OK, this is a little surreal today. I was in a bit of a weird mood when I was writing it (about a week ago, but I only got round to finishing it today)…
An awful lot of Shakespeare’s plays have been made into musicals. Think about it: West Side Story from Romeo and Juliet, Kiss Me Kate from The Taming of the Shrew, Return to the Forbidden Planet from The Tempest.
But how many musicals have been made into Shakespeare’s plays? Very few, I think you’ll agree.
So… Grease by Mr William Shakespeare? Ooh, ooh, even better: Evita – you can just imagine him writing it as one of his histories, can’t you?!
I was going to use another example, but going through it I realised that it already is an adaptation of a Shakespeare play. See if you can work out which musical and play I’m referring to:
Man, with seemingly supernatural powers, living as an exile from society in a theatre. Has a young protegé, who falls in love with a newcomer to the theatre. Magic chappy uses his powers to cause confusion in said theatre, especially disrupting the plotting of those trying to overthrow him again. In the end, he realises that the true love between protegé and newcomer is more than he could ever hope to have, and they are better off leaving him, even though it means that he will die alone. The End.
So. A very short summary of the Phantom of the Opera, you say. Well, yes. But is it not also Shakeybob’s Tempest? Methinks it is. What’s that you say? The Tempest is set on an island, not in a theatre? I draw your attention to this scene from act IV, scene I:
Be cheerful, sir.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
…and to this essay by way of explanation.
Anyway, I just thought that there were some interesting parallels there between the two plays. I am not in any way suggesting that Shakespeare plagiarised Andrew Lloyd Webber and Richard Stilgoe’s ideas (or, in fact, Gaston Leroux, who wrote the original novel – not Victor Hugo, as the Newark Palace theatre thinks)…
