Victorians on Broadway: Literature, Adaptation, and the Modern American Musical by Sharon Aronofsky Weltman (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Victorians on Broadway: Literature, Adaptation, and the Modern American Musical by Sharon Aronofsky Weltman Sara E. Lampert (bio) Victorians on Broadway: Literature, Adaptation, and the Modern American Musical, by Sharon Aronofsky Weltman; pp. ix + 321. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2020, $75.00, $37.50 paper, $37.50 ebook, £67.95, £34.50 paper, £28.60 ebook. Over the second half of the twentieth century, Victorian literature found new life in the Broadway musical. In this fascinating study, Sharon Aronofsky Weltman demonstrates how conceptions of the Victorian have been informed by the Broadway musical, which in turn reveals the theatricality of much Victorian literature. While musicals since the 1940s interpreted a range of texts, Dickensian characters and concerns recur, such that conceptions of the Victorian have become thoroughly Dickensian. Even as musicals adapting Victorian texts use them to speak to contemporary issues, Weltman shows, they more often blunt the social critiques of their originals or offer audiences a comforting sense of superiority relative to the distant Victorian past—with important exceptions. In Victorians on Broadway: Literature, Adaptation, and the Modern American Musical, the musical emerges as a major site of interpretation of Victorian literature and culture that draws on a longer history of adaptation and intertextuality. Each chapter focuses on a different musical, beginning with One Touch of Venus (1943), which took an 1885 novel as source material, but rejected a Victorian setting and [End Page 348] "establish[ed] its identity as a thoroughly Modern musical," unlike those that followed (47). From The King and I (1951) to Jane Eyre: The Musical (2000), musicals embrace their Victorian settings even as they engage contemporary concerns, raising questions about the cultural work of historical literary adaptation and the ways the stage is distinct from film. Victorians on Broadway is part of a scholarly turn toward more "rigorous academic analysis" of Broadway musicals, which are often "the only live theater most Americans ever see," a further argument for their scholarly importance (13). Weltman shows musicals to be theoretically complex and intertexual, "meta-theatrical" in ways that trouble conceptions of the "middlebrow" as "critically uninteresting" and peripheral stuff (230). Broadway musicals offer interpretive insights into Victorian literature, particularly in the way they have exploited its inherent theatricality in the choice of scenes and characterizations. These choices led to the most significant contribution of the Broadway musical, its thorough equation of the Victorian with the Dickensian, beginning with the runaway success of Oliver! (1968) and reaching a peak in the metatheatrical The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1985). Oliver! achieved a major departure from a century of adaptations of Dickens's novel that further influenced the direction of musical theater. Weltman shows how Oliver! undercuts the anti-Semitism of Oliver Twist (1837–39) by positioning Fagin as the domestic center of a sentimental musical, a feat further accomplished by key changes to the character Nancy. No longer the diabolical figure of the novel, Fagin now inhabits the fallen angel trope formerly occupied by Nancy, with his Jewishness captured sonically through klezmer stylings. The musical has changed the way the novel is read and underscores its relatively recent "canonical status," following adaptation theorist Julie Sanders (79). Since Oliver! musicals based on Victorian texts employ plot elements or characters associated with Dickens. When reviewers described Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1979) as Dickensian, Weltman explains, they were responding to its type of social critique. This was absent from its original source, The String of Pearls (1846–47), which was actually a failed attempt to imitate Dickens! Ironically, it is Sondheim's "costly middle-class, middle brow" musical that successfully "criticizes class hierarchy and the mistreatment of the working man" (117). Sondheim introduces characters—a Beadle—and characterizations—Mrs. Lovell's frustrated middle-class ambitions—that evoke Dickens's critiques of the law and class hierarchy while also resonating with suspicion of institutions and government in the 1970s. The Victorian world of Sweeney Todd is darker than Oliver!, a quality carried through other Victorian musicals, particularly Jekyll & Hyde (1997). In their treatment of gender roles, Weltman shows, musicals present a Victorian world much less complex and feminist than their...