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“SEE HER . . . LIVING . . . THE IMMORTAL JO!”

Little Women on Stage and Screen

THROUGHOUT THE HISTORY of radio, television, and film, adaptations of Little Women kept the Marches alive for generations of readers and nonreaders alike, revealing what each era saw as the story’s most important elements. Adaptations transformed the story in subtle and not so subtle ways, emphasizing some plotlines and neglecting others, simplifying characters, and putting new dialogue into characters’ mouths. Despite adapters’ avowals of fidelity to the original text, each one reinvented Little Women for a new generation, sustaining Alcott’s story as a living text growing and changing with time.

The first adaptations appeared on the stage. With home theatricals built into the novel, it was a natural progression. Amateur productions in school and community theaters had flourished since the novel was first published, but in the first decade of the twentieth century, bringing Little Women to Broadway was first proposed. There was serious resistance, however, to the idea of moving the story of the March sisters from the intimate pages of a book to the public, commercial setting of the stage. A writer for Woman’s Home Companion summed up fans’ concerns: “To see the ideals of your girlhood, womanhood, and motherhood massacred by a Broadway stage manager who never, never kept a dog-eared and tear-stained copy of ‘Little Women’ on the bedroom stand . . . seems more than you can endure!”¹ Little Women was much more than a story. It was a sacred object, anointed with tears and marked with the signs of an engaged reader’s passionate interest. Would the play evoke the same reverence and deep feelings that the book did? Or would it be turned into a comic farce or melodramatic spectacle? For those who had cried over Beth’s death, cheered on Jo’s ambition, or smiled over Meg’s mishaps as a new wife, a new version could do irreparable damage to their fond memories.

No wonder it took eight years for the director, Jessie Bonstelle, to convince Alcott’s descendants to approve the plan of putting Little Women on Broadway. With the book still in copyright, Bonstelle conducted a long, concerted siege on John Pratt Alcott, Louisa’s heir and executor of the Alcott publishing empire, for permission to write a script and stage the play. He feared—as did his brother, Frederick, and his cousin, May’s daughter Louisa, or Lulu—that the play would “make a sacrilege of our home.” They thought of Little Women as their family’s story, making it “too intimate for the publicity [of] the stage.” Even after Bonstelle was able to assure the family of her reverence for the story, others remained skeptical of her plan. When she approached Broadway theater manager William A. Brady, his response was, “What! . . . That girls’ book?” There was no way it could make a successful play, he believed. Four weeks later she returned with a script covertly titled “The Four Sisters,” and he loved it. Only afterward did he learn that it was in fact the story of Little Women (parts one and two, as all significant later adaptations would be).²

The play premiered in October 1912 at the Playhouse on Broadway, with the Alcott descendants in attendance. They were pleased with the result, agreeing with the reviewer from the New-York Tribune that “the ‘real people’ of the book” were there on the stage. The script by Marian de Forest remained largely faithful to the novel, telling the story of four sisters who make their way through life’s ups and downs. Bonstelle believed that the play’s appeal would depend on its ability to replicate the experience of reading the book. “The moment we get away from the spirit of the author,” she wrote, “we lose the interest of the public,” particularly those who had grown up loving the book. Audiences agreed. At least one performance was reportedly stopped by the audience’s gasps and fervent applause when the actress playing Jo started the play with the novel’s familiar opening line: “Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents.”³

Jo lies on the rug and complains, “Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents,” the line that opened the 1912 Broadway play and brought the house down. From Little Women, Players’ Edition (Little, Brown, 1912).

Of course, the story had to be significantly compressed for a two-hour play, meaning that the girls mature rather quickly. The romances between Meg and John Brooke and between Laurie and Amy develop rapidly with little suggestion that Jo and Laurie might be romantically paired off at all. Only slight attention is paid to Jo’s writing or Amy’s art, resulting in “a glorification of domesticity above such careers as writing or painting,” as one reviewer put it.⁴ Nonetheless, most of the play comes more or less directly from the book and established a framework followed by many of the adaptations to come.

The family play was tame in an era known for melodramatic and sensational entertainment. Vaudeville and minstrelsy reigned supreme, while dramas were full of damsels in distress and stereotypical heroes and villains. One critic, who generally liked the play, warned theatergoers, “There are no smashing ‘dramatic’ moments; there is no ‘emotional’ acting; there is no ‘grip,’ no ‘thrill.’ ” An antidote to Broadway’s usual fare, it provided wholesome entertainment whose emotional pull seemed genuine rather than manipulative. As the Brooklyn Eagle reviewer put it, the play avoided “the conventional stage tricks, [making] us live for a few brief hours, the sweet and simple lives of simple folk, to share their sorrows and to delight in their happiness. Art can do no more.” Much as the novel itself had, the play made audiences feel they were experiencing real life transfigured into art. The play ran for 203 performances on Broadway and toured the country for two years. In 1914, it was the most highly valued theatrical property in the country because it drew audiences of all ages. Theatergoers must have felt much as the New York Times reviewer Adolph Klauber did: “Our hearts go out to Jo and Beth and Amy and the rest of them quite as much as they did in the old days when we begged for ‘five minutes more to finish the chapter.’ ”⁵

HOT ON THE HEELS of the Broadway play’s success, two new adaptations appeared in the 1910s: a silent film opened in Britain in 1917 and another in the United States in 1918. Sadly, both are lost. The U.S. film, made by William A. Brady and based on the De Forest play, was filmed in Concord, using Orchard House, by then a historic home open to the public, for exterior shots and as the model for interior shots. In addition, Bonstelle again staged the play in New York and in London in 1919. During the 1920s, although the copyright expired in 1925 and the novel ranked above the Bible in popularity, adaptations of Little Women dried up.⁶ During the Roaring Twenties, the era of flappers and all things new and young, audiences weren’t particularly interested in looking backward. Nostalgia had become passé.

However, as the worldwide economy faltered in the 1930s, Little Women regained its prominence. With the Depression weighing heavily on their minds, readers and audiences yearned for an escape to simpler times and wanted to recapture the lost innocence exemplified by the March family. During the 1930s Little Women was a perpetually best-selling book in England and America. Revivals of De Forest’s play were staged on Broadway in 1931 and 1932, and in 1939 it appeared in the newly minted medium of television. Meanwhile, community productions flourished across the United States and Britain, and six new theatrical adaptations appeared. These again tended to downplay Jo’s writing and independence while placing the girls’ romances center stage. Nonetheless, the story’s themes of deprivation and women’s work made Little Women newly relevant during the 1930s.⁷

The revival was nowhere more apparent than when the first sound film adaptation of Little Women appeared in 1933. Made by RKO and directed by George Cukor (who would later direct The Philadelphia Story), it starred a newly famous Katharine Hepburn. The project was initiated by the head of production, David O. Selznick (of later Gone with the Wind fame), who wanted to modernize the story and thus save on period costumes and sets. RKO was having financial troubles. Cukor, however, was adamant that historical accuracy was crucial to the film’s success, so Selznick conducted a poll to find out what the public preferred. Authenticity won by the ratio of three to one. About this time, Selznick left RKO in a dispute with its corporate president, and one of Selznick’s assistants, Merian Cooper (producer and codirector of King Kong that same year) was put in charge of the film. Cukor was happy to find Cooper willing to let him make the film he wanted.⁸

Although filming took place in the San Fernando Valley outside of Los Angeles, Orchard House again served as a model for the set. Exact reproductions were made of every picture and piece of furniture. The costumes were made to look as if handed down among the sisters, and the dress cuffs were sandpapered to look worn.⁹ Yet there were nods to contemporary circumstances, namely the Great Depression. In the opening, Marmee provides aid to a poor man who has lost three of his four sons to the war (an incident only briefly mentioned in the novel), and one scene shows the severe poverty of the Hummels, whom the sisters and their mother visit on Christmas morning. Later adaptations would gloss over the deprivation and hardship alluded to in Cukor’s film.

By sticking with the original setting, the screenwriters also had to capture the tone and feeling of the book. After rejecting various screenplays that made the story too sentimental or that diverged from the plotline of the original book, Cukor settled on one written by Sarah Mason and Victor Heerman. In Hepburn’s opinion, they had produced a “brilliant script, . . . simple and true and naïve but really believable.”¹⁰

Publicity posters for the 1933 film, directed by George Cukor
, played up its association with Alcott’s beloved novel.
(Photo 12/Alamy Stock Photo)

Despite RKO’s money troubles, the film was allowed to go over schedule and over budget. Filming was briefly complicated by a strike of the sound men, who were replaced by an inexperienced crew. Multiple takes, due to the poor sound, of Beth’s tearful deathbed scene finally caused Hepburn to throw up. “Well, that’s what I think of the scene too,” Cukor announced, and he called off filming for the day. He was initially worried that Hepburn wasn’t professional enough. When she spilled ice cream on her dress, despite his warning that they didn’t have a replacement, he hit her and called her an amateur. “You can think what you want,” she shot back.¹¹ Soon the breach was healed, however, and they would become great friends while working together on ten films, including Holiday, The Philadelphia Story, and Adam’s Rib.

Little Women was only Hepburn’s fourth film, and it made the twenty-six-year-old a star. Although she earned her first Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance earlier that year in The Morning Glory, she always insisted she had won for the wrong film. Full-page newspaper ads trumpeted her ability to capture “the best loved heroine ever born in a book. See her . . . living . . . the immortal Jo!” Hepburn had felt a special kinship with the book. She was Jo, her brother and Cukor both said. She once boasted, “I could outdive, outswim, outrun most of the boys around me.” She completely empathized with Jo’s desire to be a boy—when Hepburn was ten, she had shaved her head, worn boy’s clothes, and changed her name to Jimmy.¹²

Cukor took a risk in letting Hepburn play the tomboy to the hilt. Her earlier performance in Christopher Strong as an independent woman aviator was not well received. Hepburn essentially played Jo as herself. As scholar Beverly Lyon Clark points out, Hepburn’s Jo is a modern version of Alcott’s heroine who leaps fences, slides down banisters, and crosses swords with Laurie—none of which Jo does in the book. But Cukor’s risk paid off, and the public fell in love with Hepburn. Reviewers almost uniformly gushed over her performance. Variety’s reviewer summed up the wide approval, writing that Hepburn “endows the role with awkwardly engaging youth, energy that makes it the essence of flesh and blood reality.”¹³

A rough- and- tumble Jo, played by Katharine Hepburn, fences with Laurie in the 1933 film. (AF archive/Alamy Stock Photo)

For many fans there will never be another Jo like Hepburn’s, yet what felt realistic to her contemporaries now seems over the top. I have to agree with critic Kate Ellis, who notes that Hepburn emphasized Jo’s masculine traits at the expense of her nurturing ones. “Apparently a tomboy . . . must be constantly swaggering, stomping, thrusting out her chin and exclaiming ‘Christopher Columbus!’ ” Hepburn herself understood the character as requiring an exaggerated, theatrical performance.¹⁴ The result is that she overwhelms the role rather than disappearing into it. Her transformation from an unnaturally boyish young woman with an affected low voice into a wistful, dewy-eyed girl with a high, soft voice swooning over Professor Bhaer is also jarring. Neither Jo rings true.

The professor was played by Hungarian Paul Lukas, who makes him rather suave and vaguely Italian-sounding instead of German. Perhaps Hitler’s rise to power earlier that year had already made Germans suspect. Amy, who is supposed to be twelve years old, was played by twenty-three-year-old and secretly pregnant Joan Bennett. When she could no longer hide her condition, her costumes had to be altered and she had to be filmed from the waist up. Douglass Montgomery makes a much-too-polished Laurie, who is supposed to be fifteen; Montgomery was twenty-six and looked thirty. Jean Parker, who played Beth, also looked too old but still captured the childlike simplicity of the March sister who hides at home with her kittens. Frances Dee, at twenty-three, played Meg and was probably the most suited to her role. Yet as a prim, scolding Meg, she doesn’t make a lasting impression.

As filming wrapped up, it became clear the film could be a hit. Merian Cooper felt it might even be bigger than King Kong. After seeing the rushes, he thought the four March sisters “as charming as anything that has ever been on screen.” Critics were less sure of the film’s success. The story’s simplicity could make it a hard sell in “these practical, hard boiled times,” as one put it. Yet audiences weren’t as hardened as all that. When the film opened in November at Radio City Music Hall, it broke box office records. Three thousand people crowded into the theater, and another thousand gathered outside. Thirty mounted policemen had to be called in to manage the crowds.¹⁵

Katharine Hepburn, as Jo, instructs a noticeably pregnant Joan Bennett, as Amy
, how to act in her play. (SilverScreen/Alamy Stock Photo)

Ultimately, Cukor’s Little Women was the fourth-highest-grossing film of 1933, netting a profit of $800,000 though it cost only $424,000 to make. Moviegoers also ranked it as their favorite of the year. It was nominated for three Academy Awards—Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Director, and Best Movie—and won for the screenplay. Distributed to at least eleven foreign countries, Little Women also played to full houses across Europe. Critics raved, calling it “a perfect picture,” “an amazing triumph,” and “a masterpiece of Americana.” It proved to be a nice break for audiences tired of the racy content of movies overpopulated with gangsters and hardened dames. (Strict enforcement of the Hayes Code, censoring risqué or violent content, would begin the following year.) A reviewer for the Indianapolis Star admitted that he was expecting to scoff at the “painfully prim” film but found instead that this love story without sex “actually got the raucous ring of ‘come up and see me sometime’ out of our ears,” an allusion to Mae West’s famous sexual invitation to Cary Grant in She Done Him Wrong earlier that year.¹⁶

The film’s success caused a spike in sales of the original novel and spawned a range of new commercial products. Little, Brown brought out “Orchard House” editions of Little Women, Little Men, and Jo’s Boys, with pictures of the Alcotts’ home in Concord. Whitman Publishing produced a “Big Little Book” edition of Little Women, written from the script and featuring a still from the movie on every other page. RKO also made souvenir playing cards and an embroidery sampler featuring each of the March sisters—Jo holding a pen, Meg knitting, Beth playing the piano, and Amy twirling an umbrella. Madame Alexander, independently, also began producing her Little Women dolls. And fashions for women, according to the United Press correspondent from Paris, were being influenced by the film. “Old-fashioned loveliness” was in style once again.¹⁷

The 1930s and 1940s were also the heyday of radio, when families huddled around large consoles listening to quiz shows, variety hours, soap operas, detective series, and radio plays, including dramatizations of classics like Little Women. It is impossible to know how many radio adaptations there were, since broadcasts were not routinely recorded until the 1940s. One of the earliest aired on NBC in 1932, and two years later, Jack Benny spoofed the novel and the film in his skit “Miniature Women,” or “Small Dames.” In act one, when Beth complains of being sick while her mother waxes on about her being so good, Benny quips, “Maybe that’s why she’s sick.” In act two, his Laurie proposes to Marie Livingstone’s Jo, who responds, “I am a genius and I have a career that I must strive and work hard for. Someday I’m going to be famous, and then I’ll come back and marry you. It might be five years, it might be ten years, . . . it might be forty years. . . . Will you still want me in forty years?” Benny says, “In forty years even RKO won’t want you.”¹⁸ Although the themes of career versus family were subdued in the RKO film, clearly audiences were aware of the tensions that Jo’s character represented.

Between 1935 and 1950, at least eight dramatizations of Little Women were aired on radio shows such as Lux Radio Theater, American Novels, and Tell It Again. In 1947, Favorite Story, which retold stories chosen by celebrities, featured Shirley Temple’s pick, Little Women. Ranging from thirty minutes to an hour, the radio plays sadly diluted Alcott’s story. They tended to skip Jo’s literary attempts, Amy’s adventures in art, the girls’ plays, school, and work, focusing almost entirely on the girls’ romances and Beth’s illness. Some radio versions of Little Women featured the stars of the RKO film. Katharine Hepburn appeared in one in 1934 and reprised her role in 1945 for Theater Guild on the Air. In that version, Jo dismisses her literary success after Beth’s death. She tells her parents that what she wrote was “nothing,” while Professor Bhaer conveniently arrives and proposes to Jo as a crescendo of music abruptly closes the show. In 1949, when another film of Little Women was released, its stars would also appear in a radio adaptation.¹⁹ In the years between films, radio plays helped to keep Little Women alive, making the story a staple in the entertainment diet of Americans throughout the first half of the century.

AS THE COUNTRY emerged from the Depression and plunged into World War II, Little Women’s popularity continued to soar. Its Civil War setting and portrayal of women on the home front, making do while the family patriarch is away at war, made the story relevant in a new way. Little Women appeared onstage in London in 1941 and in New York on Broadway in 1944 and 1945, and was produced across Britain and the United States in community and school theaters.²⁰

In the aftermath of the war, Hollywood again turned its eye toward Little Women. David O. Selznick, who had recently formed his own company, still regretted not being at the helm of the RKO film and decided in 1946 that he wanted another go at it, this time in Technicolor and starring his future wife, Jennifer Jones. He had Mason and Heerman adapt their 1933 script and hired Mervyn LeRoy, producer of The Wizard of Oz, to direct. Selznick failed to enlist Cukor, who saw no point in a remake without Hepburn. The “magic simply wouldn’t be there,” he felt.²¹ Filming lasted for only three weeks before budget cuts and the threat of a strike closed the production. LeRoy, still keen to move ahead, convinced Louis B. Mayer, head of MGM, to buy the rights from Selznick, including the screenplay and sets, and to rehire him as director. A new cast was assembled with June Allyson as Jo.

Allyson, who had a girl-next-door image, was known primarily for musical roles in films such as Two Girls and a Sailor and Good News. (She would star with James Stewart in The Stratton Story, released just two months after Little Women.) Although Allyson was thirty-one when she played Jo, she quite naturally captured Jo’s refusal to grow up. Not only boyish in voice and mannerisms, Allyson was also delightfully off balance much of the time. In the novel, Alcott described Jo as “a colt; for she never seemed to know what to do with her limbs, which were very much in her way.” Pretty without being Hollywood beautiful, Allyson also more accurately approximated a character who isn’t supposed to stand out for her physical appearance. Nonetheless, Allyson’s performance has generally been seen as not up to the benchmark set by Hepburn. Critic Carol Gay writes, for instance, that Allyson “indicated [Jo’s] tomboy qualities, . . . but she brought little else to the role. (Her films, on the whole, have actually epitomized the whole artistic failure and moral vapidity of the popular films of the 40s and 50s.)” Allyson herself complained that she didn’t get many substantial roles and cited Jo as her favorite. “Jo is a fantastic character,” she said, because “she is determined to do something more than bake cookies.”²²

Meg was played by Janet Leigh, a relative newcomer who wouldn’t become famous until Psycho (1960), while the other sisters were played by two of the most popular child stars of the era. Eleven-year-old Margaret O’Brien, who was Beth, had already been in a string of films, most memorably opposite Judy Garland in Meet Me in St. Louis (1944). Elizabeth Taylor played Amy, although she turned eighteen on the set and had to don a blond wig for the part. This was her last child role (National Velvet had been five years earlier), and she played the worldly innocent to the hilt, looking more like a Madame Alexander doll than a real girl. (In fact, all of the actresses wore too much makeup.) Interestingly, the birth order of the sisters was changed, making Beth the youngest and thereby allowing Amy to more naturally grow into a fancy young lady during the course of the story. Although it took a tremendous liberty, the move makes sense, since Beth never has to grow up.

The four actresses became quite close during the filming, eating lunch together and gossiping about costar Peter Lawford, who played Laurie. The tanned Hollywood heartthrob had previously costarred with each actress, except O’Brien. The silliness that ensued irritated Mary Astor, who played Marmee. While shooting the scene where Lawford was supposed to say that a newly shorn Allyson looked like a porcupine, he kept pronouncing it “porky-pine.” Astor stood stiffly by as the young actors guffawed at every botched take. She was especially aggravated with Taylor, who giggled on the phone with her boyfriend while the entire company waited for her to finish. “I had never before encountered such a brazen attitude of a child actor,” she later said. Astor had been playing a string of mothers, including O’Brien’s in Meet Me in St. Louis, and she wasn’t happy about it. She had previously starred with Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon and been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in The Great Lie (both 1941). Being cast as Marmee felt like being put out to pasture.²³ Her lack of enthusiasm for the role or rapport with the other actors shows in her rather stern performance.

This publicity photo for the 1949 film places June
Allyson, as Jo, on top, with a gussied- up Elizabeth
Taylor, as Amy, on the left. (Moviestore Collection Ltd/
Alamy Stock Photo)

MGM basically wanted to remake the RKO film in color, so it reused the score and slightly altered the screenplay. Some of the same scenes even reappear, most noticeably the one in which Amy is reprimanded by her teacher at school. In fact, Amy’s drawing of her teacher was spliced in from the earlier film. As in the earlier adaptations, the so-called little women grow up awfully fast. There is no Pickwick Club or Castles in the Air, no dreams of the future, only a quick march to the altar for three of them and a sad death, of course, for Beth. The girls are turned into romantic objects pretty much from the outset. Laurie tells Jo the first time he meets her of Brooke’s interest in Meg and is clearly in love with Jo at first sight. Not surprisingly, MGM billed the movie as its “New Technicolor Romance” and “World’s Greatest Love Story!”

Posters for the 1949 film emphasized the love plots
in part two of Little Women over the novel’s
domestic and coming- of- age themes.
(AF archive/Alamy Stock Photo)

In one important way, however, LeRoy’s film is very different from Cukor’s. It opens with Jo jumping the fence on her way home while her sisters watch from the window, rather than with the montage of soldiers heading off to the Civil War as in the 1933 film. By 1949, audiences didn’t want to be reminded of war or deprivation. Instead, they wanted a colorful rendition of the home as a haven and source of plenty. The studio even added an elaborate shopping scene. Having received Christmas money from Aunt March, the girls head downtown and savor the offerings at the general store. They linger over the gifts they most want but end up buying presents for Marmee instead. The movie thus supported the idea that consumerism was the patriotic duty of American women after the war. They were to rebuild the population and the economy by marrying, having babies, and filling their homes with new products.

The March sisters look through the store window in this shopping scene
created for the 1949 film. (Moviestore Collection Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo)

It is perhaps not surprising, then, that in this version Laurie dismisses Jo’s literary ambitions. Whereas in the book he calls her stories “works of Shakespeare compared to half of the rubbish that’s published every day,” here Laurie complains, “I just don’t understand you, cooping yourself up in that garret, missing a lot of fun with me, working. And for what? For one measly little dollar.” His attitude makes Jo’s later refusal of his proposal (in part because he wouldn’t like her writing) more plausible, but her interest in Professor Bhaer is made even more puzzling in this film. The Italian Rossano Brazzi makes a very handsome Bhaer, but in a slick, Hollywood sort of way. He is nothing like the endearingly absentminded professor that Alcott tried to make him. And he sounds even more Italian, at a time when everything German was tainted with Nazism.

The biggest difference from the 1933 film was the use of color. In some ways it aids the storyline, highlighting the difference between an unornamented Jo, in her simple brown and blue dresses, and Meg and Amy in bright colors and frills. In their pink brilliance, Meg and Amy reflect the over-the-top femininity that came into vogue after World War II, which their performances also accentuate. Clearly aware of the image they are creating, Leigh and Taylor self-consciously tuck in their chins, widen their eyes, and talk in soft, babyish voices. Allyson’s Jo, on the other hand, is perfectly unconcerned with how she looks to others. She raises her chin, looks men directly in the eye, and speaks in a more natural voice.

Critics were not impressed with this color version of Little Women, however. They especially objected to its sentimentality, a charge scarcely leveled at the 1933 film. The emotions evoked by Cukor’s film, which stressed authenticity to the original era and story, seemed like wholesome nostalgia. But the showiness of LeRoy’s film smacked of mawkish sentiment. For the New York Times critic, the rainbow that arches over the Marches’ home at the end symbolized everything that was wrong with the film. Technicolor had been around for a while, but it made a story that audiences were used to thinking of as “real” seem false, reminding them of movies such as 1939’s The Wizard of Oz. Under the headline “Somewhere Under the Rainbow Lies Louisa May Alcott’s ‘Little Women,’ ” one critic asserted that color was “the principal fault” of the film. “Wash it clean of its phony colors, and you would also wash it clean of its phony emotions.” Nonetheless, some reviewers were charmed by the film’s old-fashioned focus on family. For the Los Angeles Times critic, it was “a gracious and warming glance backward at a way of life that is gone forever.” In Australia, the Melbourne Age reviewer, apparently overlooking Jo entirely, approved of the film’s portrayal of an era when families were tight-knit and “girls were girls and did not try to pose as half-baked men.”²⁴

The consumerism highlighted in the film also spilled over into the new market of movie-related products. Some of the tie-ins included Hallmark cards—one of each sister—a jewelry box shaped like the book with the stars’ photos inside, and a scarf with each of the four actresses splashed across it. Clothing manufacturers created Little Women–inspired dresses and coats, while advertisers used the film to sell milk, soap, and breakfast food.²⁵ Ultimately, LeRoy’s film did well in the United States and abroad, where it was distributed to at least thirteen countries. And, presumably because it was in color, it would become the standard movie version of the popular book, the one replayed on television for each new generation of fans.

AS TELEVISION ROSE to prominence, Little Women also moved into the new medium. In all, twelve adaptations of Little Women have been produced for American television, including a 1958 musical starring Florence Henderson and a ballet version in 1976 with Joanne Woodward. There has also been one adaptation in Canada and four in Britain. The BBC produced two miniseries in the 1950s, in addition to a 1956 movie, A Girl Called Jo, and a nine-part series in 1970. The last is still available on VHS tape. As a production of the BBC, it features British actors who apparently weren’t able to manage American accents, although the servant Hannah, curiously, sounds like a southern mammy. It’s also full of other kinds of nonsense, such as Amy refusing to say the word breast as she is about to thrust a dagger into hers while rehearsing the lines of Jo’s play. At the end, during his less-than-romantic proposal, Professor Bhaer tells Jo that it is a German woman’s duty to obey her husband. (Needless to say, neither of these moments occurs in the book.)

In the United States, Universal Television produced a two-part, four-hour miniseries shown on NBC in 1978. (It is the only television adaptation currently available on DVD.) Viewed as a kind of American Masterpiece Theater, the production was intended to be faithful to the book, even more so than the previous versions. The director, David Lowell Victor, said he particularly attempted to “avoid the Hollywood glossiness” of the 1949 film.²⁶ The star-studded cast included Susan Dey (of The Partridge Family fame) as Jo, Meredith Baxter Birney (later the mom in Family Ties) as Meg, Eve Plumb (Jan from The Brady Bunch) as Beth, renowned British actor Greer Garson as Aunt March, Robert Young (star of Father Knows Best) as Mr. Laurence, and William Shatner of the Star Trek TV series as Professor Bhaer.

Dey was twenty-five at the time of shooting and originally thought “too pretty” to play Jo. But she succeeded in playing Jo with naïve simplicity more suited to the role than the overstated tomboyishness of her predecessors. Perhaps by the late 1970s Jo could begin to be simply herself without having to perform an exaggerated masculinity. The scriptwriter, Susan Clauser, said that she set out to portray a new kind of Jo, not just a tomboy but a “woman who wanted to follow her own muse.”²⁷ Thus Jo’s writing career gets more screen time than in the previous versions. The miniseries’ longer length also allowed Clauser to portray Meg’s difficulties with entering into high society and adjusting to marriage, neither of which were touched on by the earlier adaptations. As a result, this adaptation is much more about sisters with distinct personalities and problems than about Jo with her sisters in the background.

Given when it was made, this should be the feminist version of Little Women, but it falls short of even Alcott’s prefeminist-movement progressiveness. Clauser claimed that she tried to give Jo “an open ending [that would] not clos[e] off her ambitions and her desire,” but it’s not clear how she did that. Near the end, Bhaer proposes, as in the other adaptations. But Professor Bhaer, who is otherwise rather adorably played by Shatner, unexpectedly asserts his authority over Jo. In the book Jo is clear that she will contribute to their income, saying, “I’m to carry my share, Friedrich, and help to earn the home” (something none of the screenwriters have dared have her say).²⁸ But here he insists, “The decision is mine. I will take care of you as I see fit,” to which Jo meekly responds, “Yes, Friedrich.” I don’t think there is a greater betrayal of Jo and Alcott in any of the various adaptations than in those two lines.

Reviewers were mixed in their reactions to this Little Women. UPI television writer Joan Hanauer summed up the general opinion, calling it “so sweet the flies may stick to your home screen.” Another critic dubbed it “the ‘Waltons’ of an earlier era” and believed it would live long after the era’s most popular shows, such as Laverne and Shirley and Charlie’s Angels, went into syndicated reruns.²⁹ A short-lived television series was spun off, in hopes of capturing the Little House on the Prairie demographic, but it lasted only one month.

Little Women was also adapted in various languages for television outside of the United States and Britain. In the 1950s, it was made in Italian, Mandarin, Portuguese (in Brazil), and Cantonese. In the 1960s, TV series under the title Mujercitas appeared in Mexico, Argentina, and Spain. New television movies based on the novel were also produced in 1973 in Mexico, in 1990 in Italy, and in 1999 in Venezuela. In 2008, a twenty-six-episode series that set Alcott’s story in the present day was filmed in Turkish and shown in Turkey, Bulgaria, and Ukraine. Three Japanese anime studios put their twist on the novel, the first being Toei Studio’s one-hour special that aired on Fuji TV in 1980. Based on its success, Movie International made a twenty-six-episode series in 1981 with Toei animation. This version, with a blonde Jo, was dubbed into Tagalog, French, and Italian and broadcast in English on CBN, the forerunner to ABC’s The Family Channel. The most well-known anime adaptation is Tales of Little Women, a forty-eight-episode series produced by Nippon Animation that ran in 1987 on Fuji TV in Japan and across Asia on Animax satellite television. The first half of the series diverges greatly from the novel, emphasizing its Civil War setting. The Marches live near Gettysburg, hide a runaway slave, and endure occupation by Confederate troops until their home is destroyed in the famous battle. They then head to the made-up town of Newcord, where they are taken in by a reluctant Aunt March. At Christmastime the Marches move into a new home, and from there the series begins to mirror the plot of the book. Tales of Little Women was shown in English on HBO in 1988 and dubbed into at least twelve other languages, including Korean, Tagalog, German, Portuguese, Russian, Arabic, and Farsi.³⁰

ALTHOUGH NO MAJOR motion picture was made for over four decades, the appetite for Little Women remained strong. When, in 1994, a fifty-seven-year-old Margaret O’Brien was asked if she thought Little Women was too old-fashioned, she responded, “I don’t think it ever was. I still get fan mail about it. People want that kind of film even today.” That year a new film of Little Women was released by Columbia Pictures. It had been the pet project of Executive Vice President of Production Amy Pascal since 1982. Her male producer colleagues had dismissed the idea of making a film of the classic girls’ book, just as William A. Brady had in the 1910s.³¹

What finally made the difference was that in the early 1990s, “it girl” Winona Ryder became attached to the project and a kind of rebranding of the film took place. Denise Di Novi (whose credits included Edward Scissorhands and The Nightmare Before Christmas) was taken on early as producer, with relative newcomer Robin Swicord as screenwriter. Australian Gillian Armstrong (known for My Brilliant Friend and Mrs. Soffel) was slated to direct. Despite the film’s all-female production crew, they were adamant that this was not a film for women only. As Armstrong puts it in the Director’s Commentary, Pascal pitched it as a family film for Christmas. When the heads of Columbia saw the final version, they were moved to tears, according to Armstrong. They realized it was “a film for more than little girls and mothers,” calling it a touching “epic family story.”³² To prove it, they increased the film’s publicity budget. Their gambit paid off. The film far outstripped the studio’s expectations, earning $50 million, even as it competed with Dumb and Dumber. It would also be distributed to at least twenty-two foreign countries.

Publicity for Gillian Armstrong’s 1994 film of Little Women
played up the novel’s association with Christmas. (Moviestore
Collection Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo)

The movie’s hip young cast certainly helped draw in younger audiences. Ryder was at the peak of her popularity. She starred earlier that year in Reality Bites and earned a Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination for her performance the previous year in Age of Innocence. Claire Danes, who played Beth, was known for her starring role in the angsty teen television drama My So-Called Life, and Kirsten Dunst, who played Amy, had just wowed audiences in Interview with a Vampire. Trini Alvarado, who played Meg, had appeared in Armstrong’s Mrs. Soffel. The role of Laurie was given to the British Christian Bale, who had made his Hollywood debut in the 1987 Steven Spielberg film The Empire of the Sun. Susan Sarandon, costar in the landmark feminist film Thelma and Louise in 1991, played Marmee, while the Irishman Gabriel Byrne, who had appeared in a string of modestly successful movies such as Miller’s Crossing, was chosen to play Professor Bhaer.

Armstrong’s film is the adaptation of the novel for most Little Women fans under fifty. It came out shortly after I read the novel for the first time in my twenties, and I have very fond memories of it. I was thrown by the liberties it took with the book, but I still loved it. The warm hues and candlelight, so different from LeRoy’s garish Technicolor production, evoke a time when families gathered around the piano and produced their own theatricals. One of my favorite moments comes after Amy falls through the ice and the sisters, back at home, are nestled in bed with a bunch of kittens. This is what home feels like, or, more accurately, this is your image of a home you never knew but wish you had.

The March sisters cuddle with kittens in a scene typical of Armstrong’s film’s
cozy evocation of home. (AF archive/Alamy Stock Photo)

Armstrong’s film catered to a nostalgia for home and family that was particularly potent in the 1990s, when the idealized domesticity of nineteenth-century novels seemed an admonishment to the “broken homes” then becoming the norm. A new kind of battle was taking place—not against poverty or fascism but against modern life. These were the so-called culture wars, in which traditionalists and progressives argued over everything from science and the economy to art and women’s roles. Christian conservatives promoted “family values” and a 1950s-style, gendered division of labor. Meanwhile, although women had entered the workforce in unprecedented numbers, they felt increasingly uncomfortable calling themselves feminists. Armstrong, a product of the backlash years, created a film that, in the words of the journalist Marshall Fine, “manages to be traditional without being conservative.” As the syndicated columnist Sara Eckel put it, the film was “a feminist story even Newt Gingrich could love.”³³

On the road to promote the film, Armstrong was clearly wary of linking the film to feminism, which had received, in her words, “irreparable amounts of bad press.” She was eager to show that she was not the man-hating type, nor was her film. She also hoped to overcome the impression that it was “a cute little movie for little girls” and to convince men that “there’s something there for them too.” She even joked about changing the title, so they wouldn’t be scared away.³⁴

It is reasonable to view it as a feminist film, however, considering the updates Robin Swicord made to the script. For instance, in one scene Jo makes a case for women’s right to vote, something she never does in the book (although she would in the 1886 Jo’s Boys, when the issue had become a more prominent cultural topic). In the film, when a young man tells Jo she should have been a lawyer, she responds, “I should have been a great many things.” Swicord gave Marmee the lion’s share of the film’s progressive speeches, echoing Alcott’s proto-feminist views in favor of women’s education and against corsets and double sexual standards. Details from Alcott’s life also creep into the film. Jo tells Professor Bhaer, for instance, that her father’s school was closed because he admitted a black child. (In the books Mr. March is a minister, whereas in real life, as previously mentioned, Bronson Alcott led a school that failed, in part, because he admitted a black pupil.) Swicord explained that she made such changes because she wanted to make overt the things that Alcott had to suggest “between the lines,” lest she dampen the popular appeal of her book. “I tried to write the film as I imagined she would have written it today, freed of the cultural restraints of the time she lived,” Swicord said.³⁵

The result is a film whose dialogue is nearly all invented. For instance, upon first meeting Laurie, Jo confesses offhandedly, “If I wasn’t going to be a writer, I’d move to New York and pursue the stage. Are you shocked?” (Although Alcott harbored such ambition herself, her audience would, indeed, have been quite shocked to learn of it.) Marmee says, “I won’t have my girls silly about boys,” and Amy reports that her teacher said in class, “It was as useful to educate a woman as it was to educate a female cat.” Brooke says to Marmee, “One hopes your girls will be a gentling influence,” and to Laurie, “Over the mysteries of female life, there is drawn a veil best left undisturbed.” In the book, Brooke is nowhere near as priggish as Swicord makes him (and Eric Stoltz plays all too well). In these instances, Swicord has made the conservativeness of the era more overt than Alcott herself did.

Unfortunately, while Swicord has opted for a kind of spirited nostalgia by both idealizing the past and poking holes in its prejudices and proprieties, she has also dulled the power and emotions of the original work. Here Marmee is the all-wise mother figure who preaches to the girls without ever acknowledging her own difficulties or needs. She doesn’t admit to Jo, as she does in the book, that she has struggled to control her own anger and that she needs the girls to give her strength after she learns of her husband’s illness. In the book, Marmee has heartfelt conversations with the girls about their futures, whereas here she preaches to them. After Meg comes home from the Moffats, she points out the double standard that condemns a young woman for having fun but lets men do whatever they want. Yet she never tells her girls of her hope that they will find worthy mates, regardless of wealth, or agrees with Jo that it is better to “be happy old maids than unhappy wives.”³⁶ Swicord missed an opportunity to pull out of Alcott’s text what was truly original and progressive in it.

Jo is also sadly diminished as a character. We see little of her struggles against herself, and her difficult emotions are limited to sadness at losing her sister. She is granted a burst of anger when Amy burns her manuscript (a scene left out of earlier versions and thankfully restored by Swicord), but Jo never discusses her struggles to control her anger with Marmee, one of the most powerful scenes in the novel. Nor does Swicord show us Jo’s guilt over exposing Beth to the Hummels’ sick baby while she stayed home to write. Sadly, Beth is also simplified. Although she is not as overly angelic as she is in the earlier versions, her painful shyness is barely mentioned.

On the other hand, Professor Bhaer, as played by Gabriel Byrne, is by far the most believable Bhaer on screen. He is not classically handsome but appealing in a romantic, teddy-bear sort of way. Armstrong indicated that they wanted to make Bhaer their “ideal man”: good-looking, supportive of Jo’s career, and great with kids, thus updating Alcott’s portrait of him (although I would argue this is exactly how Alcott wanted us to see him).³⁷ Unfortunately, though, as in the other movies, Swicord has him not merely supportive of but instrumental in Jo’s literary career. In the novel, she achieves considerable success on her own. Here she sends him her manuscript and he gets it published for her, robbing Jo of her independence as a writer.

Regardless of the changes, this version is clearly a loving tribute to Little Women. Many of those tied to the project had personal reasons for making this film. Pascal had loved the novel as a child and was named by her mother for two of the March sisters—her full name is Amy Beth Pascal. Swicord checked the book out of the library every year, beginning when she was eight. Armstrong was given the novel for her eleventh birthday and wanted to make the film for her daughter, as did Sarandon, who took the project despite her agent’s advice against playing Ryder’s mother in age-conscious Hollywood. Ryder said that she had read the book at twelve, and it left a lasting impression for its portrayal of the obstacles women faced in the nineteenth century.³⁸

Even as the filmmakers updated Little Women, they wanted to remain faithful to it, at least visually. Orchard House again served as the model for the Marches’ home, which is re-created with subtle, muted hues. The makeup-free March sisters look more like real girls and less like dolls or fashion plates. Dresses worn by the older sisters reappear in later scenes on the younger ones, handed down as they would have been in real life. Ryder was twenty-three when she portrayed Jo, but she looked much younger. Alvarado was twenty-seven during filming but she resembled the late adolescent Meg, while Danes was only fifteen, nearly the same age as Beth. At twenty, Bale was a much more suitable Laurie than his predecessors—much less Hollywood and possessing more of the awkwardness of being a European in an American setting. One of the most striking differences of this version is that Amy is finally played by a young actress—Dunst, who was twelve—but halfway through the film, she is suddenly replaced by an older actress, Samantha Mathis. Unfortunately, Mathis’s prim Amy contrasts too markedly with Dunst’s much more playful one.

The real problem, however, was casting the stunning Winona Ryder as Jo. Ryder’s petite, fawn-like beauty conveyed none of Jo’s coltish awkwardness. Although Ryder’s performance won her an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress, she, like Hepburn, was incapable of disappearing into the role. The line that Ryder’s Jo lost her “one beauty” when she cut off her hair rings false, as does Jo’s declaration that “I am ugly and awkward and always say the wrong thing.” Ryder simply can’t help being beautiful and, apparently, she can’t help knowing it. The way Ryder smiles for the camera or her male costars betrays her consciousness of her own beauty. She is the object of our gaze, whereas Jo is supposed to be the budding writer, the bumbling tomboy, who looks out at the world and has no interest in being looked at herself. There is simply no boyishness about Ryder, and Swicord never has her say the famous line about how she wishes she had been born a boy. Downplaying Jo’s gender ambivalence appears to have been a conscious decision. In an interview, Armstrong indicated that she resented the way ambitious women are stereotyped as unattractive and as seeking compensation for their loveless lives.³⁹ As a result, unfortunately, Jo’s resistance to the gender stereotypes of her own day is virtually absent. The only times Ryder evokes this part of Jo is when she is dressed in drag—wearing a top hat in the Pickwick Club scene (which none of the other films include), or a moustache and an admiral’s hat in the scene where they are rehearsing the play. In both cases, she lowers her voice dramatically and adopts a stuffy English accent. Ryder alternately performs an exaggerated masculinity (very briefly) or a coy femininity, much like her predecessor Hepburn. Neither suits Jo, who is supposed to be gawky and free of feminine artifice.

Jo played by Winona Ryder, whose petite beauty clashed with the gawky
tomboyishness of Alcott’s character. (RGR Collection/Alamy Stock Photo)

However, it appears that Ryder was so instrumental in getting the film made that without her, it might not have existed. It was her clout that helped get the project off the ground. Her commitment was motivated by not only a love of the book but also a desire to “inspire young people. . . . Young girls, especially, don’t have a lot of good role models,” she said in an interview. “They get underestimated by the film industry,” which assumes they only want “movies like ‘Pretty Woman,’ when really they . . . have been waiting for something that doesn’t completely insult them.”⁴⁰ In other words, Hollywood hadn’t progressed much since Mae West’s heyday. It still wanted its actresses to play call girls.

Critics uniformly raved over the film. Roger Ebert wrote, “At first, I was grumpy, thinking it was going to be too sweet and devout. Gradually, I saw that Gillian Armstrong . . . was taking it seriously.” Janet Maslin, in the New York Times, called it “the loveliest ‘Little Women’ ever on screen.” She thought Ryder portrayed Jo “with enough vigor to dim memories of Katharine Hepburn.” The British press agreed. The Daily Telegraph thought it a “sweet-tempered, joyous reconciliation of modern female aspirations with traditional female roles.” The Independent called it the “best screen version yet of Little Women” and “the most authentic.” An outlier was Stephen Amidon at the Sunday Times, who felt that Armstrong had failed “to translate Alcott’s resolutely Victorian vision into a modern idiom, leaving the movie caught in a nether-land between historical accuracy and contemporary expectations.”⁴¹ He’s not wrong, but he fails to consider the power of audiences’ nostalgia for a soft-lit past of sisterly affection.

Once again, reviewers enjoyed the film’s difference from Hollywood’s standard fare. The Washington Post imagined the film could “buoy American spirits at this time of spiritual impoverishment much as George Cukor’s 1933 adaptation lifted hopes during the Great Depression.” The Daily Mail’s reviewer thought, “it is a pleasure to attend a picture in which the worst swear word is Blast.” Syndicated columnist Donna Britt believed other reviewers’ warnings that “nothing much happens” were tantamount to saying that women’s lives weren’t worth making films about. She praised the film for “honor[ing] life’s small wonders” in a culture that is “hypnotized . . . by ever-more-wizardly special effects, stupid sex tricks and the ‘thrill’ of cringing at yet another creative way to kill.”⁴²

Audiences were as charmed as the critics, sparking a revival in all things Alcott. Within days of the film’s release, Orchard House was inundated with visitors, and a movie edition of the novel was launched onto the bestseller lists. Five other editions tied to the movie also appeared, while some critics complained of the trend to market novels based on the film as versions of the original.⁴³ How were readers to know whether they had read the real book or not? Alcott’s renewed popularity also extended beyond movie tie-ins. Even before the movie came out, Random House paid $1.5 million for the rediscovered manuscript of Alcott’s early unpublished novel A Long Fatal Love Chase, heralded as a “bodice-ripper” by the author of Little Women. When the book was published in October 1995, Stephen King reviewed it positively for the New York Times, and it became a bestseller.⁴⁴ In 1997, still riding the wave of the 1994 movie’s popularity, Alcott’s first (unpublished) novel, The Inheritance, was published and also made into a television movie by CBS.

THE LATE-TWENTIETH-CENTURY revival also spawned new versions of Little Women in other forms, most notably an opera by Mark Adamo, which premiered at the Houston Grand Opera in 1998. There had been an earlier opera, Evelyn Everest Freer’s 1920 Scenes from Little Women, as well as Geoffrey O’Hara’s operetta Little Women from the 1930s, yet neither was as successful as Adamo’s. It was subsequently shown on PBS in its Great Performances series in 2001, released on CD, DVD, and in book form, and performed in over seventy venues across the United States and in Canada, Mexico, Japan, Australia, and Israel.⁴⁵

As he wrote the opera, Adamo at first struggled with the novel’s episodic structure, which the film adaptations more or less embraced until collapsing the story into a romantic narrative arc. Adamo, however, was looking for conflict and narrative tension, which he found not in Jo’s choice of a mate or struggles against convention, but in her resistance to change. At a key point when he was developing the story, he contacted June Allyson for her insight. She told him, “Jo is about to lose everything—meaning her family is outgrowing her.”⁴⁶ This gave him the idea to contrast Jo’s desire for things to stay the same with her sisters’ and Laurie’s eagerness to grow up. The result is the most successful adaptation of Alcott’s novel, in my view, at least on a narrative level. The story Adamo tells does exactly what an adaptation should do: it opens up the original text and makes you feel like you understand it even more deeply. It’s not only a work of art in its own right, but it’s also in deep conversation with the original, as if the two are distinct entities existing side by side, each enriching the other. The opera makes you want to go back and read Alcott’s work not to compare or check for points of dissimilarity, but to reread with fresh eyes.

Adamo also provides the most satisfying union between Jo and Professor Bhaer. In the end, Jo simply extends her hand to him. No rainbows, no umbrellas, no formal proposal of marriage. But this is not an open ending. Jo has clearly chosen love, which has been extolled throughout as life’s greatest gift. Earlier, however, Bhaer made a point of sharing his progressive views on marriage, agreeing with Jo that women often do not benefit from it. Bhaer sings, “Too many men bind a woman in marriage like a groom strapping a horse to a harness. And too many women call that love.” Instead, Bhaer says, man and woman “should pull together.” In my view, Adamo’s Bhaer leaves William Shatner in the dust and even outpaces adorable Gabriel Byrne. When he sings “Kennst Du Das Land” to Jo, for the first time I could see Bhaer, played by Chen-Ye Yuan in the PBS performance, as a romantic figure. His gorgeous baritone voice is truly swoon-worthy, unlike the sentimental mooning of Paul Lukas singing to Katharine Hepburn or of Rossano Brazzi to June Allyson. (Byrne didn’t even try to serenade Ryder’s Jo.)

Reviews of Adamo’s opera were generally positive. Alex Ross in The New Yorker and Jon Rockwell in the New York Times both compared it at first to other “unadventurous” or “carefully conservative” operas that mix lyric tonality with a dash of modernist dissonance. However, they came to the conclusion that Adamo’s opera was, as Ross wrote, “a beautifully crafted work” and, in Rockwell’s words, “some sort of masterpiece.” For Anthony Tommasini, however, in his review of the Great Performances broadcast for the New York Times, Adamo had failed to marry the two styles. The modernist moments seemed “forced” and the lyrical passages “cloying” or “saccharine.”⁴⁷

Six years after Adamo’s opera premiered, another musical version of Little Women appeared on Broadway. Earlier musical versions had included A Girl Called Jo, staged in London in 1955, and one simply called Jo, which played off-Broadway in 1964. Neither was particularly successful. The 2004 production, Little Women: A Musical, was written by Allan Knee with music by Jason Howland and lyrics by Mindi Dickstein. Jo was played by Sutton Foster, then the new Broadway sensation who had won a Tony Award two years earlier for her performance in Thoroughly Modern Millie. The other notable performance was Maureen McGovern’s as Marmee.

By 2004, audiences had a new reason to appreciate Little Women’s evocation of the home front during wartime: the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As McGovern put it, “The story is very universal for all ages, but given the day, the war, and all those single families, women raising their kids alone with the soldiers away, and the economy in the state that it’s in, everyone is struggling, or juggling two and three jobs just to make ends meet . . . it resonates right now very strongly.” But apparently such associations were not what drove audiences to the theater. Instead it was name recognition and mothers wanting their young daughters, who had missed the 1994 film, to fall in love with Little Women as they had. The show was dubbed another of the “girl power” musicals (such as Wicked and Mamma Mia!) then popular on Broadway.⁴⁸

Director Susan H. Shulman said she intended to remain faithful to Alcott’s novel, but she had no intention of being “slavish to it.”⁴⁹ Indeed, while it is another loving homage, the musical introduces some significant changes. Like Adamo’s opera, Knee’s script rearranges the plot, opening with a later scene and then telescoping backward to the beginning, giving the story a more contemporary feel. It opens in New York with Jo reading aloud to Professor Bhaer a rejection letter from a publisher, telling her to forget writing her sensation stories and to go home and make babies because that’s “what women are made for,” thus manufacturing a heightened conservatism not in the book, as Swicord’s script did. Jo then retells the rejected story (with actors performing it in the background) to Bhaer, who tells her she “could do better.” Jo responds with anger, singing, “How dare he make me doubt the way I feel / Doubt that each thrilling page is who I am?” Thus Knee establishes the main theme as Jo’s ambitions as a writer and projects the conflict outward onto the editor who rejected her story and onto Bhaer, who objected to its violent themes.

The central moment in Jo’s developing ambitions is reflected in the song “Astonishing,” which Jo sings after she rejects Laurie’s proposal. She must be destined for greater things. “I’ve got to know if I can be astonishing,” she belts out. Yet Knee gives her only a brief taste of successful authorship before turning the story over to the romantic arc that all adaptations (except Adamo’s) have privileged. Jo’s literary ambitions are subsumed into her dull romance with Bhaer without any of the emotional pull of the novel, the opera, or even the films, which provided a broader canvas of sisterly relations and family rather than focusing narrowly on Jo. Ultimately, this version manages to diminish the story rather than realize it (as the films do) or deepen it (as the opera does), making this the least successful adaptation.

Reviewers were certainly not impressed. Talkin’ Broadway called it a “bloated, charm-deprived show,” and Variety faulted its “bland score.” The critic for the New York Daily News pronounced it “as mechanical as an Erector Set and just as emotionally arid.” But the Newark Star-Ledger’s reviewer decided it was an “appealing tuner [that] glows with wholesome spirits” and thought it would become “a mother-and-daughter must-see,” a rare positive line the show’s marketers hyped in their attempt to court a specifically female audience.⁵⁰

Within four months the production ran out of steam, playing for only 137 performances and losing $7 million. McGovern received a Drama Desk Award, and only Foster’s performance received a Tony nomination. However, a thirty-three-city tour was quickly scheduled, which allowed the show to recoup its losses.⁵¹ That exposure and the generally more positive reviews on the road made Little Women: The Musical a sought-after production. In 2016 it made its way to the U.K., and it has been routinely performed in community and school theaters across the country, making this the version that now introduces Little Women to many young people during their school years. The Jo they discover is more ambitious than she was in her previous iterations, but she is not as fully realized as in Alcott’s original novel. For the character that inspired generations of young women to pursue their own ambitions, we have to go back to the novel itself.

AS THE 150TH anniversary approaches, Little Women is set to appear on-screen again. An independent feature film starring Lea Thompson as Marmee and billed as a modern update will be released in 2018. Amy Pascal, now of Pascal Pictures, has begun a remake of her 1994 film with Di Novi again as producer and Greta Gerwig as screenwriter. As of this writing, the project is in script rewrites and may begin filming in 2018. A sure bet, however, is a new version from the BBC, coproduced with PBS’s Masterpiece and set to air in 2018. The inclusion of Little Women in the august series of mostly British literary adaptations is an indication of the novel’s status as a revered classic, but the cast is anything but stodgy. Filmed in Ireland, it features Angela Lansbury as Aunt March, Michael Gambon (most famously Dum­bledore in the Harry Potter films) as Mr. Laurence, and Emily Watson as Marmee. Known for her “raw and unfettered performances,” Watson’s last BBC adaptation had her playing a middle-aged mom having a raucous affair.⁵² Laurie and the March sisters are played by relative unknowns. Maya Hawke, as Jo, is a newcomer to acting, but is already a high-profile model and the daughter of Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman. Interestingly, Professor Bhaer is played by thirty-year-old Mark Stanley, making him the youngest of Jo’s suitors on-screen. For many, the BBC/Masterpiece treatment promises to make this production a Little Women for the next generation of fans.