‘Doctor Zhivago’ Needs Intensive Care

Can we please get this straight, Broadway? Sprawling European novels do not make great musicals. Sorry, “Les Miz” partisans and “Phantomaniacs,” but whatever the virtues of those shows — and they are probably the best of the genre — they are mere patches on the originals. How could they not be? When you’re adapting a doorstop saga for the stage you’re obviously going to be making huge cuts. Usually this will mean excising the poetry, philosophy, and psychology in order to preserve a series of action highlights that will then stick out like angry pimples. The result is usually more of a medley than a narrative — Don Quixote’s greatest hits! — and thus unsuited to the musical’s work of grounding song in character and situation. Indeed, when New York convened a panel to come up with a list of the greatest musicals ever, not one of the top ten was based on a thick slab of fiction by Hugo or Stevenson or Cervantes or Tolstoy or Dumas or Dickens or Du Maurier. (Only two were based on novels at all, and both were American.) Original tales, or small-scale works like plays and short stories, generally produce more successful results, and give the librettist something better to do than rip out pages and jimmy the segues. Unfortunately, this lesson (despite being taught in many musical theater programs) has fallen on deaf ears at the Broadway Theatre — and I don’t just mean those forced to endure the overamplified mess that is “Doctor Zhivago.” I also mean its authors and director, who together have turned Boris Pasternak’s 700-page novel into a musical so aggressively awful it is almost sadistic.