In the early 1940s, Rodgers and Hammerstein adapted for the musical stage a nice, respectable play called Green Grow The Lilacs. Hardly anyone remembers, let alone has ever seen, Lilacs; however, Oklahoma revolutionized musical theatre. In a previous course we got a sense of how a 2,000 year old lyric poem about an artist falling in love with his statue (Pygmalion) morphed into My Fair Lady. We examine how composers and lyricists have transformed the spoken word and narrative into loverly songs.

No reading is required; however, enjoyment and understanding will be enhanced by familiarity with the underlying literary works, particularly the novel Ragtime, by E.L. Doctorow, which gave rise to a film and musical adaption, now running at Lincoln Center.

• Week 1: Candide from Voltaire to Leonard Bernstein
• Week 2: Edna Ferber’s novel Show Boat, magically transformed by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein into a musical masterpiece
• Week 3:  John Kander and Fred Ebb add song and dance to Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories, transforming it into Cabaret
• Weeks 4 and 5: Two musical adaptations by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick: She Loves Me, based upon the 1930s film The Shop Around The Corner, and Fiddler on the Roof, based upon Tevye’s Daughters and Tevye The Dairyman, both by Sholem-Aleichem (Sholem Rabinowitz)
• Week 6: First a great 1975 novel by E.L. Doctorow, then a blockbuster 1981 film with a stellar cast including James Cagney, and a beautiful 1998 musical, Ragtime