Little Women:The Musical

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Louisa May Alcott's perennially popular 1869 novel Little Women recounting the domestic adventures of the four March sisters (particularly the literarily minded middle sister Jo) in the Civil War era in Concord MA has proven perennially popular as a subject of adaptation into other media especially since the book fell out of copyright. There was the classic 1933 film starring Katharine Hepburn a 1949 movie with June Allyson a 1958 TV musical with songs by Richard Adler a 1978 TV movie and a well-received 1994 screen version featuring Winona Ryder. And starting on January 23 2005 there was a Broadway musical (no relation to the Adler work) with songs by composer Jason Howland and lyricist Mindi Dickstein starring Sutton Foster (fresh from her Tony-winning performance in Thoroughly Modern Millie) as Jo with cabaret singer Maureen McGovern as Marmee the mother of the brood. The show made a modest appearance on Broadway which had in recent years seen a plethora of musical adaptations of public-domain novels.