Adaptation

Last week marked the completion of my first-ever attempt at adapting someone else’s work.

I wasn’t adapting from a book or a play, but rather, from a collection of songs that had been performed off-Broadway a few years back. The songwriter was someone I had met through a writing gig I got last winter, writing up a sizzle reel for a prospective new TV drama.

The material I had to work with (talking about the adaptation again) was fantastic. The songs were powerful and thought-provoking, the ballads beautiful. However, this didn’t stop this from being the most challenging project I’ve worked on to date. 

I’d always thought Broadway plays like Mamma Mia and Movin’ Out had it so easy - just cobbling together a story from already hit songs. What I discovered, though, is that developing a story that can make sense within the context of certain songs, and which allows expression for a range of different characters, is a major challenge. 

Working the music in without having it be too abrupt was a major challenge. (We're keeping it a musical.)

Having four different “lead” characters, whose stories all had to have interlocking beginnings, middles, and ends, was a major challenge (and it was also the first time I worked on anything that could fall under the heading ‘ensemble.’)

But what’s hardest of all in doing an adaptation is taking into your hands and heart something that was originally created by someone else. You wind up needing to be a lot more precious about it than you would with your own creation, since you don’t know which aspects of the original work the original creator is going to value the most. And when you do make creative decisions, you worry that the original creator might take offense to them or just be outright horrified at the direction in which you took their baby.

Will he be devastated that I made this character such a monster? Will he feel like my overall theme and message are wrong? Will he think that my representation of this particular under-world, which I’ve researched but not had any personal experience with, is laughably inauthentic?

Which brings me to the most difficult part of doing an adaptation - waiting to hear from the original creator what he thinks about what I’ve written.