’s income to make this investment (probably through borrowing), it very quickly made him very rich.

Prior to 1594 there are indications that Shakespeare’s family were suffering from financial problems; there are certainly no signs of growing wealth. The Lord Chamberlain’s Men, however, proved a successful venture, growing with speed into the nation’s dominant acting company. The profits from gate receipts and court payments were distributed among the eight sharers, performers who employed hired actors and hired playwrights at fixed rates. All of the founding sharers became wealthy and the great house at which the playwright died in 1616 was one early reward of the decision that Shakespeare made. This mansion (with ten fireplaces, the second largest house in Stratford) was bought for cash in 1597. Shakespeare carried out substantial renovations and had resources enough to extend the garden, buying extra land and demolishing a cottage to get this done. The year after he still had spare money for other investments, including a stock of malt. From 1594 onwards there is a steady record of Shakespeare’s ever-growing prosperity.  Indeed, within two years of becoming a sharer, he had begun the expensive business of procuring a gentleman’s coat of arms.

The contrast between Shakespeare’s wealth and that of those who might have joined him for his birthday party remains oddly under-reported. In 1600—as Shakespeare continued to acquire land, tithes, and additional property (including a 10% stake in the Globe)—Jonson was imprisoned for debt. Debtor’s jail was a common abode for the playwrighting profession: Chapman, Dekker, and Middleton, to name but some, suffered the same fate. While it’s tempting to conclude that Shakespeare’s financial pre-eminence is simply justice (reflecting his superior talent) there is case for thinking of matters the other way round. His position as a shareholder also brought special artistic privileges. After 1594 (unlike his contemporaries) Shakespeare wrote for one company and without immediate financial pressure; he could specify the actors who would perform the roles he created; and he had a long-term stake in the life of his plays on the stage.

If Shakespeare did toast his birthday with Jonson and Drayton on 23 April 1616 he did so from a privileged position. Above all else, he had the year 1594 to thank for that. He could look out over what was now known as ‘the Great Garden’ of New Place, the owner of other property, including a residence in the exclusive Blackfriars district of London. Reason enough to hold a ‘merry meeting’ and ‘drink deep’.

Bart van Es is Lecturer in English at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of St Catherine’s College. He has previously written books on Edmund Spenser and has a special interest in the writing of history in the Renaissance. Shakespeare in Company is his first work on drama and was supported by the award of an AHRC Fellowship.

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Image credit: Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, John Faed [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

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The Oxford Index is a free search and discovery tool from Oxford University Press. It is designed to help you begin your research journey by providing a single, convenient search portal for trusted scholarship from Oxford and our partners, and then point you to the most relevant related materials — from journal articles to scholarly monographs. One search brings together top quality content and unlocks connections in a way not previously possible. Take a virtual tour of the Index to learn more.

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Since today is April Fools’ Day, we wanted to take a look at some of the most famous fools in literature: those written by Shakespeare. Below is just a handful of Shakespearean fools from a selection of his tragedies, comedies, and more. Who are your favourite Shakespearean fools? Let us know in the comments.

Feste, Twelfth Night, or What You Will
“Many a good hanging prevents a bad marriage.”

Feste is a fool for the Countess Olivia and seems to have been attached to the household for some time, as a “fool that the Lady Olivia’s father took much delight in”. Feste claims that he wears “not motley” in his brain, so even though he dresses the part of the fool, he is not an idiot, and can see through the other characters. Indeed, there are times when he appears almost omnipresent, knowing more about Viola/Cesario’s disguise than he lets on. Certainly, he seems to leave Olivia’s house and return at his desire a little too freely for a servant, weaving in and out of the action with the sort of impunity reserved for a person nobody took seriously. He is referred to by name only once during the play, otherwise he is addressed only as “Fool,” while in the stage directions he is mentioned as “Clown.”

Touchstone, As You Like It
“The more pity, that fools may not speak wisely what wise men do foolishly.”

Touchstone is Duke Frederick’s court jester, notable for his quick wit. He is an observer of human nature, and comments on the other characters throughout the play, contributing to a better understanding of the action. Touchstone is a clever and somewhat cynical fool, although, it is referenced often in the text that he is a “natural” fool (“Fortune makes Nature’s natural the cutter-off of Nature’s wit” and “hath sent this natural for our whetstone”).

The Gravediggers, Hamlet
“What is he that builds stronger than either the mason, the shipwright, or the carpenter?”

The Gravediggers (or Clowns) appear briefly in Hamlet, making their one and only appearance at the beginning of the first scene of Act V. We meet them as they dig a grave for the recently drowned Ophelia, discussing whether she deserves a Christian burial after having killed herself. Many major themes of the play are brought up by the Gravediggers in the short time they are on stage, but they use often dark humour to examine them, contrary to the rest of the tragic play.

Titania and Bottom in a scence from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, by Edwin Landseer

Bottom provides comic relief throughout A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and is probably most famous for having his head transformed into that of an ass. He is a member of The Mechanicals, who are rehearsing a play, ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’, in the hope of performing it on Duke Theseus’s wedding day. Puck, a fairy, finds them in the woods rehearsing and decides to play tricks of them, such as the aforementioned transformation of Bottom’s head. The Fairy Queen, Titania, falls in love with him thanks to a potion created by her jealous husband Oberon. Later, once Titania has had the potion removed, and Puck is made to lift the ass’s head spell, Bottom wakes in a field wondering whether it was indeed a dream or not. In terms of performance, Bottom, like Horatio in Hamlet, is the only major part that can’t be doubled, meaning that the actor who plays him cannot play another character within the same play, since Bottom is present in scenes involving nearly every character

The Fool, King Lear
“Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise”

The relationship between Lear and his Fool is founded on friendship and dependency. The Fool commentates on events and points out the truths which are either missed or ignored. When Lear banishes Cordelia, the Fool is upset, but rather than leave the ridiculous King, the Fool accompanies him on his way to madness. The Fool realises that the only true madness is to recognize this world as rational.

Trinculo, The Tempest
“I shall laugh myself to death at this puppy-headed
monster. A most scurvy monster!”

Trinculo is Alonso’s servant, a drunken jester who provides plenty of comic relief throughout the play. Caliban takes an instant dislike to him and his drunken insults. However, Trinculo becomes part of Caliban’s plan to murder Prospero which ultimately fails.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics on Twitter and Facebook.

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Image credit: Scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. By Edwin Henry Landseer [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

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Romans measured time in months but not in weeks. The Ides simply meant the middle day of a month and it functioned simply as a temporal navigation aid — one that looks clumsy to us. So one might make an appointment for two days before the Ides or for three days after the Kalends (the first day of the month) and so on. A man shouting from the back of the crowd “Beware the Ides of March!” must have sounded about as sane as a heckler yelling to a modern day politician that he should watch out for the third Tuesday in April.

But for us the Ides of March has only one meaning: the date in 44 BC when Julius Caesar was murdered by a crowd of senators led by his protégés Brutus and Cassius. Tyrannicide, treachery, pathos. And the cry “Beware the Ides of March!” is forever the warning that was ignored.

This we owe to William Shakespeare who made his murder the focal point of the tragedy Julius Caesar. The play is punchy and the action moves fast. It opens in the streets of Rome, where the people are preparing to welcome Caesar home in triumph after the defeat of his civil war rival Pompey. Meanwhile aristocrats mutter over the loss of freedom. Brutus agonizes, torn between his love for Caesar and his hatred of tyranny. The murder itself occurs at almost the exact center of the play. The outcome is briefly uncertain — will the Roman people hail Brutus and Cassius as liberators, or condemn them as murderers? Then Mark Antony, Caesar’s right-hand man, sways the crowd with a passionate funeral oration. The rest of the play follows the flight of the conspirators, their defeat in battle at Philippi, at the hands of Antony and Caesar’s heir Octavius, and their subsequent suicides. Brutus earns the shortest of obituaries from his enemies before Octavius’ closing lines “So call the field to rest, and let’s away, to part the glories of this happy day.”

The Ides themselves were not a happy day, according to Suetonius, one of Caesar’s ancient biographers. The Ides of March had been declared the Day of Parricide, and the senate was forbidden ever to meet again on that date. For things had not turned out as Brutus hoped. By Suetonius’ day it was possible to see Julius Caesar as the first of the Roman emperors, all of whom — beginning from Octavius — took Caesar’s name as a kind of title. An entire mythology had grown up of signs that had marked Caesar’s imminent death and even his subsequent transformation into a god. As Caesar’s wife Calpurnia puts it:

When beggars die there are no comets seen
The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes

“Beware the Ides of March!” was just one prophesy among others that transformed Caesar’s murder from a sordid and ultimately pointless crime into an event of cosmic significance. The deaths of emperors (like their births, when viewed in retrospect) were always marked by omens. Emperors were absolute rulers in their lifetime and gods in waiting. How could their deaths be ordinary? And how could their murder even be justified?

Tyrannicide was no more popular under the reigns of Elizabeth I (when the play was first performed) or of her successor James (when it was first printed). Yet political murder and dilemmas like that of Brutus were definitely still on the agenda. Mary Queen of Scots, for example — Elizabeth’s cousin and James’ mother — had been executed for treason just a decade before Julius Caesar was first staged. These issues still mattered.

And Shakespeare’s audience knew this story in advance. A vast mass of the detail of this play, as of Antony and Cleopatra, was drawn from the Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, written by Suetonius’ contemporary Plutarch but first translated into English in 1579, a generation before Julius Caesar began to be performed. Plutarch’s Lives, which mined classical history for morally improving tales, were fantastically popular in the early modern period and indeed remained so well into the eighteenth century. Shakespeare’s audience knew from the start that Caesar would die, who would kill him, and even that young Octavius would turn out to be a greater tyrant than Caesar had ever tried to be.

So the soothsayer’s cry “Beware the Ides of March” was not a plot-spoiler. For Shakespeare this warning, and all the others, were devices to raise the tension and focus our attention on the pivotal moment of the murder. As in a thriller today, the excitement is in the obstacles put in the way of the plot. Caesar must die. But what if he listens to his wife’s terrible nightmares? or heeds the soothsayer’s warning? or reads the written warning pushed into his hand by Artemidorus “Delay not Caesar, read it instantly!” (Caesar does not.)

Shakespeare has transformed the signs of cosmic sympathy into mood music. His opening scenes are overshadowed by storms. And again before the death of Brutus there is another omen. Plutarch’s Life of Brutus tells how a monstrous figure had appeared in his tent before the final campaign. Asked its name, it replies “I am your evil demon, Brutus, and I will see you at Philippi!” then vanishes. Shakespeare tells the story almost word for word, but add the stage direction reads Enter the Ghost of Caesar. Brutus’ imminent tragedy points back to the Ides.

Shakespeare’s Renaissance audiences and readers knew the history of Rome as a history of violence. They were drawn more to the chaos of the Republic than to the imperial peace that followed it. And they certainly did not believe in closure. The story of Julius Caesar is not self-contained, and the conflicts are not resolved. It opens with two tribunes remembering how Pompey had once been just as much adored by the Roman people, as his conqueror was now. And Octavius’ last words remind us that Antony and Octavius would immediately fall out over how exactly to “part the glories” (that is to divide the spoils). There would be fresh civil wars, more treachery and many, many more murders to come. Beware the Ides of March!

Greg Woolf is Professor of Ancient History at the University of St Andrews. He is the author of Rome: An Empire’s Story, Et Tu, Brute?: A Short History of Political Murder and editor of The Cambridge Illustrated History of the Roman World.

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Image credits: La Morte di Cesare. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

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Richard Burbage © Dulwich Picture Gallery.

It was the first performance of Hamlet around 1601 that projected Burbage into the national imagination. The earliest surviving elegy begins by saying that there will be ‘no more young Hamlet’ after the death of the star:

Oft I have seen him leap into a grave
Suiting the person, which he seemed to have,
Of a sad lover, with so true an eye
That there (I would have sworn) he meant to die.

A 1605 pamphlet notes how the ‘one man’ who plays Hamlet stands at the apogee of his profession, with ‘money’, ‘dignity’, and ‘reputation’ that are destined to earn him a ‘lordship in the country’. The play was ‘diverse times acted by his highness’s servants in the City of London as also in the two universities of Cambridge and Oxford and elsewhere’. It functioned as the calling card of its leading man.

Hamlet proved the making of Burbage, but I suggest that Burbage also had a good deal to do with the way Hamlet was made. Three things about the actor were essential. First, his wealth and playhouse investment. Second, his style of performance. Third, competition with the leading man of a rival company, Edward Alleyn.

Wealth is important because power (just as in modern Hollywood) did not come from talent alone. Before 1599 Burbage had been just one in an acting company of eight equals and his roles in Shakespeare’s plays were commensurate with that stake. But the building of the Globe in 1599 made Richard newly preeminent. He and his brother Cuthbert secured 50% of the venture, with Shakespeare and the four other ‘housekeepers’ having just 10% each. Burbage’s business dominance had immediate implications. Once Burbage was a bigger investor, the company’s playwright wrote him bigger parts. From this point on central characters become more prominent: Henry V, Duke Vincentio, Othello, Lear, Macbeth, Timon, Antony, and Coriolanus (all products of the early Globe years) are not simply longer in their line-counts, they are also grander, more self-defining, roles. Most can be linked with certainty to Burbage and all are very likely to have been played by him. Hamlet (at 1338 lines) is by some measure the largest part in the Shakespeare canon and that statistic connects pretty directly with the actor’s business share.

Of course, Burbage was not just powerful but also gifted. Ben Jonson called him the ‘best actor’ and that reputation was founded, as one elegy put it, on performing ‘so truly to the life’. According to the testimony of Richard Flecknoe:

He was a delightful Proteus, so wholly transforming himself into his part, and putting off himself with his clothes, as he never (not so much as in the tiring house) assumed himself again until the play was done: there being as much difference betwixt him and one of our common actors as between a ballad singer who only mouths it and an excellent singer.

This distance from common actors is vital to Hamlet because it makes possible the Prince’s declaration that ‘forms, moods, shapes of grief’ are merely ‘actions that a man might play’ but that he ‘has that within which passes show’.

Edward Alleyn © Dulwich Picture Gallery.

A final element, though, was the rivalry between Burbage and Alleyn. Exactly like Burbage, Alleyn was an actor who had recently become a big-scale playhouse investor. In 1600 he built the Fortune playhouse to the north of the city, deliberately copying the Globe. To launch his theatre Alleyn revived the roles that had made him famous in the early 1590s: Tamburlaine, Faustus, and other leads in Marlowe plays. Amongst these was Marlowe’s Dido, in which he spoke the following lines:

At last came Pyrrhus, fell and full of ire,
His harness dropping blood, and on his spear
The mangled head of Priam’s youngest son…

In Hamlet (written while Alleyn conducted these revivals) the Prince meets a player and requests an old speech that has a very similar ring:

The rugged Pyrrhus like th’ Hyrcanian beast…
—’Tis not so. It begins with Pyrrhus.
The rugged Pyrrhus, he whose sable arms,
Black as his purpose, did the night resemble…

Burbage, at the Globe, was pretending awkwardly to remember lines that closely resembled those of his rival on the other side of the Thames. The unpopularity of the ‘tragedians of the city’ (which has forced the player to travel to Elsinore) thus becomes a very local affair.

The player’s long speech (which ‘pleased not the million’ and bores Polonius) is partly a dig at Alleyn, but it is also something more complex. Hamlet admires the old player and behind this there is surely also admiration for Alleyn, with whom Burbage had learned his craft as a travelling actor a decade before.  His character’s inability to ‘drown the stage with tears, / And cleave the general ear with horrid speech’ is an expression of limitation. But it also announces a new kind of acting in which the feelings of characters are not so easily known. Alleyn had starred as Cutlack the Dane with eyes of ‘lightning’ and words of ‘thunder’; Burbage would command the stage in a different way. ‘To be or not to be’ was a question of acting method. The performer whose death Thomas Middleton would describe as an ‘eclipse of playing’ had an artistic vision of his own.

Bart van Es is Lecturer in English at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of St Catherine’s College. He has previously written books on Edmund Spenser and has a special interest in the writing of history in the Renaissance. Shakespeare in Company is his first work on drama and was supported by the award of an AHRC Fellowship.

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Image credit: Portraits of Richard Burbage and Edward Alleyn used with permission of Dulwich Picture Gallery. All rights reserved. 

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By Maya Slater

The farce is at its height: the old clown in the armchair is surrounded by whirling figures in outlandish doctors’ costumes, welcoming him into their brotherhood with a mock initiation ceremony. He takes the Latin oath: ‘Juro’, falters. His face crumples. The audience gasps – is something wrong? But the clown is grinning now, all is well, the dancing grows frenzied, the play rushes on to its end.

Not till the next day will the audience find out what happened afterwards. They carried the clown off the stage in his chair, and rushed him home. He was coughing blood, dying. He asked for his wife, and for a priest to confess him. They failed to arrive before he died.

It happened 340 years ago, on 17 February 1673, but his magnificently ironic death is still central to the French understanding of Molière. He is their greatest comic playwright, unique in that he also directed his own plays and wrote his greatest parts for himself. Centuries later, this still gives the modern audience a frisson. In The Hypochondriac, sick with TB (he had his fatal seizure during the fourth performance), Molière himself spoke the following words:

‘Your Molière’s an impertinent fellow… If I were a doctor, I’d have my revenge… when he fell ill, I’d let him die without helping him. I’d say: “Go on, drop dead!”

Writing those words anticipating his own death was surely tempting fate, but long before his last play, audiences had got used to seeing Molière on stage speaking lines which seemed to cast an ironic light on his own life. Nine years earlier, in The School for Wives (1662), the first of his great verse comedies, he played the part of a ridiculous old bachelor determined to marry an innocent young girl decades younger than him. Instead, the girl escapes with a young man her own age. The audience knew that Molière himself had recently married Armande – he was 40, she was 22. What must they have thought when he portrayed a thwarted older lover, gnashing his teeth in rage and frustration as his young bride escaped from his clutches?

A year later, Molière’s self-mockery has grown more explicit. The new play is The School for Wives Criticised, a short, informal sketch, ridiculing Molière’s critics in an argument about The School for Wives. Significantly, Molière didn’t defend his own play onstage.  Instead, he himself played an absurd Marquis, who attacks Molière and his work: ‘I’ve just been to see it… It’s detestable.’ ‘Talk to us about its faults,’ says someone. ‘How should I know? I didn’t even bother to listen,’ replies the Marquis.

Molière’s second riposte to his critics, which again took the form of a short polemic play, The Impromptu at Versailles, was strikingly new, and still feels fresh and exciting today. We see Molière (who just this once played himself) and his troupe in rehearsal, trying desperately to get a performance together for the King and Court to see. The actors are uncooperative and annoying, which enables Molière to show himself trying to cope with them. He presents himself as unable to keep control of his unruly cast, breaking out in frustration: ‘Don’t you realise, I’m the one who carries the can…?’ When they finally start their rehearsal, Molière interrupts it to comment on The School for Wives, and to make some interesting general observations on acting. The play they are rehearsing  is a conversation between two stupid courtiers. Molière again takes the part of the silly Marquis, and once more launches a comic attack on himself: ‘You’re desperate to justify Molière… don’t you think your Molière is played out [?]’ And then comes a moment unique in his work, where he takes over another actor’s part, and speaks as himself, in defence of his own art: ‘Wait a minute, You want to say all that a bit more emphatically. Listen, this is how I want it spoken…’

Of course the burning question must be: what was Molière like as an actor, and how did he perform his roles? We know he wore a heavy black moustache. We can assume that he excelled at portraying comic rage and frustration, from the number of furious outbursts he wrote for himself to perform. He put himself in ridiculous situations, hiding under the table in Tartuffe, performing a clumsy dance in The Bourgeois Gentleman, fleeing in terror dressed as a woman in M. de Pourceaugnac. But perhaps the most vivid account of his acting is found in a malicious satirical portrait written by the son of a rival actor:

‘He enters, nose to the wind, on bow legs, one shoulder thrust forward. His wig trails behind, stuffed full of bayleaves like a ham. He dangles his hands rather carelessly by his sides. His head sits on his back like a pack on a mule. He rolls his eyes. When he speaks his lines, the words are punctuated by endless hiccoughs.’

By the end, racked with TB, his performances had become less physically demanding. And performing the role which killed him that February night 350 years ago, that of the ludicrous hypochondriac, he was having to insert lines to excuse his own coughing, and played the part sitting in the red velvet chair which is still preserved as their most precious relic by the Comédie française theatre.

Maya Slater is Senior Reseach Fellow at Queen Mary, University of London. She also writes fiction and reviews theatre and books. She is the editor and translator of the Oxford World’s Classics edition of The Misanthrope, Tartuffe, and Other Plays by Molière.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics on Twitter and Facebook.

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Image credit: Portrait of Molière as Julius Cesar by Nicolas Mignard [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

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Show Boat is back on the boards, visiting four major opera companies in a new production of yet another new version. Originally debuted on Broadway in 1927, apparently Show Boat will never stop being remade. The new production, directed by Francesca Zambello, had its premiere at the Chicago Lyric Opera a year ago, an appropriate starting place as much of the second act takes place in the Windy City. A run at Houston Grand Opera is wrapping up this week. Washington National Opera follows in May, with a final stop at the San Francisco Opera in June.

The Houston Grand Opera’s Show Boat. (c) Houston Grand Opera. houstongrandopera.org

I saw the production in Chicago and by casual reckoning—I don’t have a copy of the script—upwards of thirty percent of the dialogue is new. Several tried-and-true Show Boat laugh lines are gone: some new attempts at humor are in. Parthy’s repeated complaints about going to Chicago for New Year’s Eve (i.e. in the middle of winter) got a laugh in Chicago but might fall flat elsewhere. In general, this version isn’t as funny as some others, but opera house Show Boats—the first dates back to 1954—have typically emphasized singing over comedy.

Some things didn’t change in Chicago, in particular, the audience reaction to “Ol’ Man River.” At the performance I saw, applause stepped on the long held note that ends the song and resounded long and loud in the Lyric’s golden-walled theater. Morris Robinson in the role of Joe and the men of the black chorus held their final pose and soaked up the ovation for “Ol’ Man River” while the remainder of the cast waited for the show to resume. This moment—predictably—stopped Show Boat cold, and it’s been working that way since 1927. Why? Given that February is Black History Month, a look into the past might help explain why “Ol’ Man River” still stops Show Boat.

In September 1926, Edna Ferber’s novel Show Boat was published to great fanfare. By December it was among the best-selling books of the year. Broadway songwriter Jerome Kern read Show Boat and immediately recognized it as a compelling basis for a musical show with the capacity to feature a black star of the moment singing music the white audiences of midtown, Jazz Age Manhattan were already cheering. Kern brought lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II onto the project. Among the first songs the pair wrote was “Ol’ Man River,” which Kern remembered was inspired not by Ferber’s book but rather by the sound of Paul Robeson’s voice.

Robeson—a black dramatic actor who had recently begun singing recitals of Negro spirituals—was at the height of his 1920s fame and it made sense to Kern, Hammerstein, and their producer Florenz Ziegfeld to feature Robeson as much as possible in Show Boat. Initially, they wanted Robeson to not only play Joe and sing “Ol’ Man River” but to also perform a set of Negro spirituals as himself in act two, accompanied by his regular pianist, the accomplished African American musician Lawrence Brown. Robeson and Brown’s all-spirituals concerts—the first was in April 1925 in Greenwich Village—were hugely successful with New York audiences. Crowds—predominantly white—reportedly lined up in the snow to buy tickets. Audiences cheered and wept, demanding encore after encore. Critics hailed the duo and regularly described what they offered as more than just a concert but an experience. Robeson was praised for expressing “all the plaintiveness of the colored race” with “a haunting tenderness, a wistful longing, an indescribable seeking for something just beyond, to be found in the voice of the Negro, and in no other voice.” Part of the 1920s Harlem Renaissance, the Robeson-Brown recital experience captured contemporary white fascination with black music and performers in a tremendously attractive package.

Kern, Hammerstein, and Ziegfeld wanted to make the Robeson-Brown experience part of Show Boat. While Robeson resisted their plan and refused to play Joe in the original Broadway production, Kern and Hammerstein succeeded in bringing a black male voice before the white Broadway audience simply by way of “Ol’ Man River.” This spiritual-like Broadway song—with its soaring tune that echoes folk melodies and lyrics expressing the predicament of black Americans in ways the white audience could accept without feeling threatened—quickly became Show Boat‘s signature moment. Ferber remembered the reaction to Robeson as Joe in 1932—the first time he played the part on Broadway—this way: “I witnessed a New York first-night audience, after Paul Robeson’s singing of Ol’ Man River, shout and cheer and behave generally as I’ve never seen an audience behave in any theatre in all my years of playgoing.” Robeson sang Joe for the first time in London in 1928, where one reviewer noted “his performance is worth all the money you will pay for admission.” More than one review in the show’s long performance history echoes this astonishing claim that a single song sung by a character with no role in the plot was sufficient reason to sit through the entire show.

Is this reaction of a white audience to a black male singer still happening when contemporary audiences applaud “Ol’ Man River”? Morris Robinson, the Chicago Lyric Opera’s Joe, answered the question with some self-aware humor in a live interview posted online by the Chicago Tribune.

Watch the full interview and hear Robinson sing “Ol’ Man River”.

Robinson told the audience, ““Just in case you haven’t noticed, I’m a six-foot-three black guy, so “Ol’ Man River” is what they’re wanting to hear at the end of my concerts. And I make them wait.” Earlier in the interview, Robinson—like Robeson, an all-American college football player—described an encounter at the start of his singing career with the black bass Todd Duncan. (The original Porgy in Porgy and Bess, Duncan played Joe onstage in 1944.) Duncan vocalized Robinson a bit, then played a few notes from “Ol’ Man River” and told the young singer—who didn’t recognize the tune—that he’d be singing it many, many times. Robinson’s anecdote suggests the extent to which race is still destiny for African American singers on the musical and concert stage. For all the progress made in race relations in the more than eighty years since Show Boat first played to packed houses, white audiences still respond to a powerful black bass singing “Ol’ Man River,” making this famous song one reason Show Boat itself keeps sailing on.

Todd Decker is Assistant Professor of Music at Washington University in St. Louis, and the author of Show Boat: Performing Race in an American Musical and Music Makes Me: Fred Astaire and Jazz, winner of the Best First Book Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies

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By Ann Saddlemyer

There had been rumours for months. When Dublin’s Abbey Theatre announced that John Millington Synge’s new play The Playboy of the Western World would be produced on Saturday, 26 January 1907, all were on alert. Controversy had followed Synge since the production of his first Wicklow play, The Shadow of the Glen, in which a bold, young, and lonely woman leaves a loveless May/December marriage to go off with a fine-talking Tramp who rhapsodizes over the freedom of the roads. Irish women wouldn’t do that!

In The Playboy the action takes place in a public house on the wild coast of Mayo, when a travel-stained stranger enters and is persuaded to tell his story. Impressed, the admiring on-stage audience thinks he must be very brave indeed to have killed his father, and in turn the young tramp blossoms into the daring rollicking hero they believe him to be – winning all the prizes at the races and the love of the publican’s daughter. But then his father, with a bandaged head, turns up seeking his worthless son who is not the courageous father-slayer after all. Disillusioned and angry at the loss of their hero, the onstage crowd turns brutally on Christy, who tries to prove that he is indeed capable of savage deeds, even attempting unsuccessfully to kill his father a third time. The play ends with father and son leaving together, dismissing the onstage audience with the words “Shut yer yelling for if you’re after making a mighty man of me this day by the power of a lie, you’re setting me now to think if it’s a poor thing to be lonesome, it’s worse maybe to go mixing with the fools of earth”.

Irish actors Sara Allgood (“Pegeen Mike”) and J. M. Kerrigan (“Shawn Keogh”), in ‘The Playboy of the Western World’, Plymouth Theatre, Boston, 1911.

Yet the playwright does not seem to have been aware of the response his play would cause, insisting that it was merely a comedy, an “extravaganza”, meant to entertain, and that “the story — in its ESSENCE — is probable, given the psychic state of the locality.” Not to this audience, who charged him with immorality, obscenity and blasphemy, “a sordid, squalid and repulsive picture of Irish life and character”, making a hero of “a foul-mouthed scoundrel and parricide”.

For three years Synge had painstakingly developed his original idea, producing more than a thousand typescript pages, drafts and scenarios, all the way to draft “K” before he finally hit on the brilliantly ambiguous final form. For a “playboy” may be an athlete, performer, seducer, trickster, manipulator, creator, hero, or all of the above; while “the western world” might refer to County Mayo, to the United States, or to this world as contrasted with that “eastern world” of folk and fairy tales — or to all. “What a blessing you did not go to version L, if Version K had such a disastrous effect!” a friend commented in the turbulent months that followed.

Like Christy’s own tale of slaying his Da, the story of his injuries to Ireland’s good name continued to grow with the years. When the Abbey theatre took the play on tour to the United States, the clash between the idea of a pure nationhood cherished by Irish immigrants and what they saw on stage was even more pronounced. In New York missiles were thrown on the stage, and a hundred police attempted to keep order. Lady Gregory, who led the tour, received death threats; Theodore Roosevelt’s presence at the second performance ensured a more sedate reception. But when the company arrived in Philadelphia all hell broke loose, and the players were hauled into court by an Irish-American patriot who accused the company and the play of indecency. The case was dismissed when the judge learned that the accusers had not read the text.

In the theatre individual response to what is clearly not real can quickly become an excuse for objecting to what is perceived to be real. Audiences have always felt justified in expressing their disapproval of what is staged, or attempted to be staged. In 18th century London theatre managers petitioned the King for a guard of soldiers; one manager engaged thirty prize-fighters as well. Destruction of scenery, benches and even musical instruments was all too common when the audience felt cheated; often foreign performers were pelted with rotten fruit and other missiles (and told to go home).

Patriotism was perhaps the most frequent cause, especially in Ireland where the stage Irishman, created by English dramatists, was a subject of mockery and ridicule, and where class, nationalism, and religion were inextricably entwined. In 1907 however the disturbance was premeditated, with members of the audience carrying in stink bombs, rotten vegetables, trumpets, whistles, and other paraphernalia. There was clearly an organized cabal determined to silence a work which is now considered a masterpiece of comedy, performed throughout the world and recently the centrepiece of a world tour.

Would such events happen today? We are much more accustomed to onstage violence; but censorship is still very much with us. Synge suggests that to hold a dream is better than to live with caution; the outsider serves to perpetuate the myth-making process while at the same time challenging it, introducing a heightened self-awareness which embraces community on both sides of the footlights. Thus the audience is caught off-guard, encouraged to enter the world of fantasy, then betrayed by a reality of a different sort — the dream itself can threaten if fulfilled; we are briefly dangled above two worlds at once.

Ann Saddlemyer has published extensively on Irish and Canadian theatre and edited the plays of Lady Gregory and the letters between the founding Directors of the Abbey Theatre. Her book Becoming George: The Life of Mrs W.B. Yeats was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography. She has most recently edited W.B. Yeats and George Yeats: The Letters. She is the editor of the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World and Other Plays.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics on Twitter and Facebook.

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Image credit: From the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Archive, Boston [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

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Outreach and innovation are two buzzwords that pop up again and again in relation to established “classical” music institutions such as symphony orchestras and opera companies. In an effort to build younger audiences, many of these institutions have introduced new programs that attempt to do away with the of the concert-going experience, such as expensive tickets or the need for a certain type of attire, that might discourage younger or less experienced listeners from attending.

l’Opéra Garnier, Paris, France

A perfect example is the English National Opera’s initiative “Undress for the Opera”, whose launch last year included such pop icons as Damon Albarn (Blur, Gorillaz) and Terry Gilliam (Monty Python, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas). “Undress” aims at a younger audience by offering affordable tickets, opportunities to meet the cast post-performance, and “club-style” bars, as well as a refreshing mix of new and old works throughout the season (by Mozart, Verdi, Glass, and Michel van der Aa).

While the challenge for large, established companies like ENO is to attract younger audiences, the challenge for the many smaller, newly-established companies out there is simply that of creating work that holds true to an overall mission of performing and creating opera that holds relevance and meaning to contemporary audiences of all ages. Two such companies here in New York City typify the main thrusts of that mission, which involve either: (1) reimagining old works, or, (2) developing new works that stretch traditional conceptions of opera.

Morningside Opera, founded four years ago by a group of Columbia University musicology PhD students, has performed works from Britten to Handel, incorporating their musicological savvy with a modern sensibility that often pushes at the boundaries of decency (much like the original works did in their own time). Case in point is their most recent production, ¡Figaro! (90210), which recasts Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro as “a zany farce about immigration and citizenship in 21st-century America.”

MO’s setting of Cherubino’s aria “Non so più” speaks for itself:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Experiments in Opera, founded two years ago by a collective of composers and performers, on the other hand focuses solely on producing newly composed works. EiO defines opera as “the hybrid space of the theater, performance, installation, dance and storytelling arts”, a definition borne out by performances that have included libretto-as-comic-book (Jason Cady’s Happiness Is the Problem) and works like Matthew Welch’s Borges and the Other, based on Jorge Luis Borges’ short story about a meeting between an older Borges and a younger Borges.

Both of these performances remind us that the genre of opera is not a repository of museum pieces but a living, breathing art.  Morningside Opera’s take on Figaro leads us to reconsider an opera that was politically timely in the 18^th century to be just as relevant in the 21^st. EiO’s performance reveals new ways for opera’s inherently multi-media substance to tell a story for a new age. Both performances demonstrate that the art of opera is still a vital genre, one that continues to inspire composers and performers to break new ground.

Meghann Wilhoite is an Assistant Editor at Grove Music/Oxford Music Online, music blogger, and organist. Follow her on Twitter at @megwilhoite. Read her previous blog posts on Sibelius, the pipe organ, John Zorn, West Side Story, and other subjects.

Oxford Music Online is the gateway offering users the ability to access and cross-search multiple music reference resources in one location. With Grove Music Online as its cornerstone, Oxford Music Online also contains The Oxford Companion to Music, The Oxford Dictionary of Music, and The Encyclopedia of Popular Music.

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On Christmas Day, the eagerly-awaited movie musical Les Misérables — “A Musical Phenomenon” the advertisement promises — opens across the United States. If it makes half the splash that its Broadway source did in 1987, we’re in for a long ride. The musical ran for 6680 performances, and won Tony awards for Best Musical, Best Book, and Best Score. It closed and then re-opened for another 463-performance run in 2006. It continues to tour the US.

Extensive production gossip on the movie has focused on Anne Hathaway’s brave hair-shaving, braver weight loss of twenty-five pounds, and bravest willingness to sing live during filming. Director Tom Hooper has repeatedly noted the incomparable intimacy achieved by actors singing live on film. Barbra Streisand, at age 25, knew the same thing when she insisted on singing live for the film of Funny Girl in 1968 (she shared the Best Actress Oscar with Katharine Hepburn in The Lion in Winter).

The 60 million people who have seen the stage version of the Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil musical will no doubt compare the movie to their memories of a dark and shadowy stage, the crowd of actors marching in step during the thrilling Act One finale of “One Day More,” the huge rotating barricade littered with fifty bloody bodies of the revolutionary students, and a breathtaking theatrical moment when the evil Javert jumps to his death off the upstage catwalk bridge.

Given Hathaway’s stardom, movie goers might also compare the film’s portrayal of the tragic Fantine with her stage character, played by Patti LuPone, Ruthie Henshall, Lea Salonga, and Daphne Rubin-Vega. Film critic A.O. Scott recently commented on the number of strong women in 2012’s movies. What will Les Miz bring us?

If it’s anything like the stage musical, don’t get excited, fellow feminists. For all of its theatrical heft, musical power, and romantic reputation, Les Miz leaves women in the lurch.

Women in the musical play small and insignificant roles. First, they appear late: Fantine’s first song halfway through Act One is a woman’s first solo, well after the male characters have been introduced and have sung and the story is well on its way.

Second, the three featured female characters — Fantine, Cosette, and Eponine — are delineated from the other minor female characters and ensemble players by their spiritual purity, a narrow female stereotype. Third, the women only exist to set off the complex decisions, ethical struggles, and brave actions of the men. Finally, the women only sing about men (though, according to the Bechdel test that Scott cites, there are more than two women in the show and they do have names: a hopeful sign, perhaps?).

The central story of Les Miz has nothing whatsoever to do with women, but rather follows the battle between Valjean and Javert. Dramaturgically, the women only function to strengthen the men’s characterizations. Fantine’s sole purpose, for example, is to show Valjean’s extraordinary generosity when he agrees to raise her soon-to-be-orphaned daughter, Cosette, as his own. Cosette serves as Marius’s love interest so that he can choose her over a political career. (Unlike the musicals of the 1950s where the individual lovers each signified political differences that the musical eventually resolved through their union, in Les Miz, the lovers are a mere diversion from the real plot, which is “political” and decidedly homoerotic.) And Eponine exists so that she can pine for Marius and die for his cause. During the stage musical’s production process, in fact, codirectors Trevor Nunn and John Caird worked with the composers to eliminate the women characters’ back stories and reduce their stage time.

Equally important for this stage production was the amazing sceneography, designed by Royal Shakespeare Company veteran John Napier. The musical’s Act Two climax, when two giant towers, weighing three tons and driven by computer, glide, merge, and interlock to form a stage-filling structure on which the bodies of dead rebel students lay signals how Les Miz sceneographically values men and their world. In his review of the Broadway production, Frank Rich in the New York Times described how “in a dazzling transition, the towers tilt to form an enormous barricade.” The male characters interact with the set from this barricade to the tower to the tavern. Valjean carries the wounded Marius through the sewers of Paris, evoked by fog and dim grey lighting, and even the villain Javert kills himself by jumping off a high bridge upstage, a moment that invariably elicits gasps from the audience when the actor disappears below the stage floor.

The musical’s principal women, on the other hand, are excluded from the impressive, visually engaging scenes. Each female character’s song is staged with her alone, almost as if in concert, apart from the story, performing in a single pool of light. Now there’s nothing wrong with an actor being onstage in a single spotlight: that’s what stars are made of. But according to the visual codes that tell an audience what’s important here, the women are shut out. Fantine sings both of her two songs in Act One alone, one before she succumbs to prostitution and the other — her big death song — on a cot; Cosette’s key number is staged in front of the gates of her house.

Eponine does a bit better: her showstopping “On My Own” begins with the actor walking on a slowly revolving platform, but by the second verse, the turntable stops and she stands still for the number’s climax.

Eponine does get one opportunity to interact with the musical’s remarkable scenery — in her death scene. Although her involvement with the students’ rebellion is not because she is political, but because she wants to be on the barricade to be near Marius, she gets caught in the crossfire. Marius takes her into his arms, soothing her and kissing her gently, and they sing, “A Little Fall of Rain,” leaning against by the barricade, and she dies. The message is clear in this touching moment: the women only get to be on Les Miz’s big set when they die.

In front of the barricade in Les Misérables (opened on Broadway in 1987), Eponine (Frances Ruffelle) dies in the arms of Marius (Michael Bell), her love for him still unrequited.  Enjolras (David Burt) stands by. Photograph by Michael Le Poer Trench © Cameron Mackintosh Ltd. Used with permission.

This account of women’s sad situation in Les Miz relies on the languages of the stage. It may be that the film adaptation will give women more to do. Or maybe the tools of film will alter the architecture of this musical. Or maybe Hathaway — thin, bald, and singing “live” — will deliver a performance that will vindicate the women in Les Miz.

Stacy Wolf is Professor in the Program in Theater and the Director of the Princeton Atelier in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University. She is the author of A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical, Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical, and co-editor of the forthcoming paperback release of The Oxford Handbook of The American Musical.

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One of the largest — and, I admit, most disappointing — revelations I had while researching 1970s adult musicals for my book, Hard Times: The Adult Musical in 1970s New York City, was just how tame they all ended up being. Sure, there was frank talk about sex in most adult musicals. There were also a lot of naked bodies on display. Occasionally, there were simulated sex acts that were creative and acrobatic enough to make even the hippest, most solid of 1970s hepcats feel like a real chump and go on a serious bummer. This is precisely what I expected when I started looking into musicals with names like Stag Movie, Lovers, Le Bellybutton, and Let My People Come.

What I wasn’t prepared for, however, was just how traditional the subtext of most of these shows typically was. Indeed, lurking beneath the jiggling breasts, faked orgasms, and copious use of slang terms for genitalia was often an almost jarring adherence to conventional love relationships, and, more shockingly, even the occasional twinge of nostalgia for the social constrictions of the Eisenhower era. The moral of most adult musicals, even those featuring the nudiest, sluttiest, foul-mouthiest of characters, was that all the consequence-free, anonymous sex in the world — no matter how many swingers and far-out drugs were involved — was just never as fulfilling as good old-fashioned monogamous love. Preferably in the missionary position. After marriage. With the lights out.

Now, I was born a titch too late to experience the swinging seventies first-hand, unless you count the ribald (if surely heavily-edited, child-friendly) tales a particularly groovy babysitter would occasionally tell my sister and me as she helped us brush our teeth and get into our jammies. Nevertheless, I have always liked to think of that time as one of continued excess, during which a vast majority of American citizens turned on, freaked out, and had sex with one another as easily as we currently mutter “what’s up” to acquaintances we see on the street or run into on the subway. Thus, learning that the live entertainment form I’d decided to research — and that, at first glance, seemed to be the musical equivalent of hard-core porn, albeit with more jazz hands — were, in fact, really sort of tame and conservative, truly bummed me out at first.

But then again, recognizing the cultural conventionality in adult musicals was important, not only for the book’s narrative, but for my grasp of social history, which is, of course, never remotely as straightforward or uncomplicated as it is often depicted. My students always get an earful from me about how much I hate the overgeneralizations that get uttered all too frequently in documentaries and oral histories, especially those about rock music and pop culture that get broadcast on channels like VH1: “And then… everything changed.” “It was truly revolutionary… unlike anything… anyone… HAD EVER EXPERIENCED.” Hmph.

As it played out into the 1970s, the 1960s sexual revolution was enormous and confused and multi-tentacled, and meant many different things to as many different people. To be sure, some of us Americans had a great time: some of us did, indeed, jump wholeheartedly into the cultural orgy of drugs and excess that the era offered. And many of us did, indeed, find the strength to come out of the closet; or to leave unsatisfying marriages; or to change career paths, or spiritual, cultural, or social practices, in a quest for a more satisfying and liberated, and less stultifying life. But then again, just as many of us felt confused, threatened, left out, or even terrified by the many cultural disruptions of the time period. And I found ample evidence of enormously mixed emotions about the seismic shifts we lived through: a blend of almost palpable longing for the newly disrupted cultural codes we understood and felt safe enacting, which came part and parcel with — and directly contradicted — feelings of elation, joy, celebration, and a fervid embrace of cultural change.

Which is why, I guess, the adult musicals of the 1970s were so often a blend of the shocking and the conventional. The American stage musical has long made a practice of mixing the conservative and subversive, thereby appealing to the broadest possible audience. Stage musicals have always been, after all, a commercial entertainment form. Why should musicals depicting the sexual revolution, and the subsequent gay and women’s liberation movements, be any different? Shows like Oh! Calcutta! and Let My People Come enjoyed successful runs primarily because they allowed audiences the chance to experience the sexual revolution at a safe, even comforting, distance. Adult musicals helped ease doubt, ambivalence, and anxiety about rapidly changing cultural mores. They invited audiences to embrace the notions that sex could be fun and harmless, that naked bodies could be beautiful, and that sexual identity didn’t have to be so threatening. Adult musicals allowed spectators — some of whom were struggling with their own sexuality, some of whom were hoping to learn more about the rapidly changing sexual mores, some of them simply eager to find out exactly what all the fuss was about –to live vicariously without getting in too deep.

Their existence, otherwise, doesn’t make any sense, especially during a period in which there were so many other kinds of far more explicit sexual entertainment available. After all, why Oh! Calcutta! when Deep Throat was showing down the street? Why buy tickets to see simulated sex on stage when there were actual live sex shows going on a few avenues away? Why see an Off-Broadway comedy about swinging, or group sex, when you’ve heard whispers of a key party being planned a few towns over? Through the 1970s, Americans struggled mightily over issues of sexuality and gender in unprecedented ways; the result was a complex, if heady, blend of feelings of elation, confusion, frustration, and fear. Adult musicals didn’t so much challenge as they did educated, palliate, and ameliorate, by offering cheery, conventional messages to audiences who needed reassurance during a time of enormous, rapid change.

I recently thought a great deal about the function of 1970s adult musicals while watching David West-Read’s sex farce The Performers, which opened on Broadway at the Longacre Theatre on November 14th… and closed four days later. Sometimes, Broadway flops are squirmy, embarrassing affairs, but this one was great fun — I think even more so, since the star-studded cast clearly knew the show was on the chopping block, and was thus collectively far looser than most companies tend to be on Broadway immediately post-opening. I’m awfully glad I got to see The Performers. But I’m not surprised that it closed as quickly as it did.

While not a musical, The Performers, which takes place in Las Vegas during an adult-film awards show, has a lot of the same ingredients as the adult musicals of the 1970s. The show featured no nudity — it’s not really an entertainment trend these days. But there was plenty of skin (the first scene features the hilarious Cheyenne Jackson in a teeny suede… thing, which he eventually removes to reveal even teenier Superman underpants); a few simulated, if exceptionally goofy, sex acts and a lot of even goofier sex talk; a scene in which an enormous dildo was tossed across the stage; and a huge pair of prop breasts, gamely worn by the actress Jenni Barber in the role of Sundown LeMay. Many of the characters — who have stage names like Mandrew (Jackson) and Chuck Wood (Henry Winkler) — talk frankly about scenes they’ve filmed, sex positions they excel at, and movies they’ve shot, all of which have names like Planet of the Tits, Spontaneass, and Cum on My Bum.

In some ways, shows like this imply that nothing has changed much over the course of forty years. Buried under the sex jokes, flying dildos, and increasingly ridiculous euphemisms for genitalia lies a variant on the same old plot: Mandrew’s childhood friend Lee (Daniel Breaker) has come to Vegas to interview Mandrew for an article about adult films for The New York Post. Lee’s high-school sweetheart and fiancée, Sara (Alicia Silverstone), has come along, too. After spending time with Mandrew, Lee — who has only ever had sex with Sara — becomes concerned that he and Sara will become bored with their sex life as they grow older together. When he broaches the possibility of playing the field before they marry to Sara, she gets insulted and pretends to strike up a flirtation with Chuck Wood. Meanwhile, Mandrew learns that his wife, Peeps (Ari Graynor), also a porn star, is pregnant. This good news is soured, however, when Peeps discovers that Mandrew recently kissed Sundown LeMay on the mouth, which is an intimacy that she and her husband typically reserve for private, offscreen moments together. Amid the strife, the awards show happens, Chuck Wood delivers an absolutely hilarious monologue-as-acceptance-speech that I wish I could have taken home with me after the show, lots of alcohol is consumed, and drunken, heartbroken wackiness ensues.

Happy endings (the old-fashioned kind; not the pornographic kind) are experienced by all involved. Peeps and Sundown make up. Mandrew and Peeps make up. Sara and Lee make up. The porn stars all make it clear to Sara and Lee that sex is not nearly as important as love and commitment, and that they would all kill for the kind of love that Sara and Lee have for one another. Sara and Lee realize that they’ve never had sex with anyone but one another because they have never loved anyone else as deeply. Love conquers all, and monogamy rules — just like it did in adult musicals during the 1970s.

Yet for all the similarities, there are a couple of important ways that The Performers differ from adult musicals. Back in the early 1970s, for a few years at least, hard-core pornography was taken more seriously in the art world as a burgeoning genre with the potential for mainstream appeal, especially following the enormous — and, for many, surprising — commercial success of films like Behind the Green Door and Deep Throat. Yet hard-core porn never crossed over; it went, instead, to video. Thus, over the past several decades, as much as pornography has influenced the aesthetics of myriad forms of mainstream entertainment — from the fashion world to horror films to cooking shows — the adult film industry’s potential for a chance to edge into the mainstream is long gone, if it ever truly had a chance at all.

The Peformers makes this clear: While Lee and Sara feel like freaks for being so straitlaced, it’s their wacky, adult-film friends who are the true outsiders. Exceptionally stupid and self-centered, if also ultimately good-natured and well-meaning, the adult film actors in the show have their own rules, ideals, and aspirations, and live by their own warped code of conduct. Chuck Wood serves as the wise elder of the group. He’s been around since the 1970s, a time he frequently, reverently describes as one of both innocence and enormous excess, and he has come to realize that as he ages alone, all the sex he’s had has amounted to nothing. Not accidentally, then, Chuck is the character who is instrumental in getting all of the heartbroken, arguing couples into the same room together to talk it all out, sit-com style, at the end of the show.

But much more broadly, I think it’s the failure of The Performers to connect with audiences that points, at least in some small part, to the cultural differences between the 1970s and now. It’s easy to say that we are more prudish than we were back in the 1970s: that today’s audiences wouldn’t be able to handle stage nudity, or the kind of frank talk about sex that was a regular feature of so many shows that appeared on, Off, and Off Off Broadway back then. By that logic, maybe The Performers closed because of its very subject matter: audiences stayed away because they deemed it too crass or off-color for their tastes.

Then again, maybe not. In some ways, we’re really a lot savvier now than we were then, especially when it comes to human sexuality. After all, while some of the excesses of the 1970s have faded away over time, we’ve got lots more in the way of lasting, meaningful, truly progressive ramifications: more rights for women in both the domestic and the public sphere; more states recognizing the civil rights of gay men and lesbians; more citizens who, despite their political or religious affiliations, just aren’t too terribly concerned or bothered by the sexual preferences or private lives of their neighbors. Maybe, then, stage nudity is no longer trendy because we just don’t crave it like we did. Maybe jokes about dildos and crazy sex positions are cute, but ultimately not all that deep.

Near the end of The Performers, a sad, drunken Sara bursts out with a line that neatly sums up the feelings of the entire company: “I just wanna be me and be okay with it, and have everybody else be okay with it, too!” This is, in some ways, a quintessentially 1970s statement — boil it down to its essence and you get any number of platitudinous expressions that were so popular back then: “Go with the flow.” “Do your own thing.” “Whatever turns you on.” Maybe we just don’t need the same neat, tidy little messages anymore. Maybe a silly sex farce, while fun and cute, and even occasionally hilarious, is just not what we need right now. Maybe The Performers closed as quickly as it did because in the end, we’ve moved beyond it.

Elizabeth L. Wollman is Assistant Professor of Music at Baruch College in New York City, and author of Hard Times: The Adult Musical in 1970s New York City and The Theater Will Rock: A History of the Rock Musical, from Hair to Hedwig. She also contributes to the Show Showdown blog.

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Image credit: Poster for The Performers used for the pusposes of illustration under fair use. Source: theperformersonbroadway.com.

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Moby-Dick draws readers into it. And many of its more creative readers have sought to capture its grandeur on film and stage. From the first film in 1926 to the present, these attempts have taken liberties with the novel, sometimes for good, sometimes for ill. But that is the challenge that Moby-Dick offers its readers, a text that is deep and wide, an ocean of issues and concerns that we must all, in some fashion, navigate.

• The Sea Beast (1926 film)

   

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  Forget about the whale vanquishing Ahab. In this silent film, John Barrymore stars as Ahab. Although he is dismasted, he kills the whale and an evil half-brother and gets the girl.

• Moby Dick—Rehearsed (1955 play)

   

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  Orson Welles, who might have made a superior Ahab, wrote this two-act play about an acting troupe told they are going to perform Moby Dick. Welles had hoped to make this into a film but the results were disappointing. This play within a play, however, has some moments that Melville would have appreciated.

• Moby Dick (1956 film)

   

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  Directed by John Huston, co-written by Huston and Ray Bradbury, and starring Gregory Peck as Ahab. Although Peck hardly sizzled with Ahab’s philosophical gravitas, the film did challenge polite 1950s codes about racial relations and hinted at blasphemy. And the final scene, with Ahab forever joined to the White Whale is powerful.

• Hakugei: Legend of the Moby Dick (1997-1999 Japanese animated tv series)

   

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  Ahab commands a spaceship against Moby-Dick, a beast that is terrorizing a planet. Lucky Luck, like Ishmael, signs on for duty, finding perhaps more than he had anticipated.

• Moby Dick (1998 tv mini-series)

   

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  Famous as Captain Picard on Star-Trek, Stewart showed his acting chops as Ahab in this immensely popular made for television film. Ahab’s obsession, said Stewart, is what rendered him a tragic figure. Because he is cognizant of his obsession, he is a man in agony. And that is how Stewart sort to portray Ahab.

• Songs and Stories from Moby-Dick (1999 performance art)

   

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  Performance and techno-artist Anderson had been drawn to Moby-Dick in high school. She realized her vision of the saga with an electric violin and a “talking stick” that resembled nothing so much as a harpoon.

• Moby-Dick: Then and Now (2007 play)

   

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  This is a clever staging of the novel by Ricardo Pitts-Wiley. Except this time around, the protagonists are kids from the ghetto and their quarry is the white whale of cocaine.

• 2010: Moby Dick (2010 film)

   

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  Here Moby has destroyed a submarine and dismasted its Captain, named Ahab. Ahab wants revenge. Ishmael is played by Renee O’Connor (formerly sidekick to Xenia, the Warrior Woman). Her name in the film is Michelle Herman (M.H. - get it? Herman Melville, in reverse).

• Moby-Dick (2010 Dallas Opera)

   

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  Ahab is an operatic figure, if ever there was one. Jake Heggie wrote the score, with Gene Sheer doing the libretto. Among the challenges were whittling down the book into something manageable for the stage. Spoiler alert: the opera does not open with the famous first line of the novel. But that line is heard – eventually. Photo by Karen Almond/Dallas Opera.

• Moby-Dick Big Read (2012 radio series)

   

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  The daily online release of chapters from Moby-Dick, recorded by a host of international and national celebrities.

George Cotkin is Professor of History at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, and author of the forthcoming book, Dive Deeper: Journeys with Moby-Dick.

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If a theater noob polled a group of theater fans on what classic musicals she must see to jumpstart her theater education, you would be hard pressed to find a fan without The Phantom of the Opera on their list. The show, which opened at Her Majesty’s Theatre in London on 9 October 1986, has left an undeniable impact on London’s West End, Broadway, and theater in general. I can personally attest to listening to the original cast soundtrack growing up, seeing the 2004 movie with my theater friends as soon as it came out (and proceeding to listen and sing loudly to that soundtrack on every car drive for months), to finally seeing the Broadway production in 2007 and being absolutely blown away.

In honor of the anniversary of The Phantom of the Opera opening in London 26 years ago today, we thought a mini quiz was in order.

Phantom of the Opera is based on a novel. What year was it written?

According to the novel, what is the phantom’s real name?

Who were the original actors for the characters of Phantom, Christine Daaé, and Raoul in the London production?

Which actor in The Phantom of the Opera received the Laurence Olivier Award for best actor in a musical?

When did The Phantom of the Opera open on Broadway?

How many Tonys did the Broadway version win?

True or False: The Phantom of the Opera is the longest running show on Broadway.

Phantom of the Opera is based on a novel. What year was it written?
Le Fantôme de l’Opéra by Gaston Leroux was written in 1911.
(Brewer’s Dictionary of Modern Phrase & Fable)

According to the novel, what is the phantom’s real name?
Erik. The phantom’s story in the novel is the same as in the musical; he is a man with a hideous skull-like face who lives in seclusion beneath a Paris opera house.
(Brewer’s Dictionary of Modern Phrase & Fable)

Who were the original actors for the characters of Phantom, Christine Daaé, and Raoul in the London production?
Phantom — Michael Crawford
Christine — Sarah Brightman (Andrew Lloyd Webber’s wife at the time)
Raoul — Steve Barton
(The Oxford Companion to the American Musical)

Which actor in The Phantom of the Opera received the Laurence Olivier Award for best actor in a musical?
Michael Crawford. He also had a UK Top 10 hit with “The Music Of The Night.”
(Encyclopedia of Popular Music)

When did The Phantom of the Opera open on Broadway?
It opened in the Majestic Theatre on 26 January 1988. Michael Crawford, Sarah Brightman, and Steve Barton reprised their roles in this production.
(Encyclopedia of Popular Music)

How many Tonys did the Broadway version win?
Seven: Best Musical, Actor (Michael Crawford), Featured Actress (Judy Kaye), Sets, Costumes, Lighting, and Director (Harold Prince).
(Encyclopedia of Popular Music)

True or False: The Phantom of the Opera is the longest running show on Broadway.
True. It passed Cats (another Andrew Lloyd Webber show) on 9 January 2006.
(Encyclopedia of Popular Music)

As a bonus, check out our Spotify playlist of The Phantom of the Opera songs from both the original London production and the 2004 movie. Do you have a favorite version? What’s your favorite song? Leave your thoughts in the comments.

All the answers to this quiz are sourced from Oxford Reference.

Alyssa Bender joined Oxford University Press as a marketing assistant in July 2011. She works on academic/trade history, literature, and music titles, and tweets @OUPMusic. Read her previous blog posts.

Oxford Reference is the home of Oxford’s quality reference publishing, bringing together over 2 million entries, many of which are illustrated, into a single cross-searchable resource. Newly relaunched with a brand new look and feel, and specifically designed to meet the needs and expectations of reference users, Oxford Reference provides quality, up-to-date reference content at the click of a button. Made up of two main collections, both fully integrated and cross-searchable, Oxford Reference couples Oxford’s trusted A-Z reference material with an intuitive design to deliver a discoverable, up-to-date, and expanding reference resource.

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Image credit: Her Majesty’s Theatre – The Phantom of the Opera. Photo by ZeroJanvier, 2005. Released to public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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A blend of past and present, art and life: Beethoven’s most challenging work for piano, the Diabelli Variations op. 120, has triggered a mania of interest on the theatrical scene. Several years ago New York playwright Moisés Kaufman visited my wife Katherine Syer and myself — the first of several visits — to shape a play on Beethoven. The resulting play, 33 Variations, focuses on Beethoven’s spectacular obsession with Anton Diabelli’s humble but sturdy waltz, and in turn our own scholarly obsession with the composition. Following a final workshop of the play at the University of Illinois and its premiere at the Arena Stage in Washington, DC, it reached Broadway with Jane Fonda assuming the central role of the musicologist Katherine Brandt, who seeks to unravel the mystery of Beethoven’s obsession by studying the composer’s sketchbooks at the Beethoven Archive at Bonn. From major stages in Los Angeles to Chicago, Berlin to Tokyo, 33 Variations is now being performed at many regional and community theaters around the country.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The intertwining of art and life goes further. Fascinated by his own visit to Bonn to examine Beethoven’s manuscripts, Kaufman set the second act of the play in the Beethoven Archive itself. (The New York production won a Tony Award for the stage set depicting the archive.) Just as the play opened, a big fundraising effort enabled the Beethoven-Haus at Bonn to acquire the autograph score of the Diabelli Variations from private hands, enabling the intriguing manuscript to join the sketchbooks already in that collection. The manuscript treasure can be viewed online through the digital archives of the Beethoven-Haus.

Playwright Moisés Kaufman, left, consulted with musicologists Katherine Syer and William Kinderman on his new play, 33 Variations. Ultimately, Kaufman developed a composite character based on the husband-and-wife consultants. Photo by L. Brian Stauffer

The cast of 33 Variations requires seven actors as well as a pianist who plays many of the variations. In its sequence of scenes, the play mirrors the variation form of Beethoven’s great work with a fugue of interwoven themes and a graceful minuet finale. Kaufman’s fictional construction is sustained by Beethoven’s creative vision. In one memorable scene, Katherine is amazed to observe from Beethoven’s sketches how the composer created Variation 3 step-by step, refining a basic idea through richer successive versions. The pianist brings this creative unfolding to sound for the audience.

In my research I discovered that Beethoven conceived two-thirds of the variations in 1819 and then, unable to finish the piece, put the work aside for several years. The manuscripts reveal how he finished it, by incorporating ironic allusions to the original waltz and then radically transforming it in later variations. Beethoven absorbs into his work an encyclopedic range of contexts including references to Bach, Handel, and Mozart before capping his cycle through a fascinating self-reference to the last movement of his own last sonata.

It is rare for a play to engage so directly with musical meaning and the creative process, and gratifying how a book and recording helped generate an unanticipated harvest like 33 Variations. How one thing leads to another — sometimes quite unexpectedly — is Beethoven’s secret. Anton Diabelli requested just a single variation from Beethoven, seeking to have the famous composer’s name associated with a networking project for his fledgling publishing firm. Instead of that single variation, Beethoven instead offered after years of toil a microcosm of his art, a colossal achievement brimming with wit and brilliance but also compassionate understanding. Now, almost two centuries later, his astonishing brainstorm exerts a stronger spell than ever before. The play that started in our living room in Illinois testifies to that effect. Artworks like Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations draw people together, raise awareness, enable new friendships, and open new perspectives.

William Kinderman is Professor of Musicology at the University of Illinois and a noted pianist, whose recordings of Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations and last sonatas are available through Arietta Records. Kinderman’s books with Oxford University Press include Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations, Mozart’s Piano Music (2006), the comprehensive study Beethoven (expanded ed. 2009), and Wagner’s ‘Parsifal’ (2013).

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Today marks the 55th anniversary of the Broadway premiere of Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story.

A racially-charged retelling of Romeo and Juliet, West Side Story is set in the “blighted” West Side of 1950s Manhattan, the potent themes of star-crossed love and gang rivalry successfully translated from 16th century Italy to 20th century New York by book-writer Arthur Laurents and lyricist Steven Sondheim. The premiere was timely. One day before the curtain rose on West Side Story, America had witnessed a key event in its Civil Rights Movement with the forced integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Five years later, Bernstein, then music director of the New York Philharmonic, moved the orchestra’s home from Carnegie Hall to nearby Lincoln Center, the construction of which had cleared away much of the neighborhood portrayed in the musical, ironically displacing Tony and Maria’s real-life counterparts as part of Robert Moses’ urban renewal program.

Carol Lawrence and Larry Kert running down the street in promotional photo for West Side Story. (1957) Source: NYPL Friedman-Abeles Collection.

Yes, in many ways West Side Story reflected the drama of its time, flying in the face of racial taboo by bringing together a Puerto Rican girl and a Polish American boy, while also bringing together ballet and popular dance, opera and musical theater, with the attendant implications regarding class and the perception of “high” vs. “low” art.

Of course, when I first saw the West Side Story movie as a child, none of this factored into my perception of the musical, at least not consciously. What jumped out at me was the beauty of the dancers’ movement and the infectious, sometimes tragically beautiful music.

Even in college, when I played piano and celesta in Bernstein’s suite of orchestral movements from the musical, called Symphonic Dances from West Side Story, all I could focus on was the music. I still get a thrill when I think about playing that piece — my heartbeat literally quickens a bit — with its catchy dance tunes and heart-wrenching arias (for an example of the latter, watch this, starting about 0:35).

Click here to view the embedded video.

Looking back, I see now that West Side’s socio-political message was probably a larger part of my appreciation of the work than I realized at the time. Raised in a blue collar environment, I was mostly surrounded by the culture of rock music (with a little polka here and there), while my mother and grandmother instilled in me an appreciation of Mozart and Beethoven, which ultimately led to hours and hours on the piano bench. My young life revolved around a mix of “high” and “low” art, and West Side’s expert mixing of “popular” and “art” music probably appealed to me far more than I realized at the time.

Bernstein, also from a blue collar background, was perhaps the first composer to endeavor to truly marry the compositional rigor of art music with the vibrant spontaneity of popular music, and see the result earn a widespread and lasting influence. The 2009 Broadway revival of West Side Story sold over one million tickets during its two-year run. This clip from Bernstein’s 1973 Harvard lectures perfectly summarizes his views on the relationship of high and low art, with prophetic pronouncements regarding a “great new era of eclecticism.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Bernstein’s overarching use of words such as dignity, passion, and Earth (by which he means the harmonic series, and, ultimately, tonality) to describe the coming era of eclectic music may go against the grain of postmodern, relativistic thinking, but, as I witness more and more young composers attempting to fuse their formal education with their “popular” music backgrounds, I’m inclined to think Bernstein a true prophet.

Meghann Wilhoite is an Assistant Editor at Grove Music/Oxford Music Online, music blogger, and organist. Follow her on Twitter at @megwilhoite. Read her previous blog posts:“Saving Sibelius: Software in peril,” “The king of instruments: Scary or sleepy?” and “John Zorn at 59.”

Oxford Music Online is the gateway offering users the ability to access and cross-search multiple music reference resources in one location. With Grove Music Online as its cornerstone, Oxford Music Online also contains The Oxford Companion to Music, The Oxford Dictionary of Music, and The Encyclopedia of Popular Music.

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You write that Berlin saw his work as a “mirror” of the nation.

Source: NYPL.

Berlin believed that “the mob is always right.” What does that mean?

Berlin held a mercilessly populist notion of his craft. He didn’t believe his work was good unless people wanted to sing it and buy it in the form of sheet music, sound recordings, or tickets to his shows on stage and screen. For him, songwriting was business, and art and commerce went hand in hand. I argue that this sensibility took root in his early experiences as an immigrant on the Lower East Side. And I develop the idea that it reflects what I call a “Lower East Side Aesthetic,” which holds a practical, even survivalist, view of creativity and entertainment as a job joining ambition, entrepreneurship, mercantilism, and, not least, craft.

Oh! How I hate to get up in the morning in Yip, yip, Yaphank by Irving Berlin (1918). Source: NYPL.

He named them: “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” “Oh! How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning,” “Say It With Music,” “Always,” “Blue Skies,” “How Deep Is the Ocean,” “Easter Parade,” “White Christmas,” “God Bless America,” and “There’s No Business Like Show Business.”

Why were those songs his favorites?

In a statement when he named these songs, he equated “favorites” with “the ones that have won the widest acceptance.” In other words, he judged his songs not by his own standards but by the response of the “mob.” He once even declared that “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” was “terrible,” but it was a favorite because people liked it: they wanted to hear it.

Berlin made a distinction between a “composer” and a “songwriter.” Why? What’s the difference?

Berlin stands out in a small group of Americans between Stephen Foster and Stephen Sondheim who succeeded writing both words and music. So he called himself a “songwriter” and denied being a “composer.”

Which came first, words or music?

Photo of Irving Berlin in New York City, circa 1911.

 People know a lot of Berlin songs, but why not his musicals?

Theater stood at the center of Berlin’s world, and he wrote all or most of the score for some twenty shows across a half century. But just one of his shows has seen continuous productions since its premiere: Annie Get Your Gun, and that show is almost unique among his shows in its historical plot. For Berlin, effective musical theater had to be an event that spoke directly to the “mob” of the moment. He gave little or no thought to writing “masterworks” that would be performed years beyond their openings. The chief legacy of most of his shows has been the songs, but in recent years many of his earlier shows have been revived, and they continue to delight audiences.

Did Berlin have a favorite among his shows?

Yes, and it comes as a surprise to most people. It was his World War II soldier revue, This Is the Army, which opened on July 4, 1942, toured the country, went to Hollywood, then went overseas — ultimately playing for some 2.5 million military and civilian spectators in the U.S., Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, and the South Pacific before its last performance in October 1945. Today, the Hollywood adaptation (starring Ronald Reagan) is the way people remember the show, if they remember it at all. But that film, which was one of the top grossing films in Hollywood in its day, overlaid a sentimental plot on top of a revue that aimed to capture the common ground between soldiers and civilians. Among Berlin’s papers, there is a mountain of material on this show. He had hoped to write a whole book about it.

Berlin’s papers? You had access to them?

Yes, mainly at the Library of Congress, where they’ve been housed since the mid-1990s. The Irving Berlin Collection there contains well over 600 boxes and some 750,000 documents. As I discuss in the book, there are musical manuscripts and lyric sheets, revue sketches, musical comedy scripts, orchestral parts, screenplays, scrapbooks brimming with newspaper clippings, photographs, business papers, financial and legal records, and correspondence — thousands of letters written to and from powerful and lofty figures including presidents and generals, show business personalities, and ordinary citizens expressing appreciation for Berlin’s work or good wishes for his family. The thing that struck me, above all, is that Berlin wrote a lot of music for the theater that has never been published, mostly because it exceeded the bounds of Tin Pan Alley’s conventional sheet music format. Meanwhile, the unpublished scripts allow for a clearer understanding of the context for which Berlin wrote musical numbers.

Is there any one discovery that stands out among all that stuff?

A pretty girl is like a melody, words and music by Irving Berlin. Ziegfeld follies of 1919. Source: NYPL.

Why do the shows matter?

The shows reflect an omnivorous embrace of everything available on the American musical stage, not just musical comedy, but opera, revue, vaudeville, minstrelsy. They may be seen as a prism through which we can understand where this uniquely American idiom came from. He began writing Broadway shows three decades before Rodgers and Hammerstein joined up, at a time when his great ambition was to write a distinctively American opera in ragtime, so his work offers a microcosm of the Broadway musical in the formative years of the genre. Berlin was a particular master of the revue, which offered a sequence of songs and sketches linked by a common theme and refracted current events, people, music, and theater itself. The glorious age of the revue, the 1910s-20s period, has almost been lost to history, but Berlin’s papers help us to imagine what it was have been like. Alan Jay Lerner once wrote that “what Berlin did for the modern musical theatre was to make it possible,” and I hope readers come away with a sense of how that happened.

Jeffrey Magee is Associate Professor of Music and Theater at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and author of The Uncrowned King of Swing, winner of the Irving Lowens Award from the Society for American Music.  He is the author most recently of Irving Berlin’s American Musical Theater.

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Martha Graham’s work was prominent in the New York dance world of the 1930s in the wake of her innovative Primitive Mysteries (1931). Yet, her reputation grew exponentially beyond the confines of dance and the New York art world after the premiere of American Document (1938) followed by its national tour in 1939. This is, paradoxically, a work that the Martha Graham Dance Company may be reluctant to perform today in a version close to the original. It was related to the political issues of the day, highly anti-fascist and popular front, and critical of the history of the United States. Graham’s national reputation took hold at this time, and she was noted not only for her choreography and dancing but also for her political stance in the pre-war moment.

It is incongruous that this occurred by and through a work that is considered to be of little artistic value today. To some American Document might indeed appear old-fashioned or too specific to its time to merit revival. Yet I think in this time of political uncertainty Graham’s anti-fascist work — done without updating the context and streamlining the aesthetic to be faster and brasher to account for what is assumed to be the audience’s diminished attention span — may prove most successful. The obscuration of democratic traditions and the perverse rhetorical prevarications of our present political climate have more than a little resemblance to the period that saw the rise of fascism. Dance can be exciting precisely when it is not updated, not commented upon in the process of performing it. But, to understand such works and to convey them effectively to an audience demands a deep historical and theoretical grasp on the director’s part — one that might not have existed at the time of the premiere either on the part of the artists or the public — and an ability to translate that historical perspective into immediate artistic terms.

Graham’s scrapbooks housed at the Library of Congress seem to have saved every bit of ephemera concerning her career, all meticulously cut out and pasted in, probably by her mentor and musical director Louis Horst. They reveal her in advertising, popular culture, and the media as driven to reach a broad public throughout the 1940s, which she did quite successfully. But the media also manipulated her image in ways she disliked. By the end of the decade, however, Martha Graham had become a household name.

This was in no small measure thanks to the efforts of her dance partner and lover Erick Hawkins who first came to her work in 1938. In addition to dancing in her company, serving as a company manager, booking agent, technical director, and general factotum, Hawkins brought a knowledge of the myth culture of ancient Greece that was most useful to Graham. He had graduated with a major in classics from Harvard and read Greek. He also dreamed up the first scheme for fundraising in the dance world and executed it successfully. Their relationship, however, was in many ways a tormented one. Although Hawkins was demonized in Agnes de Mille’s biography Martha for walking out on Graham in London in 1950, the correspondence between Hawkins and Graham tells a different story.

The myth works of the immediate post-war era made an appeal to the themes sanctioned by psychoanalysis as universal, notably the Oedipus complex explored in Night Journey (1947). How could she reconcile a fascination with myth so identified with Nazi fascism — think of Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia, which also premiered in 1938 — with her own anti-fascist stance? This was a mystery to unravel. Her well-known interest in Jung only aggravates this question as recent scholarship has shown Jung’s involvement with Nazism during the Second World War.

Knowing that Graham was a voracious and serious reader of modern literature and psychology, I thought it possible to unearth a literary logic behind choreographic thinking in many of her artistic choices. But, could her reading be tracked? Of course, there were clues. Bertram Ross (one of her lead dancers) said she was reading Esther M. Harding’s Psychic Energy while choreographing Night Journey. Might her library have survived her death intact? Certainly, the publication of The Notebooks of Martha Graham (1973) was a strong indication that her choreography was linked to a practice of writing and reading, even though the Notebooks are often quite difficult to decipher.

Also key to Graham’s work of the immediate postwar era were Otto Rank and Erich Fromm. She had actually consulted with Fromm — and some say had an affair with him — in 1946. Although her connection to Freud is often touted, Graham was much more up to date: she was a choreographic post-Freudian. Her myth works dealt with the cultural value of incest, the demystification of the Oedipus conflict, and the revalorization of the mother in psychoanalytic theory, something principally attributed in psychoanalytic literature to Rank’s The Trauma of Birth. Although Graham did read Jung, one should differentiate between the influence of psychology and psychoanalysis in her work. She underwent an extended analysis with Frances G. Wickes, a prominent New York Jungian, in the early fifties. Paradoxically, her analytic experience did not lead to further myth works but to her only anti-myth work, Voyage (1953). All but disappeared from the annals of Graham performance, yet Voyage (retitled Theater for Voyage in 1955) set to a score by William Schuman deserves to be rediscovered – perhaps even on the stage.

Mark Franko is Professor of Dance at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Director of the Center for Visual and Performance Studies, and Editor of Dance Research Journal. He is the author of Martha Graham in Love and War: The Life in the Work.

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There / was a star danced and under that was I born.
Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing, Act II, sc.i

I am writing this on Shakespeare’s birthday, April 23rd, and it strikes me how apposite are Beatrice’s words in Much Ado to the birth, on 10 September 1896, of Adele Marie Austerlitz — later Adele Astaire — a personality and a performer of infinite, inextinguishable and irresistible mirth. In London in the 1920s, she was depicted as a misplaced Shakespearean sprite who “should be dancing by glow-worm light under entranced trees on a midsummer eve with a rout of elves, after drinking rose-dew.”

The name Astaire has become synonymous with the most sublime expression of the Terpsichorean art and a metaphor for ‘effortless’ perfection in any field of endeavour. (I have heard it said, for instance, that Roger Federer is the ‘Astaire of tennis’.) The Astaire being invoked on such occasions is, of course, Fred, creator of scores of imaginative dance masterpieces on film. But the name Astaire was not always celebrated in the singular. Adele was Fred’s elder sister and his first dancing partner. Throughout their twenty-five-year theatrical career, she was considered the more naturally gifted and the greater star. There is no film record of their work together and Adele’s retirement from the stage almost immediately preceded Fred’s first tentative foray into Hollywood. As a consequence, Adele, one of the original pop icons of the twentieth century, has not achieved the lasting universal fame of her brother.

Is it then, as some may surmise, a forlorn, even futile quest to try to penetrate the essence of a performer, especially a dancer whose artistry was never captured on film — one said to have possessed the combustive, elusive properties of a lilac flame? The performance historian should not be easily deterred by the apparent or actual impossibility of the task. In Adele’s case there is no shortage of first-hand accounts of her peculiar alchemy and, as her most ardent admirers included some of the greatest literary talents of the twentieth century, these accounts are nothing if not evocative and brimming with insight and immediacy. Moreover, they emanate from the power of live theatre to leave a deep impression on the collective and individual memory. The point is not even how accurately they describe Adele’s dancing technique and style but, rather, how revealing they are of a genuine phenomenon in the cultural imagination of the period. There is no guarantee that a filmed live performance could communicate the Astaire magic, which was intimately entwined in the here and now, or that such footage would not prove anti-climactic. Perhaps it’s better to let our imaginations feast on the vivid eyewitness accounts of those who breathed the selfsame air as Fred and Adele inside theatres and on nights long gone.


• Adele Astaire in Funny Face

   

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• Adele the Clown

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/astairess2.jpg

• Fred and Adele

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/astairess3.jpg

• Still dancing

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/astairess4.jpg

• The Astaires

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/astairess5.jpg

Adele was a natural dancer who could be graceful and clownish at the same time, but what those who saw her on stage describe is not so much her dancing genius as the sheer, triumphant force of personality. George Jean Nathan defined her presence as “a dozen Florestan cocktails filtered through silk” and said she had “the air of a Peck’s Bad Girl being blown hither and thither by a hundred powerful electric fans … a figure come out of Degas to a galloping ragtime tune.” But perhaps the critic in 1919 who used the analogy of a lilac flame put it best — a lilac flame burns vigorously from the life-giving elements of potassium and oxygen.

The date chosen for International Dance Day, April 29th, commemorates the birthday of Jean-George Noverre (1727-1810), the creator of modern ballet. In his Letters on Dancing, Noverre wrote:

Dancing is possessed of all the advantages of a beautiful language, yet it is not sufficient to know the alphabet alone. But when a man of genius arranges the letters to form words and connects the words to form sentences, it will cease to be dumb; it will speak with both strength and energy; and then ballets will share with the best plays the merits of affecting and moving.

One of the two main qualities that distinguished Adele and Fred’s dancing was its eloquence and narrative power. When they made their London debut in Stop Flirting in 1923, Francis Birrell, writing in the Nation and Athenaeum, said they “uttered the least important word with every inch of their bodies, never being content with the employment of the essential extremities – tongue, hand, or foot.” Of Fred, the Birmingham Post reported, “he has not only winged heels, but winged arms and winged back” and, of Adele, “hers is not only the poetry of motion but its wit, its malice, its humour.” The Birmingham Dispatch provided an account of the mesmeric, transporting quality of the siblings’ richly nuanced somatic vocabulary: “Their humour lies in gesture, their attraction in the power to set us dancing with them, to send us in spirit, twirling and striding and frolicking in glorious abandon.” Which brings us to their other main distinguishing quality – delight; a warmth and openness and something intrinsically joyful and forward-looking. The Astaires in fact exemplified F. Scott Fitzgerald’s fundamentally romantic if elegiac conception of America as “a willingness of the heart.”

The best dancing tells us a story, illuminates a character or psyche, enables us to see the inner workings of music in motion, and above all, touches and exhilarates us at a profoundly human, elemental level — even as its exponents perform physical feats which seem preternatural or indeed divinely inspired. As I began, so I end with the Bard. Laurence Olivier described Shakespeare as “the nearest thing in incarnation to the eye of God.” Perhaps it could be said that the likes of the Astaires, of whom one London critic observed “they almost ceased to be human beings to become, as it were, translated into denizens of an Elizabethan forest,” are the nearest thing in incarnation to the music and laughter of God – the literal embodiment of a deep, redemptive joyfulness.

Born in Australia and educated at Sydney and Oxford Universities, Kathleen Riley is a classical scholar and modern theater historian. At Oxford in 2008 she convened the first international conference on the art and legacy of Fred Astaire. She is the author of the new book The Astaires: Fred & Adele.

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Though music plays a significant role within Charles Dickens’s novels — as various characters’ personalities are defined by their fondness for song — music has also proven a central element of the larger legacy surrounding Dickens’s works. From the Victorian period onward, music has been used as a medium for the adaptation of Dickens’s texts. Paul Schlicke recounts that numerous composers in the nineteenth century wrote instrumental movements and parlor songs based on Dickens’s novels and characters, and James T. Lightwood includes a catalog of these songs in the appendix to his text, Charles Dickens and Music. Such tunes include “The Pickwick Quadrille” by Fred Ravellin, the “Barnaby Rudge Tarantelle” and the “Little Dorrit Serenade,” both by Clementine Ward, “The Nicholas Nickleby Quadrille and Nickleby Gallop” by Sydney Vernon, and countless waltzes, ballads, and comic songs based on the characters of Little Nell and Dolly Varden. This proliferation of Dickensian songs is a testament to the author’s unprecedented popularity. It is also a testament to certain qualities in the characters themselves which seem to transcend traditional discourse and elevate these individuals to a more melodious medium of expression.

Whereas nineteenth-century musical variations on Dickens took the form of individual songs or movements based on various Dickensian characters, twentieth- and twenty-first century adaptations have often taken the form of stage and film musicals. Though this format diverges from the ballads of the nineteenth century, the emphasis on the passionate traits of Dickens’s characters remains the same. Emotional catharsis is a central element of musical theatre. In the opening pages to his book on the history of the American musical, Scott Miller states that “the extreme, unapologetic emotionalism of musical theatre offers audiences a much needed release. Only in musical theatre can those big emotions be adequately expressed.” This idea of unreserved emotional catharsis likewise seems fundamental to Dickens’ prose style; The Oxford Reader’s Companion to Dickens mentions that “Dickens was famous—later notorious—for his willingness to play on readers’ heartstrings.” Dickens was not simply trying to manipulate his audience, however. He too invested himself emotionally in the tribulations of his characters, most notoriously in the case of Little Nell, whose death left her creator devastated. Though Aldous Huxley attacked Dickens’ writings as a primary example of what he called “vulgarity” in literature, the very qualities that Huxley and others decry as excessive are the same qualities that make Dickens so suitable for musical adaptation.

The basic principles behind the cathartic presentation of large emotions through song in musical theatre is similar to the catharses that Dickens creates in his novels through his emotionally unrestrained prose style, save of course for the obvious fact that musicals utilize melodies and lyrics instead of narration and dialogue. It is emotion that dictates the use and placement of music in a musical, for songs are most effective if they occur at emotional highpoints: audience members would not believe that the hills were alive with the sound of music if Maria were merely talking about the scenery, nor would they understand the centrality of tradition to the people of Anatevka if the townspeople used speech to describe this critical facet of their daily lives. Dickens’s appropriateness as a source for musical adaptation becomes all the more apparent when one considers just how many emotional peaks can be found in a single Dickens novel. Whereas the process of “spotting” opportunities for songs is difficult if the story being told is one that lacks emotional resonance, Dickens’s works seem to automatically lend themselves to such a process. The emotional climaxes in Dickens are so overt to begin with that having the characters shift from speaking to singing in a musical adaptation of a Dickens novel feels almost natural: the justification for the song is evident to the librettist from the passion that the author has incorporated into his narrative.

Each of the following Dickensian novels has been adapted into a musical at least once: The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop, A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, Hard Times, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations and The Mystery of Edwin Drood. While the sheer abundance of Dickensian musicals is striking, the variety of these adaptations is even more striking. Novels by Dickens have served as the inspiration for many different types of musicals, and several Dickensian musical adaptations reflect various trends in musical theatre during specific periods in the history of the genre: Oliver!, a book show, was written during the golden age of the Broadway musical; Smike, a pop musical adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby, was written in the wake of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s early “rock musicals,” such as Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat; and the highly experimental Drood was written in the innovative era of the concept musical. The realization that Dickensian source material could be employed in such a wide variety of ways by such a wide variety of writers is again indicative of the author’s adaptability, and, moreover, his suitability, for the musical genre.

Perhaps the most appropriate musical format for a Dickensian novel is the English mega-musical, as defined and perfected by Lloyd Webber and his European counterparts. The connections between the Dickensian musical and the mega-musical run deep given the centrality of Oliver! to the emergence of the postwar British musical. Oliver!’s influence on the mega-musical movement would extend beyond the advent of Lloyd Webber, particularly given Oliver!’s status as a personal favorite of mega-musical impresario Sir Cameron Mackintosh. Oliver! even helped to serve as the inspiration for one of the most successful mega-musicals ever produced; Mackintosh once related that when composer Alain Boublil went to see a revival of Oliver! in 1977, “he said that as he watched the Artful Dodger sing ‘Consider Yourself,’ the character of Gavroche from Les Miz suddenly just jumped into his head.”  Ironically, just as musical adaptations shaped the trajectory of the popular perception of Dickens by underscoring his boisterous emotionalism, Dickens himself has shaped the trajectory of British musical theater.

Marc Napolitano is Assistant Professor of English at the United States Military Academy, West Point, NY. He attained his Ph.D. in English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2009. He has published articles on musical and operatic adaptations of Dickens in journals such as Dickens Studies Annual, Studies in Musical Theatre, and Neo-Victorian Studies. English: The Journal of the English Association has enabled free access for a limited time to Napolitano’s article, “Singing Christmas Carols: The Dickensian Musical Vs. The Dickensian Mega-Musical”.

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