Michael Weller, Book Writer
Like most people I know, I was aware of Doctor Zhivago "the movie" long before I read the novel by Boris Pasternak. Finishing the book for the first time, I was surprised how different it was from what I expected: at once a vivid social document teeming with incident, startling encounters, a passionate debate and magnificent descriptions of Russian life at every level, and at the same time an intimate account of three men in love with the same woman, each for very different reasons.
At first, the task of bringing these stories to life onstage seemed a daunting challenge. But as I read the book a second, third and finally a fourth time, one character struck me as vital to the story in ways that both the novel and the film didn't fully exploit in dramatic terms. Without giving anything more away, I'll suggest only that this discovery gave me a way to link the personal journeys of the book to a larger point Pasternak is at pains to make: namely, that all life - public and private - is at the mercy of politics. It is a point that feels not entirely unrelated to events in a land thousands of miles and almost a century away from where Pasternak wrote his amazing document.
Lucy Simon, Composer
I have always had a very personal feeling about Boris Pasternak's novel and a tremendous respect for the David Lean film. Before I even started thinking it might be possible to write a musical based on this work, I reread the novel three times. When I understood the significance of the last chapter, "The Poems of Yurii Zhivago," the proverbial light went on.
After completing the prose novel, Pasternak wrote 25 poems - poems that Zhivago had been in the process of creating throughout the novel. If read by themselves, the poems capture the novel and retell it in a different form. That is what one hopes to do in creating a musical score. If we have done our job well, the songs alone should be able to convey the journey and the emotion of the play. That concept of being able to reduce the size of the novel by translating into another language - music - was my thrilling challenge.
Also igniting my interest was the discovery that Doctor Zhivago is more than a novel about love and revolution. It is novel about hope and the irreducible force of creation rising from the ashes of the revolution - a creation that continues and informs the future.
Michael Korie and Amy Powers, Lyricists
The lyrics of a musical traditionally bridge the voices of the characters as they move from speech to song and back again, furthering the plot and amplifying the characters' inner lives. In adapting Doctor Zhivago, the lyrics had an additional role: to bridge poetry and drama, as Pasternak's masterpiece is beloved for both.
Happily, the novel provides a wealth of imagery to draw from. The primary image of our opening sequence, "To Light the New Year," originated in Pasternak's poem "Winter Night": "…a candle burned… a candle burned." We found the title of Lara's first song in a passage about waltzing: "While the music played, a whole eternity went by… you spun 'round and 'round, thinking of nothing." Zhivago's indecision, depicted in the poem "Hamlet," colored our lyrics to his Act One soliloquy "A Man Who Lives Up to His Name."
Pasternak's lush descriptions of natural phenomena are a virtual tour of the Russian landscape: the bright summer nights, the snow-covered steppes, the radiant stars, the groves of moonlit birch trees. They informed a number of our lyrics, especially "Ashes and Tears" and "On the Edge of Time."
Being reflective, poetry directly set to music cannot further the points of an eventful story like Zhivago. And so, rather than quote it directly, we chose to respond to it in a way we believe evokes Pasternak's singular vision of his Russian homeland, while continuing to advance the plot of a modern musical.
