On Head Over Heels as Adaptation
The story of the creation of Head Over Heels is a story of adaption and revision. The first level of adaptation is of Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia into the book of Head Over Heels. The idea was conceived by Jeff Whitty, who wrote the version of the show that played at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 2015. Whitty is the most traditional adapter involved in this process, doing the work of transforming a prose poem into a stage musical. His adaptation, while queering Arcadia and eliminating significant portions of the long plot, stayed true to the spirit of Arcadia and more closely resembles the show as it opened on Broadway. That version was written by James Magruder, who was adapting not only Arcadia, but the script that Whitty wrote as well. Magruder overhauled the script, changing everything about it short of the basic plot; it both added and subtracted subplots, but kept the core story that both Whitty and Sidney were telling.
Paralleling the adapting and revising happening with the book of Head Over Heels, the same process happened to Arcadia. After Sidney finished the text, he was unhappy with it and revisited it years later. Though he died before the revisions were complete, there are now two major versions of Arcadia: the Old Arcadia, or the original text Sidney wrote, and the New Arcadia, which was left incomplete when he died. Many people tried to finish Sidney’s revisions for him, from close friends to his sister, who he initially wrote the poem for. But even these two versions of the New Arcadia aren’t the only adaptations that happened of it, as other people tried to fill by the gaps left in the revising process and write their own versions.
But adaptation can take many forms, and in Head Over Heels it does. Because not only is it a musical, it is a jukebox musical. A jukebox musical uses existing music as the songs in a musical, typically songs from either the same genre or time period, if not the same artist. For Head Over Heels, the music being used is that of The Go-Go’s (and select Belinda Carlisle solo songs). In including these pre-existing songs, they are being taken out of their natural form and adapted into something new. Authorial intent from the songwriter is lost, and the song is repurposed and shaped in whatever way the book writer (in this case Whitty, then Magruder) wants it to be. Songs take on new meanings, are sung by different people, and are put in contexts that can be wildly different from how they were originally intended. It’s doubtful that when The Go-Go’s were writing any of their music, they expected them to be sung by characters living in Ancient Greece (though our production is reset in the 1980s, Arcadia (the place) is an Ancient Greek city-state and that is where Arcadia (the prose poem) is set). But through the magic of adaptation and reframing a song, that’s able to happen.
Head Over Heels tells a story about journeying and ending up where you began, but changed. That is the story of the creation of Head Over Heels too. As each new level of adaptation was added, a new journey was taken, and the piece emerged out the other side with the same ideas and core values but different, with a newfound sense of identity and understanding of itself.