Welcome to my first in-depth analysis! These won’t be super frequent because they do take a heck of a lot of work (hence my brief hiatus – sorry ‘bout that, by the way), so if this isn’t your thing, never fear – we’ll be back to our regularly scheduled writerly content on Thursday. But if you, like me, crave an outlet for the part of yourself that never quite moved on from high school lit class, or if you’re trying to write an adaptation of something and would prefer that people not hate it, read on.

Legally Blonde is one of my favorite movies of all time. It’s goofy to the point of ridiculousness at times, true, but I’ve always found it kind of inspiring. It’s the story of a woman entering a competitive and heavily male-dominated field and refusing to sacrifice even a scrap of her femininity for the sake of success – something that resonated heavily with me during my college years as an engineering major. Elle insists on being taken seriously on the merits of her skill and intelligence without falling into the extremely common trap of needing to behave like a man to exist alongside them. I love that. I love Reese Witherspoon’s acting, the nostalgic early 2000s vibes of the set pieces, the dialogue, everything. And as for the musical? I think it’s one of the most brilliant examples of how to adapt a story between mediums the right way that I’ve ever seen, and today I’m going to tell you why.

First, a brief history. Because shockingly, many people are not even aware that this thing got turned into a musical. It did! Legally Blonde: the Musical premiered in 2007, first in San Francisco and then on Broadway, starring Laura Bell Bundy as Elle.  It was nominated for seven Tonys, and has won a host of other awards over the years. It’s actually the second round of adaption this story has gone through; Legally Blonde started its life as a novel by Amanda Brown. I haven’t read the novel (yet! It’s on my list, guys, don’t panic), so I can’t speak to the nature of the book-to-movie phase of the adaptation. For its part, however, the musical has been widely lauded as a wonderful adaptation, balancing well-thought-out additions and changes with enough respect paid to the original source material to both retain the existing fan base and attract a new one.

The supporting characters are fleshed out, plot lines are tied together more securely, and the musical format gave the writers a chance to lean a lot more heavily into the cheesiness and playful energy of the movie. The script, written by Heather Hach, shows a tremendous understanding of who the characters are meant to be, meaning that none of the people you’re seeing onstage feel unfamiliar if you’ve seen the movie. (This is a common problem in adaptations, and one many people attribute to poor casting. But it really has as much to do with the writing as it does the appearance of the actors, and I think this show demonstrates that nicely.) The music (by Nell Benjamin and Laurence O’Keefe) is stylistically consistent with the music featured in the movie, contributing to an overall tone that is pretty much exactly what you’d expect from this movie made into a musical.

This, obviously, is a rare feat for any type of adaptation. So how did they pull this off? And what can we learn about the process of adaptation by studying exactly what was changed? Armed with a 144p YouTube bootleg of the musical, some very worn-out vocal cords, and way, way too much free time, this is what I recently set out to discover. I did a very close watch of both the movie and the musical and wrote down every place – or, nearly every place – where I spotted a change that was made. I took obsessive notes, I researched my little heart out, I found out that the dog that played Bruiser onstage was a rescue named Chico and a very good boy, and I figured out the biggest changes that were made in the adaptation and why.

Why a musical? And why does it work?

Let’s get the most obvious change out of the way first: on the stage, they’re singing and dancing. The movie, colorful and silly and over-the-top as it may be, is woefully devoid of group dance numbers, spontaneous ballads about Ireland, or vocal-cord-breaking belts. Adding these interludes understandably necessitates a few pretty noticeable changes to the story. To appreciate why, we first need to take a look at the function of song and dance in musicals in general.

Singing and dancing happens in musicals at moments of high emotional intensity in the story — the peaks and valleys of feeling where the characters can no longer contain themselves and have to burst into song to properly express themselves. They can also occur more strategically, at moments when the performers need to rev the audience up to keep them engaged. This is why you typically have a high-energy number right after the intermission to welcome everyone back and get them engaged in the story again. For example, Legally Blonde features “Whipped Into Shape” right after the intermission, an up-tempo, highly energizing song with such exhausting choreography that I get chest pains just watching it. You also want to line up the most intense moments of your story with places you already want to insert a song. This is perhaps why in the musical, Vivian and Warner aren’t engaged from the moment Elle arrives at Harvard – he proposes right after the internship results are posted, giving us an even more poignant emotional springboard from which to launch into the act 1 finale, “So Much Better.”

But there’s another place you might want to insert a song, particularly in an adaptation, and that’s moment where you want to add depth. Say you’ve got a character whose motivation you want to expand on, or an internal thought process or decision you want to explore further than the source material does. Those are great places to stick in a song, and Legally Blonde does this all over the place. In fact, almost every song in the show contains some additional level of detail beyond what was included in the movie. Sometimes this is even the entire point of the song. But put a pin in that — we’re going to come back to it later.

The point is that a lot of the changes we’re going to see happened either in service of the medium – in order to make the emotional highs and lows of the songs hit harder, for example, or turn a highly emotional moment into a better song – or to capitalize on the many opportunities for added depth the medium inherently provides. You get changes like this in any adaptation, of course. The trick is to pick a target medium for adaptation that will mean that the specific changes you’ll end up having to make for the sake of that target medium add something valuable to the story. This isn’t always the case with adaptations, but as we’ll see, it sure is here.

Even without considering the changes that were made, a musical was a fantastic choice of target medium for this story. When I rewatched the movie for this post, I did so with my mom, who sagely observed during one of the opening scenes, “It’s practically a musical already.” What she was referring to specifically was the over-the-top goofiness in the way the story is presented. Stuff like the infamous “bend and snap” scene, or Elle’s Harvard admissions “essay”, is so hilariously Out There that you have to suspend your disbelief a little bit to fully enjoy it. That’s not a bad thing — in fact, I love it. What I’m saying is that if you’re one of those party poopers who sneers at movies like this for being unrealistic, you should probably never, ever go see a musical.

Musicals depend on suspension of disbelief in order to function. It is built inherently into the mechanics of the medium, by necessity. In order for a musical to work, you need your audience to magically not care that spontaneous singing and dancing is happening in the middle of these characters’ lives. They also need to accept that the people whose lives they are watching unfold before their eyes are mysteriously unaware of the fact that they’re on a stage with several hundred people staring at them. It’s like watching a movie where you can see the microphone boom in the shot — the immersion is inherently broken, and the audience walks in knowing that and accepting it as part of the experience.

By comparison, the suspensions of disbelief demanded by the wonderful silliness of this story are positively insignificant. Many lines from the movie (for example, the UPS man’s “I’ve got a package”) lean heavily into the kind of exaggerated delivery that is already typical of musicals, and there are scenes that are virtually shot-for-shot identical for the same reason (like Warner’s entrance at the beginning of the movie, right before his date with Elle). Adapting this into a musical rather than, say, a video game, graphic novel, radio serial, or whatever other medium you care to mention, allowed the writers to not only keep these outlandish yet iconic moments, but lean into them and allow them to enrich the story the way they were always meant to do.

Supporting characters are people too

Remember when I mentioned how some of the songs in Legally Blonde exist solely for the purpose of fleshing out areas of the story that lacked depth in the movie? Well, it turns out a lot of them are focused on the exact same area of the story, and that’s the supporting characters.

In the movie, the story is almost entirely focused on Elle. And it makes sense! The story of Legally Blonde is focused around the emotional journey of one person, Elle Woods, and in order to make her story as interesting and rich as possible within the short-ish runtime of the movie, it has to be told with a relatively close focus on her. Other characters float in and out of the story, but they are all framed in terms of what they can do for Elle’s character arc. They may be people on their own, but we don’t get to see that. We have time for quick dips into things like Paulette regaining her confidence and Emmett’s attraction to Elle, but we don’t have time to draw much out of these storylines besides how they affect Elle. But with just an hour and a half of runtime in the movie, we don’t really have time to get to know either of these characters on their own.

But with over an hour of music added to the stage show, oh, we sure can now! And the two characters I’ve cited as examples here, Paulette and Emmett, are the two best examples of this. Let’s examine Paulette first. Movie Paulette’s defining characteristics are 1. loving her dog, 2. wanting to date the UPS guy (who doesn’t even get a name in the movie! The disrespect!) and 3. being awkward around men, with all three of these being things that Elle can either directly relate to or directly assist with.

By comparison, Musical Paulette is larger than life. Her song “Ireland” and its short reprise, collectively one of my favorite numbers in the show, give us a ton of information about her that there’s just not time for in the movie, and which would feel wildly out of place if we didn’t have the opportunity to step out of the story and belt about it for a few minutes. We get to see that despite her insecurities, she knows what it takes to be more confident, and knows she has it in her somewhere if she could just set aside the trauma of her bad relationship with her ex. We see that she had a reason — however ridiculous — for wanting to be with her ex in the first place, and it’s even alluded to by the line “through my boozy, delusional fog” that alcohol addiction may have played a role in some of the pain of her past. Seeing her have a little bit bolder personality in her interactions with Elle also makes her shift in demeanor when they go to confront her dog-and-trailer-stealing ex all the more apparent and dramatic, giving us far more sympathy for her and amping up the emotional stakes of the scene.

All of these are highly Paulette-centric points. We don’t need to know that Paulette has had problems with alcohol, or that she loves Ireland and plays Celtic music in an attempt to soothe her constant anxiety in order to understand Paulette’s role in Elle’s story, so why would any of this have been included in the movie? But in a musical, where audiences expect a full cast of complex, fleshed-out characters to enjoy, we have time to give her her own motivations and backstory. As a result, we’re no longer just watching Elle make a friend – we’re watching two whole people make friends with each other, and the story is far richer for it.

(Also, the actor who originated the role of Kyle, the UPS man, on Broadway is married to the actress who originated Paulette. Fun fact!)

For another shining example, let’s look at Emmett. Movie Emmett is like a male version of that one girl in action movies who has 3 lines, a scene where she emerges from a pool in slow motion, and nothing else. He’s good-looking and a nice person — that’s it. We barely even learn what his actual job is, or why he’s there, apart from a few tiny details dropped through throwaway lines or inferred from other parts of the narrative. He just sort of… is. And apart from some brief flirting with Elle, we don’t really get to see a real romantic relationship develop between them.

Musical Emmett, meanwhile, has two entire songs dedicated to his backstory (“Chip on My Shoulder”) and character growth (“Take It Like a Man”) respectively. In the former, we learn that he grew up in poverty and wants to be a lawyer in order to help his family. We also get some subtextual information about his background from the way he dresses, which isn’t really present in the movie — he just looks like any other law student. This gives us some helpful contrast with Warner, who exudes an almost stifling aura of wealth and privilege throughout the story. In Emmett’s second song, we get to see his budding relationship with Elle through his eyes, which is another thing the movie never gives us. We are completely inside his head here, learning to love Elle along with him while also getting a window into his internal narrative that makes his character feel much more whole than he does in the movie.

Once again, these things don’t really matter to the mechanics of Elle’s storyline. Although contrasting Emmett more strongly with Warner by way of their differing backgrounds is an extremely smart choice, and seeing first hand why Emmett loves Elle also makes us love her all the more, the movie doesn’t fail to make sense because these details are absent. However, the musical certainly makes more sense, and once again, is far more enjoyable as a result of this added depth of character. (Also, I just have to say, Elle proposing to Emmett instead of the other way around at the end of the show is entirely consistent with the theme of Elle taking command of her own happiness that’s been present throughout the story, and I thought that was an excellent change.)

Now, stepping back for a moment, note that these changes are actually pretty significant. We’ve altered Paulette’s entire personality, making her a lot bolder in scenes where she’s just around Elle, and we’ve not only altered Emmett’s personality, but also his appearance. These are things that have been known to leave fans up in arms when present in adaptations of other stories. So, why do we accept them here?

Well, this is what it boils down to: none of these things take away from the way the characters are in the movie. When you re-watch the movie knowing that Paulette is obsessed with Ireland and Emmett grew up poor, you don’t see these changes as a dissonant with the original source material. It’s more like trivia — insider information you have because you saw or listened to the musical, which makes you appreciate these characters even more when you see them in their original portrayals. Furthermore, none of these changes detract from the original function of these characters in the story — in fact, I’d argue they significantly add to them. Both characters’ relationships with Elle in the show highlight her gift for bringing out the best in the people around her and boosting her friends’ self-esteem, making us love her all the more, which was the point of these characters in the first place. These changes show that the writers not only understood the point of the side characters they had to work with, but were willing to make conscious efforts to make us understand it too. This is how they took a story we already loved and made us love it even more. And if that’s not the point of an adaptation, I don’t know what is.

Vivian, Callahan, and the vanishing of Professor Stromwell

Now, all the changes we’ve discussed so far were in the category of “nice to know, but not mission-critical.” The story is certainly improved by them, but the original movie is not necessarily worse for lacking these details. But there are some aspects of the movie’s plot that are… well… not bad, exactly, but annoying when you think about them too hard. The writers of the musical took the opportunity to alter many of these things, and the story is significantly better for it. Most of these have to do not with the characters themselves, but with their character arcs.

In case you couldn’t tell, I’m talking about Vivian.

Ohhh, Vivian. The movie really did my girl dirty. Her character is established beautifully, through a series of strong and consistent scenes that tell you exactly who she is, what she wants, and what she’s willing to do to get it. But from there on out, her character development is all over the place.

We see the first hints of character development in Movie Vivian taking hold shortly after Callahan’s internship starts. This is largely communicated through body language at first, although there is a great scene where she comes into Elle’s room and they end up discussing the fact that Callahan treats the two of them differently from the guys. We see that she’s actually highly perceptive, with a keen nose for injustice. She clearly wants to be friends with Elle, and has been steadily gaining respect for her ever since they started the internship.

And then she has to go through this entire arc all over again at the end of the movie when they inexplicably try to convince us that she thinks what happened between Elle and Callahan was consensual. We’re supposed to believe that this woman – the one who was the first to directly call out Callahan’s sexism earlier in the movie and has been visibly irritated by it for at least half the runtime now – saw Callahan touch Elle’s leg and it never once occurred to her that she might be witnessing an assault? True, she does come around pretty quickly, but that initial doubt is just such a bizarre little twist given what her character arc has looked like so far. I’m not saying character development always needs to be linear – it absolutely doesn’t – but… really? Given what we know about this character and the way Callahan has also treated her, we’re supposed to believe she really doesn’t suspect anything? Sorry – I don’t buy it. Never have, never will.

The musical turns this around completely. It’s not Vivian who insults Elle after the assault – it’s Warner, proving to Elle once and for all that he’s not the kind of person she wants to be with, and sowing the seeds of this realization with Vivian as well without negating any of her character development. Vivian is then the one who bursts into Paulette’s salon and gives Elle the encouragement she needs to return to the trial. This not only serves as a logical conclusion to Vivian’s character arc and a concrete reason for her and Elle to eventually become good friends, but it eliminates a character who’s sort of redundant in the movie: Professor Stromwell.

Stromwell is first introduced in a scene that ended up in the musical as Callahan’s introductory number, “Blood in the Water,” where she kicks Elle out of her class for not having done the assigned reading. After that, we basically don’t see her again in any substantial way until she magically appears underneath a hairdryer at Paulette’s and tells Elle to get her act together. Cutting her out and distributing her role in the story between Callahan and Vivian gives us an opportunity to solve two big problems: the lack of a satisfyingly dramatic conclusion to Vivian’s character arc and the lack of foreshadowing of Callahan’s villainy.

In the movie, Callahan is portrayed as a nice, helpful, encouraging professor without a hint of evil in him until the moment he starts sending Vivian to bring him coffee. The musical, in keeping with the traditions of the medium, leans much harder into Callahan as a villain from the get-go, giving him “Blood in the Water” as a villain song and establishing him early on as an arrogant hard-ass. Instead of having his true nature be slowly revealed, the musical tells us who he is right off the bat, and teases us with tantalizing hints of a possible redemption until Elle comes to realize just how terrible he really is, and adds him to the list of men in her life she can’t change, and doesn’t need to impress for the sake of her self-worth.

Now, I’m not saying the way Callahan was portrayed in the movie was bad. It actually made a lot of sense, given the way the movie follows Elle’s internal journey with a very close focus, as we’ve talked about previously. But the adaptation was trying to do something else. They were zooming out, giving more focus to the side characters. So it’s only natural that in this different view of the story, we as the audience might see Callahan for what he really is from the start, even if Elle doesn’t.

And all this just by getting rid of Stromwell! This is an important lesson about adaptations: you can get rid of characters, but you can’t get rid of their role in the story. What you can do, however, is redistribute it amongst the other characters for the sake of enriching other parts of the story. You can’t do this with a major character, but with someone who only has one or two scenes? Go for it. You are not committing a deadly sin. You are adapting.

What did they keep, and why does it matter?

Throughout all of the changes in the story, big and small, there were a smattering of things that were kept the same. Actually, it’s more than a smattering. Not only is the general framework of the story largely unchanged, but most (if not all) of the movie’s most iconic scenes are kept in place – sometimes even drawn out or emphasized. Scenes like the bend and snap, or the argument over whether or not the pool boy is gay – scenes that take up a disproportionately small amount of runtime in the movie when you consider their memorability – are drawn out into explosive, dramatic, over-the-top musical numbers that become some of the highest emotional peaks of the show.

So why these scenes?

Short answer: because of the medium.

It goes back to what we discussed earlier, about where songs tend to happen in musicals – that is to say at emotional peaks and valleys. In Legally Blonde, the writers actually took this a step further and used not only the emotional peaks of the characters, but those of the audience – points where they knew that the excitement of recognizing an iconic scene coming just around the bend would hype up the audience in much the same way that a growing emotional climax in the story would. And they made the very wise decision to acknowledge this by using these moments to create big musical numbers that would capitalize on the energy that would already be present in the crowd, if not always in the characters. Sometimes they even scooted around the movie’s plot points to take advantage of these ready-made emotional highs, like how Paulette breaking the UPS guy’s nose ends up being the big finale of “Bend and Snap.”

Also, look at the kind of scenes these are from a plot standpoint. They’re… well, kind of silly. Kind of out-there. Dare I say, these are the kinds of things that would only really happen… in a musical. This show practically wrote itself. In fact, why “Bend and Snap” was not a musical number to start out with, I will never know. They had the choreography, they had the suspension of disbelief – just let Paulette riff already, why don’t you? Turning moments like this into musical numbers was really just allowing these parts of the story to be what they always wanted to be – to exist in the framework in which they were always meant to exist.

The writers made changes where it actually needed changes made – where those changes would either improve the flow of the story or make the story fit more naturally into the format of a musical. But they put just as much thought into what to keep. Into what already made sense for the new iteration they were trying to create. This is something many of the worst adaptations completely fail to do.

Adaptation is not supposed to be inherently about changing the story, although stories do naturally undergo some changes during the adaptation process. But at its core, adaptation is about recognizing the value of what is already there, and realizing there’s a way to make the story shine brighter than it did before. Legally Blonde: the Musical doesn’t feel like the work of some money-grabbing team of executives hoping to capitalize on an already-popular franchise by repackaging it in a new format. It feels much more like a labor of love – like the product of a team of people who loved the movie and wanted to shine a very literal spotlight on its best, most iconic moments. And that, my friends, is the only good reason to make an adaptation: to make the story so much better.

(See what I did there? Please clap.)

Arbitrary changes, and what we can learn from them

An interesting angle to look at this all from is the question of what doesn’t matter when you adapt something. What can you safely change, with reckless abandon and no consideration for source material, without pissing off your audience? Well, it turns out, quite a lot! Here’s a short list of the things I noticed that were different between the movie and the musical for no writing-related reason that I could readily identify:

• The half-loop stitch on low-viscosity rayon becomes a half-loop stitch on China silk, and last June’s Vogue becomes last May’s Vogue.
• Elle’s LSAT score goes from 179 in the movie to 175 in the show.
• Emmett’s last name changed from Richmond in the movie to Forrest in the show.
• Paulette says in the movie that she lived with her ex for eight years, but in the show, it’s ten.
• The adaptation process mysteriously reduced Warner’s engagement ring from six carats to four — tragic.

Some of these could have been mistakes or oversights. Some might have been changes for the sake of the flow of the lyrics or the rhythm of the dialogue. Maybe ten and four are just more palatable numbers than eight and six, and low-viscosity rayon is fine with half-loop stitches after all. I don’t know, I don’t write musicals for a living, and all I know about LSAT scores, diamond rings, and last May’s Vogue I learned from Legally Blonde.

It’s interesting how people tend to sing the praises of adaptations that get all the little details right, and yet did not eviscerate Legally Blonde for failing completely in this area. The thing to take from this is that loyalty to the source material is really a high-level problem, not something you find in the tiny, nit-picky details of a story. When we watch an adaptation through the lens of its source material, we want to feel like we know where we are — the story, the characters, the theme, the tone, the aesthetic. We want it to evoke the same emotions as the source material, and capture the same balance of laughter and tears. This is why adaptations that are built to cater to a different target audience than the source material (like Percy Jackson) or incorporate drastic changes in tone (like Vampire Academy) tend not to do well.

Sometimes, in the face of particularly terrible reception, writers and directors will defend these decisions by saying they wanted to make the adaptation stand on its own, or wanted to make the story their own creative endeavor, or some other drivel about “breathing new life into an old story.” But Legally Blonde: the Musical proves all these arguments wrong. It does stand on its own, while simultaneously enriching any fan’s enjoyment of the source material. It does breathe new life into the story, but not by replacing what was already there. And the writers did make the story their own, and even managed to change a few details completely without anyone caring.

Adaptation is hard. As the title of this post suggests, it’s a science — an exact and punishing one that can easily blow up in your face. Doing it right is a gargantuan effort requiring the writer to have an intense connection with the emotional meat of the story, and a thorough, profound understanding of what made fans love it in the first place. But it’s worth it. Just ask the writers of Legally Blonde: the Musical. Look at what you get — what the world gets — when you do it right.

“That’s the best part: the outside is new, but now it reflects what’s already in you. Couldn’t change that if I wanted to… and I do not.”

-Elle Woods in Legally Blonde: the Musical

Happy adapting!