LITTLE WOMEN

A raw team of producers, Dani Davis (an actress) and Jason Howland (musical supervisor to Frank Wildhorn), wanted to option the piece. When they partnered with a more experienced producer, the offer seemed more tempting. The producers then tried persuading the authors into foregoing the staged readings the Rodgers Award pays for (after all, they were heading to production now!), but the authors held firm, the readings were done at the York Theatre and were a huge success.

The subsequent development of the musical was less of one. The producers started demanding more, and–so Oler and Hubbard began to feel–more distortive rewrites, ultimately insisting upon entering the very writing process itself, keeping creative team members separate from one another, Jason Howland increasingly muscling in on the music until he flat-out began actually writing music of his own.

The readings of this version presented interpolations and adjustments not approved, sanctioned, or in some cases even written by Oler and Hubbard, over their specifically articulated (and theoretically enforceable) objections; their usually impeccable craftsmanship suffered as much as the actual songs, and the watered down score got an unsurprisingly watered down industry response.

Shortly thereafter, on the purely subjective view that Hubbard and Oler couldn’t produce the "big" score required for Broadway, an assertion that they refused to rewrite–and the premise that a work based on a public domain property need not demonstrate allegiance to anyone–the team was fired from their own, award-winning show. A small clause in the contract said it could happen. (Nick Corley, the director who, perhaps too late in the game, stood up for them, was fired too.)

They’re on the A-plus list of the new generation. The famed BMI-Lehman-Engel Musical Theatre Workshop has been their "home away from home" (as it has been for so many gifted writers, among them Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx, who developed "Avenue Q" in it) and over the last half decade they have nurtured three projects along there. (They’ve been members much longer, but their post-"Little Women" period has been an astonishingly productive one.) Being on the faculty, I’ve heard most of the work, even brought their latest, "Buddy’s Tavern" (based on the film "Two Family House" with that film’s screenwriter-director Ray de Felitta as their enthusiastic librettist), into one of the Master Classes I moderate, where the panel of approving luminaries consisted of Sheldon Harnick and–again–John Kander. As members of the advanced class, Kim and Alison have had their work consistently praised and touted by that group’s (these days part-time) moderator, Maury Yeston. Their stuff is courageous, artful and unafraid of big emotions–which are often realized with the subtlest of poetic strokes, capable of producing laughter and tears but a beat away from each other. But they can deliver the broad, bold strokes too. Speaking as a musical dramatist myself, I have often been made quite happily jealous by what they do. And the Rodgers Award has not been their only accolade over the years. They have been produced regionally and several times as authors of TYA musicals for Theatreworks/USA, the pre-eminent family theatre producers in the United States. No one works harder, better, smarter, more diligently,more professionally. No one is more willing to rework, rewrite, reconceive, reconsider. No one responds to notes more intelligently and thoughtfully. And while there is a small, select group of new writers just as good (some you know, some yet to be known), none is better.

Sidebar over. Let’s continue.

Who replaced Kim Oler as composer?

As the credit says, Jason Howland. Former co-producer.

For he did then step down as co-producer, to avoid, as he put it, a conflict of interest.

And then he married his former producing partner Dani Davis.

Mindi Dickstein, also a Theatreworks/USA veteran, was brought in to replace Ms. Hubbard.

The show being on a fast track to production (an out of town engagement had originally been scheduled for about six months after the firing, but was eventually cancelled), its subsequent score had to be written relatively quickly. (The original score had been developed meticulously over multiple drafts and seven years.)

It consists also of the song ideas. The song concepts. The song placement. The stuff that gets developed in tandem with, and often teased out of, the book. This gets into the gray legal area of "intellectual property," which is only definable on a per-case basis by a jury, so I won’t go there.

What I can tell you, as an expert on musical dramaturgy is this: when a songwriter or songwriters of a musical are working out ideas, concepts and placement with the librettist, the book and score "wrap" to each other.

That’s because songs "eat" book.

And they should.

Songs are not dropped into the book, but rather absorb the book–or take over from the book–at places of key emotion, intensity or thematic importance. This absorption bespeaks an integration so thorough that the absence of song from a finished script will render it unintelligible.

The "Little Women" book being thus preserved, or at any rate retained for a certain structural foundation (Allan Knee’s complicity in this must speak for itself), its new score, especially because it had to hit its marks at calendar speed, naturally had to mold to the points of emotion and exploitation already devised by the previous team. And of course, thus piggybacked on the prior work.

Decency happens, and very often, but it’s a gift and you learn to cherish it.

In the absence of it, what is there?

Well, if the producers had said, "You know what? Fuck it. It’s ‘Little Women’, let’s do our own," trashed everything and started totally fresh, they’d be able to assert, in traditional showbiz-is-a-tough-sandbox fashion, that "On its feet, the show just wasn’t what we thought it would be. We’re trying again." New show, new adaptation, new solution. Ugly, but fair enough. Indeed, Broadway has a small, but interesting history of similar occurrences. Each is too individualistic to provide boilerplate comparison, but for rough example: "La Cage Aux Folles" was originally going to be re-set in New Orleans, called "The Queen of Basin Street" and feature a score by Maury Yeston and book by Jay Presson Allen. The producers ultimately desired a more faithful adaptation of the source property, and the Yeston-Allen approach was put to rest. Jerry Herman and Harvey Fierstein started with a clean slate. (When Yeston and Allen were replaced, by the way, it was not without a small continuing interest in the show.) But in the case of "Little Women", use of public domain as a convenient smokescreen to remove the originators and hang onto their foundation sets a frightening precedent. And IMHO, the Dramatists Guild should revise its standard contract to prevent it being invoked in future. (By the way, Oler and Hubbard have no continuing interest, and had to settle for a nominal buyout fee.)

It’s not terrible.

What it is, mostly, is midlist. It emerges as the kind of watchable but forgettable musical that used to proliferate in the 50s, 60s and early 70s when getting these things on was cheaper.

Louisa May Alcott’s rich and lyrical novel has been adapted in a brisk, perfunctory manner that would give Cliff’s Notes a run for their money. Susan H. Schulman’s direction and staging is, likewise, dutifully sprightly and only sufficient unto the task.

The BMI Workshop…
Maury Yeston…
Stephen Sondheim…
John Kander…
Richard Maltby, Jr. …
Lynn Ahrens…
John Guare…
Terrence McNally…
Sheldon Harnick…