By Jeeves!

[vtsuion]

Andrew Llyod Webber and Alan Ayckbourn’s “By Jeeves” is a fun, highly entertaining, somewhat understated musical, with a lot of funny moments. It recounts the silly misadventures of foolish young Bertie Wooster and his friends, aided (and humiliated) by his long-suffering valet, Jeeves. I saw it for the first time this summer as part of “The Shows Must Go On,” and I recommend it to anyone who can find it!

All of that said, it’s not exactly how I’d choose to adapt Jeeves and Wooster to musical theater. For one, the characters were quite altered from their usual loveable, if troublesome selves and, unusually for an Andew Lloyd Webber production, the music seemed to essentially be an afterthought. I haven’t done it much on here, but I happen to have a hobby of rewriting movies, shows, books, and the like. So, with no offense intended to the original, here are some of my thoughts on how I’d approach a Jeeves and Wooster musical:

• Make it big. Jeeves and Wooster could work really well as a comic opera along the lines of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro. Make it big and a little melodramatic, full of as many comedic misunderstandings as a Shakespeare comedy. I would keep it in a pastoral setting at a big country house, and add a grand central number: a whole-cast love song with everyone singing about the wrong person, and Wooster tied up hopelessly in the middle of it. That song can then come back around at the end with everyone singing at the right person.

• Give it more music. Webber has shown his musical range in Cats, and that could be put to great use with Jeeves and Wooster. Aside from the big romantic ensemble number above, I would give the leads their own styles. It makes sense that Jeeves wouldn't be inclined to do much singing, but in the musical he did a brief patter song, where he half-spoke half-sung at a rapid-fire pace that worked well and he should do more of it, going back and forth with Wooster and the rest of the cast. Also, he’s most likely a bass, so he could sing an absurdly low note for comedic effect at some point. And then Wooster can sing the sort of fun, period-appropriate tunes he might sing over the course of an episode of the television show. If you have the right actor for it, maybe even give Wooster a chance to play the piano. Otherwise, some jazz would be perfect to fit the 1920’s theme.

• Let Jeeves be petty. Though Jeeves at times humiliated Wooster in the musical, he didn’t get to be silly himself, whereas in the stories he isn’t above giving Wooster the cold shoulder for upwards of a month for the crime of wearing the wrong cummerbund (in his defense, it was crimson!). Give me a song early on about what Wooster should and shouldn’t wear, showing off Jeeves’s pettiness and Wooster’s stubbornness and letting them bounce off each other. This can feed into a larger conflict...

• Give Jeeves and Wooster more plot. The musical made some effort to have a conflict between Jeeves and Wooster, but it should be more central and have a little more time to develop, since they’re the emotional core of the show. Maybe start with them bickering over clothing at the beginning and have the tension build over the course of the musical, though there should, of course, be good moments between them too. I would have Jeeves and Wooster’s conflict parallel whatever romance troubles are going on among Wooster’s friends, so they can sing parts of the same songs, but while Wooster’s friends are singing about their love lives, Jeeves and Wooster can sing about their own conflict.

• Further complications. With everything else going on, this is probably too much to add, but I thought I ought to mention it anyway. One particularly interesting thing about the musical was that it had a nested narrative, with Wooster in universe telling/performing a story about one of his previous misadventures. This is a nice way to integrate Wooster’s narrative voice, which is a highlight of the stories (though it’s completely absent from the television show and that works fine too). If the framing device stays, I would blur the line between the show and the show-within-a-show a little more than the musical does already. I would simplify the plot of the show-within-the-show and add a different love triangle among the actors, both involving Wooster, of course, so both dramas can unfold and resolve concurrently.