Musical Master Class 3 — Adaptions

Posted in Musical Master Class |

Michael was invited by the largest Vien­nese musi­cal the­ater to write the the German-language adap­tion of Evita. That’s when he met the two most-influential per­sons for his career as a musi­cal author: Harold Prince (direc­tor) and Andrew Lloyd Web­ber (com­poser of Evita, Phan­tom of the Opera, JCS, and many other hit musicals).

Dur­ing long dis­cus­sions with the author of Jesus Christ Super­star, and through adapt­ing Evita in Ger­man, Michael Kunze learned a lot about Mr. Webber’s approach to the struc­ture of a musi­cal. He con­tin­ued to cre­ate adap­tions for many of the most pop­u­lar shows at that time: Phan­tom, Wicked, Cats, A Cho­rus Line, Into the Woods, Sun­set Boule­vard, Mamma Mia, and sev­eral others.

How To Write A Musi­cal Adaption

Mr. Kunze says, he tries to “crawl into the head” of the orig­i­nal writer…to think as he thinks, and to write as he would write if he had to do it all over again — only, this time, in Ger­man. Michael warns, how­ever, that it is not enough to sim­ply trans­late the text: “We need to account for the cul­tural dif­fer­ences between the orig­i­nal coun­try and the audi­ence of the adap­tion; that’s where I can make my con­tri­bu­tions. Oth­er­wise, I try to present the adap­tion as if it was the orig­i­nal ver­sion of the work. I don’t even want to be named ‘author’.”

And then Michael Kunze reveals a lit­tle “pro­fes­sional secret” that gives him a notable advan­tage in the field of writ­ing for musi­cals and musi­cal adaptions…

Watch the video here!