A Few Thoughts on Alcott as Broadway Musical

Last night I set about to live stream the first of the two San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM) Musical Theatre performances of the Broadway musical version of Little Women. The overall script for the show was by Allen Knee. Where the songs were involved, Mindi Dickstein provided lyrics for composer Jason Howard. The show was given 137 performances on Broadway at the Virginia Theatre between January and May of 2005.

To be fair about my personal bias, my preference for dramatizing Louisa May Alcott’s novel has been Mark Adamo’s opera, for which he wrote his own libretto. This was first performed on March 13, 1998 in a small-scale production by the Houston Grand Opera. The success was such that General Director David Gockley scheduled ten main-stage performances for March of 2000. That production was aired by PBS in 2001, and I first got to know it through the DVD release. I was particularly struck by Adamo’s keen sense of subtleties in the narrative, reflected through both the libretto and the music. I would later be fortunate enough to see this version staged at SFCM.

There once was a time when audiences never expected much depth in a Broadway musical. Stephen Sondheim changed all that; and it was no surprise that, after Gockley made his move to the San Francisco Opera (SFO), he would have selected Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street for a subscription performance in September of 2015, his final season as SFO General Director. (He also featured Adamo with the world premiere performance of his The Gospel of Mary Magdalene in 2013.)

screen shot from last night’s performance

Last night it was almost immediately apparent that the Broadway team of 2005 was a far cry from Sondheim standards. As a result, my attention was never particularly aroused by anything other than the imaginative set design shown above. The narrative followed the simplifications of Classics Illustrated comic books, and the tunes were innocuously predictable. I went into the performance with curiosity, but disappointment had overwhelmed me after about half an hour.