'Little Women' as Girl-illa Theater

Song of Sisterhood Is Now a Musical, Too

How do you like your "Little Women" -- straight and unabridged, as the classic book Louisa May Alcott wrote in 1868? Sung? Made for TV? Perhaps as Japanese anime, or an early silent film?

It's all on the menu, for Alcott's coming-of-age tale is eternally omnipresent in the culture, morphing across time and media, and it's been enjoying a particular surge of late. Mark Adamo turned the saga of the March sisters and their beloved mother, Marmee, into a well-received opera. Geraldine Brooks melded the family's absent patriarch with details from the life of Alcott's progressive father in "March," this year's Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction.

And as the natural cap to any true multimedia juggernaut, there is last season's Broadway musical, now on tour and opening tonight at the Kennedy Center.

"You don't think of the March girls singing," says Maria Powers, assistant to the executive director of Orchard House, the Alcotts' historic home in Concord, Mass. But Powers reports that the Alcott custodians have seen it all, from "countless stage adaptations" (many of them amateur and school versions and impossible to monitor because the book's in the public domain) to the anime iterations that are fundamentally faithful.

Says Powers: "I don't think we would be surprised by anything anymore."

Alcott scholar Madelon Bedell is widely quoted as describing "Little Women" as " the American female myth, its subject the primordial one of the passage from childhood, from girl to woman."

Susan H. Schulman, director of the current musical, was 12 when she discovered "Little Women" in a Brooklyn library. Maureen McGovern, who played Marmee on Broadway and headlines the current tour, recalls picking up an abridged version when she was 10 or so, then sobbing with her mother in front of the television set while watching the two major film versions, starring Katharine Hepburn in 1933 and June Allyson in 1949. "We'd have our hankies," McGovern recalls with a chuckle. "Sentimental slobs, we'd call each other." (The movies, even the 1994 Winona Ryder picture, are typically identified by who plays Jo, the spunky, independent sister Alcott most closely patterned after herself.)

In print continuously since 1868, "Little Women" never falls from the Top 10 list of all-time bestsellers. It's a distaff must-read, the most powerful girly book this country's ever produced.

Elaine Showalter, editor of the Library of America's 2005 edition of the "Little Women" trilogy (which includes "Little Men" and "Jo's Boys"), writes that "there can be few other books in American literary history which have had so enormous a critical impact on half the reading population, and so minuscule a place in the libraries or criticism of the other."

Schulman says, "I think it's hard to get an adult man to read it unless there's a real reason for it."

Jan Susina, associate professor of English at Illinois State University, notes that the men in "Little Women" are in distant orbit around the March sisters. When eldest sister Meg marries John Brooke, her first kiss goes not to her husband, but to Marmee. Theodore Lawrence, aka Laurie (oh dear), is an "eternal boy," a "romantic object" who gets passed around among the sisters until he lands for good with Amy. Consider a gender reversal of that, Susina contends, and "it would be really creepy."

Susina, a specialist in children's literature who loves "Little Women" (really), didn't read the novel until it was assigned during his final semester in graduate school. In that class, none of the men had read it before. All of the women had.