The Books Behind 8 Popular Musicals

Hamilton (Alexander Hamilton, by Ron Chernow)
The biggest thing to hit Broadway in years is Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hip-hop retelling of the life and death of Alexander Hamilton. (Please send tickets.) Hamilton racked up a record-breaking 16 Tony Awards nominations this year, and while Hamilton the man is a well-known Founding Father, Miranda took direct inspiration from Pulitzer Prize-winner Ron Chenow’s bestselling 2004 biography Alexander Hamilton, which he happened to pickup during a layover at an airport.

Damn Yankees (The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant, by Douglas Wallop)
The baseball-themed musical is a retelling of the Faust story, solidified in the Western canon by Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust. In both of those versions, a man sells his soul to the Devil in exchange for money, success, and glory. In Damn Yankees, a middle-aged businessman (and Washington Senators fan) sells his soul in order to become a young power hitter (and beat the New York Yankees). The musical is an adaptation of the hit 1954 novel The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant by Douglas Wallop, who also wrote the musical’s book.

Fiddler on the Roof (Tevye the Dairyman, by Sholem Aleichem)
An unlikely smash when it debuted on Broadway in 1964, Fiddler on the Roof takes place in a Jewish village in imperialist Russia in the late 19th century. The musical pieces together different stories from a collection called Tevye the Dairyman. Sholem Aleichem wrote and published the stories between 1894 and 1914, and in Yiddish.

South Pacific
James Michener won the Pulitzer Prize in 1947 for his atmospheric collection of World War II stories Tales of the South Pacific, launching his career as one of the most prolific and popular American authors. Based on Michener’s experiences in the Navy during World War II, it only took two years—about the time it makes the average person to read one of Michener’s massive tomes—to adapt it into the perennial musical favorite South Pacific.

Cabaret (Goodbye to Berlin, by Christopher Isherwood)
In the late 20s, young British novelist Christopher Isherwood moved to Berlin during its Weimar Republic period. He was attracted to the excitement and sexual freedom the city’s underground nightclubs offered, which he wrote about in Goodbye to Berlin (1939) a loosely fictionalized series of short stories. It was first adapted for the stage in 1951 as a play called I Am a Camera, but became a Broadway classic when John Kander and Fred Ebb took Isherwood’s story and made it into the musical Cabaret.

Wicked (Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, by Gregory Maguire)
There’s a fun literary subgenre called revisionism: famous tales retold from the point of view of a different character. Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead reimagines Hamlet, for example, and Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, is novelist Gregory Maguire’s telling of L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, but sympathetic to the Wicked Witch of the West. Readers, and then theater-goers, finally got learn how and why the Wicked Witch got so wicked. (Spoiler: It’s because of complicated family stuff.)

Cats (Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, by T. S. Eliot)
T.S. Eliot is regarded as one of the finest English language poets, and is most famous for his long works such as The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and The Waste Land. But his most enduring work was a lark—a collection of poems about cats called Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. Andrew Lloyd Webber put the poems to music and in 1981 Cats debuted on the London stage. In 1982 it opened on Broadway, where it ran for 18 years.

Fun Home (Fun Home, by Alison Bechdel)
Last year’s Tony winner for Best Musical is about a young woman growing up in a funeral home and coming to terms with her own sexuality while her father comes out, too. It’s based on the graphic novel of the same name by Alison Bechdel. It’s the first ever graphic novel adapted for the stage.