Composition and Performance History

Photo of Blanche Case as Laura in Four Frogs Productions' Goblin Market (2012)

Goblin Market was Polly Pen’s first musical and her first Off-Broadway production as both composer and co-author. Goblin Market was a critical hit and enjoyed a long and successful Off-Broadway run in New York. It also earned five Drama Desk Nominations and the Best Plays Special Citation for Music Composition and Adaptation. An actress herself, Pen’s transition to composing might never have happened but for fortuitous circumstances and the encouragement of Douglas Aibel, the artistic director of the New York’s Off-Broadway Vineyard Theatre. Aibel tells how this came about: “One day Polly sheepishly mentioned that she had been composing a show. I remember having to persuade her to play it for me. When she finally agreed, she made me turn my back so she could play the music without me looking” (qtd in Ahmad). Aibel immediately commissioned Goblin Market, which Pen went on to co-author with Peggy Harmon. Pen recalls, “If Doug hadn’t persuaded me so persistently, I don’t know whether I would have shown my work to anyone. It would have been a private pastime between acting assignments” (qtd in Ahmad).

In Victorians on Broadway: Literature, Adaptation, and the Modern American Musical, Sharon Aronofsky Weltman relates that in a personal interview with Polly Pen, the playwright reflected on the contemporary issues that Rossetti’s poem brought to mind for her at the time of composition in the 1980’s: the AIDS epidemic and public funding for the arts. Pen felt that her play addresses “a terrible and incurable wasting illness” and “the terror of a disease that kills people for, essentially, loving one another, for giving into sexual temptation, that most basic of desires” (Weltman, Victorians on Broadway, p. 162).

Also in a personal interview, Pen commented on the process of “reworking a text into a new medium.” Weltman comments that, “Part of the show’s experimental force as an adaptation comes from its commitment to the language and medium of its source.” Pen herself was impressed by how “completely singable” Rossetti’s poetic language is: the “sound sense of the piece is extraordinary. I mean when the goblins . . . have the rhythm—it’s all there. She gives it to you. So that was a joy to discover, that . . . wasn’t something I was going to have to labor over making her words work. They just did” (Weltman, Victorians on Broadway, p. 162).

Cd cover for recording of Goblin Market: A Musical 

Goblin Market opened at New York’s Vineyard Theatre on 17 October 1985, before transferring to a long and successful Off-Broadway run at Circle in the Square, a larger theatre in Manhattan.The play was a critical success that was enthusiastically received and favourably reviewed.The New York Times described it as an “entrancing expedition to ‘Those pleasant days long gone / Of not-returning time.’” Meanwhile, The New York Post called it “an absolutely gorgeous piece of Victorian erotica” and The New York Daily News, considered it “one of the season’s few genuine successes” (qtd in Pen and Harmon, back cover). In 1986, Jay Records released a recording of music from Goblin Market: A Musical performed by the original Off-Broadway cast of Terri Klausner and Ann Morrison as Laura and Lizzie.

Since this original run, Goblin Market has been staged many times in regional and college theatres (Weltman), appearing in cities including Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Kingston (Ontario), Seattle, Hartford, Princeton, Hoboken, Albuquerque, Portsmouth, Garrison, Providence, Macomb, Pensacola, Fort Lauderdale and Juneau, to name but some. Such productions truly are evidence of the chamber opera’s geographical reach and its enduring appeal.