SCHC 450 H05 26474

EngLit, Humanities, AIU

Notes:

From the very first "book" musical-a play that told a story through its songs rather than presenting a vaudeville-style medley-Show Boat (1927), based on Fannie Hurst's best-selling novel of that title, the American musical has been engaged in literary adaptation. This course will range across the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century to ask how musicals take source materials and transform them. Each week of the semester, we will pair a source text with its resulting musical, and we will consider how plot, characterization, setting, and musical styles shape the thematic messages of an adaptation. Cervantes' Don Quixote, for example, was designed to be a satire of chivalric romance, while Dale Wasserman's Man of La Mancha (1965) recalls the Cold War aspiration, embodied by the recently assassinated John F. Kennedy, to dream impossible dreams. We will end the semester with recent award-winning musicals, Fun Home (2013) and Hamilton (2015), that adapt unlikely source materials, a graphic novel and a historical biography respectively. This course will provide a rigorous introduction to interpreting narrative through historical context, tone, and theme, and it will also provide an entertaining survey of the American musical.