Reviewed by: Victorians on Broadway: Literature, Adaptation, and the Modern American Musical by Sharon Aronofsky Weltman Sooyoung Chung (bio) Sharon Aronofsky Weltman, Victorians on Broadway: Literature, Adaptation, and the Modern American Musical (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2020), pp. ix + 321, $37.50 paperback. Sharon Aronofsky Weltman’s Victorians on Broadway: Literature, Adaptation, and the Modern American Musical examines the Broadway musical’s creative and critical engagement with Victorian literature and culture. Weltman focuses on the intertextual network surrounding Broadway adaptations and their Victorian sources and explores other adaptations including plays, films, and illustrations. Beginning with the musical theater adaptations of Victorian literature produced in the “Golden Age of Broadway” in the 1940s, Weltman follows the chronological development of American musical theater, from musical comedy to integrated musical to the megamusical (4). This chronological organization allows Weltman to analyze each Broadway musical adaptation in the historical and cultural context of both Victorian literature and American musical theater. [End Page 662] Weltman’s extensive research bolsters her analyses of the literary and musical texts, helping the reader gain “reciprocal insights” to both texts (227). The strength of Victorians on Broadway lies in its attempt to understand Broadway adaptations of Victorian literature within a larger network of texts and contexts. The first chapter sets the stage for Weltman’s intertextual exploration of Broadway adaptations by providing a history of the American musical theater; a historiography of Victorian studies with reference to scholars such as Virginia Woolf, F. R. Leavis, Kathleen Tillotson, Walter E. Houghton, Lytton Strachey, and Richard Altick; and an overview of the twentieth century’s reception of Victorian literature and culture. Weltman examines One Touch of Venus (1943) in this larger context and argues that the musical “is a precursor and an outlier, illustrating an important conjunction of intellectual and aesthetic changes occurring simultaneously in the 1940s and 1950s” (53–54). Chapters 2 and 3, examining The King and I (1951) and Oliver! (1968) respectively, illustrate how these musicals negotiate each Victorian source text’s commentary on race, gender, and class for its American audience in the mid-twentieth century. “In The King and I’s mythologized Victorian milieu,” Weltman argues, “the white British governess represents in part an idealized United States” (56). Weltman’s claim that these musicals “use their Victorian lenses to refract contemporary American concerns” is more clearly demonstrated in Oliver! (56). Oliver! carefully downplayed the Jewishness of Fagin to address concerns of post–World War II audiences and recreated him, “a virulent anti-Semitic stereotype, in a way that makes the character likable while still utterly recognizable” (92). Weltman rightly acknowledges that this is a great example of an adaptation affecting the public view of its source text. At the heart of Weltman’s argument is the contention that Broadway’s perception of the Victorian equals Dickensian. She not only discusses the musicals adapted directly from Charles Dickens’s works, Oliver! and The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1985), but more interestingly finds influences of Dickens in other musicals based on Victorian texts, such as Sweeney Todd (1979) and Jekyll and Hyde: The Musical (1997). In chapter 4, Weltman provides insight into Sweeney Todd’s relation to Victorian cultural contexts based on her personal interview with the creator, Stephen Sondheim. When asked about his idea of Victorian literature and culture, Sondheim pointed to Dickens—both the novels and their film adaptations (109). Weltman also examines how Sweeney Todd enjoyed a successful afterlife in opera and film, which also employed Dickensian features to ensure their Victorianism. In chapter 5, Weltman examines Rupert Holmes’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood, adapted from Dickens’s unfinished novel of the same title. She pays particular attention to the show’s metatheatricality, in which “Dickens, Holmes, the performers, and the audience as well as the [End Page 663] characters all seem to participate” (134). The musical actively engages with the unfinished state of the novel’s narrative and offers a do-it-yourself ending where the audience votes for a desired conclusion. This meta theatricality illuminates the inherent musical theatricality in Dickens’s novel, Weltman argues, supporting her central claim that “adaptations indelibly affect our understanding of Victorian literature and...
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Sep 13, 2024
Eric Sandberg 
Open Access