Shakespeare and the American Musical (review)

In her introduction to Shakespeare and the American Musical, Irene Dash offers a chronicle of her own personal experience with five musicals based on Shakespeare’s plays. For Dash, the fusion of Shakespeare’s verse and vision with the “organic” (or “integrated”) form of American musical theater that began to emerge in the late 1930s “tells the story of how American culture transmuted these Renaissance plays into a vibrant new experience in modern theater” (9). Dash investigates how “the American Shakespeare musical” served as a marker of “political and social change” (186). She brings an intricate and valuable familiarity with Shakespeare’s texts to this project. The book covers the following musical adaptations: The Boys from Syracuse (based on The Comedy of Errors), Kiss Me, Kate (based on The Taming of the Shrew), West Side Story (based on Romeo and Juliet), Your Own Thing (based on Twelfth Night), and The Two Gentlemen of Verona (a rock musical version of Shakespeare’s comedy). It is divided into five chapters, plus a brief introduction and a coda. Each chapter covers a single musical.

Dash credits the melding of Shakespeare’s plays and the American musical form with “providing [American musicals] with a sophistication they had lacked,” arguing that Shakespeare’s plays offered American composers “complex, multilayered plots with psychologically credible characters” (187). It would be more accurate to suggest that the American Shakespeare musical coevolved with the complexity of the American musical, rather than that one gave rise to the other. Many of the other psychologically complex musicals of the period that Dash mentions fleetingly (or omits entirely) such as Showboat, Porgy and Bess, Carousel, and Gypsy also developed during the period she examines and owe no recognizable debt to Shakespeare’s work. And while Dash explores how lyricists adapted Shakespeare’s verse structure to songs that would appeal to American audiences, it would have been productive to examine more fully the ways in which forms of music that came to be seen as distinctly American (jazz, blues, rock ’n’ roll) helped to “translate” Shakespeare into a contemporary context. While she uses terms such as “syncopation,” “off-beat,” “minor key,” “bouncy melody,” or “blues melody” throughout the text, she does not detail how these musical choices are relevant to the Shakespearean content. Examining more explicitly the connection between the rhythms of American music and the rhythms of Shakespeare’s language might explain why she thinks his works lent themselves so well to the musical theater genre.

Chapters 1 and 2 focus on comparisons of The Comedy of Errors to The Boys from Syracuse and The Taming of the Shrew to Kiss Me, Kate, respectively. Dash provides an extended summary of the action in each play for those who may be unfamiliar with the scripts before describing the changes that Rodgers, Hart, and Abbott made to Comedy and that Spewack and Porter made to Shrew (indeed, she does this for each play throughout). While she offers intriguing interpretations of many of the adaptors’ choices, Dash often omits evidence that might support her argument. For example, in detailing the addition of the tailor scene to The Boys from Syracuse (which is only alluded to in Shakespeare’s play), Dash argues (but does not provide evidence for the assertion) that the added scene in which a tailor gives the outsider Antipholus one of his twin’s suits contains a subtle reference to the growing political conflict in Europe. Yet the added scene also seems a theatrical device to ensure that the two Antipholus characters wind up dressed in identical clothing, thus explaining and prolonging the other characters’ confusion throughout the rest of the play. Additionally, in describing the transformations made to various female characters, Dash makes frequent references to the mores of the 1930s and 1940s without providing a larger historical context for that claim, such as the backlash against the sexual freedom of the 1920s, the advent of the Hays Code in 1930, and the postwar effort to push...