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| P.T. Barnum |
About six years ago I went through a phase where I read all the books that had been turned into musicals.
I began with Gregory Maguire's
Wicked, went straight through Leroux's
The Phantom of the Opera, made a left at Dubose Heyward's
Porgy, went a few miles with Hugo's
Les Miserables, and finally ended up in the middle of nowhere with a copy of
Struggles and Triumphs, the autobiography of 19th century American showman P.T. Barnum.
Struggles and Triumphs wasn't the official source material for the Cy Coleman-Michael Stewart musical
Barnum, but
the no doubt mined it for material. I thought the book might be a bit
of a slog but it was surprisingly engaging. Barnum
was famous for his various schemes to amaze, astonish and occasionally humbug his audiences with Siamese twins, dwarves, wolfboys, living
skeletons and other human curiosities. I settled in for an intriguing
portrait of this "first purveyor of mass entertainment" (as the editors
at Penguin Classics called him), already planning to move on to E.L.
Doctorow's
Ragtime when I was done.
And then, on Page 283, everything changed. A single sentence had the same effect as a flat tire on a road trip; it was something which forced me to stop for breath.
