Shakespeare and the American Musical (review)

For nearly a century, the plays of William Shakespeare have inspired American musicals. These adaptations (nearly twenty-five to date) range from the securely canonized Kiss Me, Kate (1948) and West Side Story (1957), to the more obscure Play On! (1997), to the all-but-forgotten Swingin' the Dream (1930). While some theatre historians have recognized "The Shakespeare Musical" as a legitimate category of study, only a few of these musical works have received significant scholarly consideration. Research on the genre as a whole has been scant. Francis Teague's 2006 publication Shakespeare and the American Popular Stage offers a brief survey of the genre, but also considers other ways in which Shakespeare's plays have inhabited American popular discourse. Many of her case studies center upon entertainments that are distinctly nonmusical. Teague's study notwithstanding, the dearth of scholarship on the topic is curious: the Shakespeare musical has, after all, undergone something of a renaissance lately, with composers and librettists taking a renewed interest in musicalizing the Bard's properties after a respite of almost ten years. The Off-Broadway and regional success of new works like Peter Mills's Illyria and Matt Sax's Venice suggests that the Shakespeare musical is alive and well; taking pause to consider its origins and evolution is, therefore, both appropriate and timely.

Irene Dash's Shakespeare and the American Musical, which offers the first concentrated study of the Shakespeare musical, promises to do just this. Dash approaches her work from the perspective of a seasoned Shakespeare interpreter and musical theatre enthusiast. Literary scholars have praised her previous work, in which she places feminist readings of Shakespeare's plays in conversation with their production histories. Shakespeare and the American Musical draws upon Dash's vast knowledge of the Bard's catalogue and her fondness for the musical to mark the author's first foray into musical theatre scholarship.

Dash contends that the first creators of the American musical looked to Shakespeare for inspiration, since several of his works (such as Romeo and Juliet, among others) call for music and dance. The Bard's plays therefore were not only well-suited for musicalization, but also served as a kind of antecedent to the musical, a genre that would utilize similar theatrical tools, Dash notes, but in a decidedly different manner: "Whereas dance, song, and story had often been part of a Shakespeare production, never before had they all been united in a concerted effort to propel the plot forward" (1).

Dash limits her study to five examples of what she terms the "organic musical"—what most musical theatre scholars refer to as the "integrated musical." The works she chooses to analyze represent some of the form's most notable Shakespearean adaptations. In addition to the above-named Kiss Me, Kate and West Side Story, the book attends to The Boys from Syracuse (1938), Your Own Thing (1968), and Two Gentlemen of Verona (1971). Its considerations of these musicals are grounded in archival research and supplemented by the author's own memory, since Dash saw several of the original productions.

An underlying assumption (and de facto thesis) of Shakespeare and the American Musical is that these new musical works still belong to Shakespeare. Throughout the book, Dash tacitly suggests that the Bard's plays have been simply redressed and re-conceptualized to fit the model of the integrated musical and thereby have "enhanced the totality of his vision" (9). To further this claim, Dash organizes her book into a series of comparative readings, noting how each selected musical resembles or diverges from its original source text. The author peppers these case studies with biographical information about the musicals' authors, discussions of the sociopolitical contexts in which the musicals were created, and descriptions of how certain moments of action occurred onstage. Yet amid all of this information, her primary objective remains the same: to demonstrate how Shakespeare's genius endures within this new musicalized genre.

Musical theatre historians may take issue with some of the book's under-supported or...