HOW DO YOU solve a problem like Maria? How do you catch a cloud and pin it down? And how do you turn a book into a hit Broadway musical? The Sound of Music, which debuted on Broadway in 1959 (the movie version came out in 1965), began with Maria von Trapp’s memoir The Story of the Trapp Family Singers (1949). The memoir inspired two successful German films in the 1950s, which in turn inspired the Broadway producers Leland Hayward and Richard Halliday to commission a stage adaptation by the playwrights Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse. Hayward and Halliday decided that rather than use the Trapp family’s own music, they would add numbers by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, the team behind Oklahoma!, South Pacific, and The King and I. The Sound of Music, of course, became a smashing success. Many other musical adaptations have proved that “once you know the notes to sing, you can sing most anything.” See if you can identify the novels, nonmusical plays, and even one book of poems behind these catchy Broadway shows.
1. The Man of La Mancha
2. My Fair Lady
3. West Side Story
4. The Phantom of the Opera
5. Cats!
6. South Pacific
ANSWERS
1. Don Quixote, the novel by Miguel de Cervantes.
2. Pygmalion, the play by George Bernard Shaw. The play itself is based on the tale of Pygmalion—about a sculptor who falls in love with a woman he has carved from ivory—in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
3. Romeo and Juliet, the play by William Shakespeare.
4. Le fantôme de l’opéra, the novel by Gaston Leroux.
5. Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, a book of poems by T. S. Eliot.
6. Tales of the South Pacific, James Michener’s Pulitzer Prize–winning story collection.