Published:
Musicals take inspiration from all sorts of sources, particularly books! Lots of books have been adapted into huge Broadway hits that are loved the world over, while some popular books have been adapted into huge flops. Below is a list of books that have been source materials for musicals that are favorites of the Page to Stage Book Club at Northeast Library. If you want to read more books like these, come to book club!
The Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood (Cabaret)
The Berlin Stories are a collection of two novellas, “The Last of Mr. Norris” and “Farewell to Berlin,” that are semi-autobiographical stories of author Christopher Isherwood’s time in Berlin in the 1930s during the Weimar era and as the Nazis came to power. Through relationships with people in the Berlin demimonde, Isherwood explores the banality of encroaching fascism during precarious times and how suddenly and completely it can take hold when it finally does. The plot and characters of the 1966 musical Cabaret and its more famous and acclaimed 1973 adaptation come mostly from “Farewell to Berlin.”
The Bridges of Madison County by Robert James Waller
The Bridges of Madison County is one of the best selling novels of all time. It was not only adapted into a famous movie starring Meryl Streep and Clint Eastwood, but also a short lived 2014 Broadway musical. It tells of the short but life altering romance between National Geographic photographer and loner Robert Kincaid and Neapolitan war bride and local outsider Francesca Johnson when Kincaid is on assignment taking photos of famed covered bridges in Madison County, Iowa. In their brief affair, they must decide whether their love for each other is enough for them to radically alter the trajectory of their lives, or if in doing so, they will stop loving the things about each other that draws them together in the first place.
Fun Home is an autobiographical graphic novel written and illustrated by famed cartoonist Allison Bechdel. It details her unusual upbringing growing up gay with a closeted gay father, the limits of their relationship, his plausible suicide, and the family funeral home business they helped run. Both tragic and comic, Bechdel tries to make sense of and reconstruct her complicated relationship with her father and the how much she really knew of him. The graphic novel was adapted into a 2016 musical of the same name, winning several Tony Award categories.
Hamilton the book is an extensive biography of US Founding Father Alexander Hamilton that is so dense and wordy that Hamilton smash hit musical writer Lin-Manuel Miranda joked that it needed to be a hip-hop musical to fit the words per minute to get the whole story across. Chernow provides not just the events of Hamilton’s life, but fleshes out the contexts of his time and his life’s parallels to the creation of early United States institutions.
The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux
Serialized between 1909-1910, Leroux’s Phantom is a late gothic horror written from the perspective of an unnamed narrator investigating the details of a series of perilous events of Paris’ Palais Garnier Opera House 30 years after they occurred. A series of hauntings of hauntings is revealed to be the work of a polymath composer named Erik who covers a disfigured face who blackmails the Opera managers and secretly tutors an aspiring ingénue to take center stage in his new opera composition. It is a “True Crime” podcast of its time, a little pulpy, but a rare piece of gothic horror that offers sympathy and complexity to its “monster.” The book not only was adapted into the first popular horror movie, it also lent itself to the source material of the longest running show in Broadway history, the recently closed Andrew Lloyd Weber musical of the same name.
About the Author
Jeffrey G is a Library Associate at the Northeast Neighborhood Library. He likes to read about ancient history, contemporary ethnographies, and lots of speculative fiction. When not reading, he can be found visiting DC’s many museums, bowling, or seeing a new theatre productions. He also facilitates the “Page to Stage Book Club” where we read books that have inspired musicals, enriching our understanding and appreciation of both.