Older Than They Think/Theatre: Difference between revisions

* Almost all of [[William Shakespeare]]'s plays are based on pre-existing works, legends, and historical figures. Out of all his plays, only ''[[The Tempest]]'' seems to lack a specific source.

** ''[[Romeo and Juliet]]'' was an adaptation of an Italian narrative poem called ''The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet'', which had been translated into English about thirty years before Shakespeare's play. The poem's basic story is itself very similar to [[Ovid]]'s "Pyramus and Thisbe" in ''[[The Metamorphoses]]'' from [[Classical Mythology]].

** ''[[Titus Andronicus (theatre)|Titus Andronicus]]'' bears many similarities to another myth Ovid recorded: the story of Philomena. Lavinia actually grabs a copy of ''The Metamorphoses'' to tell her family what had happened to her.

** ''[[Othello]]'' was taken from Italian author Cinthio's short story "Un Capitano Moro", in his anthology ''Gli Hecatommithi''. In the original story, the Moor gets away with his crime for a while, Iago's motive is lust over Desdemona, and the moral is that European women should not fall in love with foreigners.

* ALL plays created from the Renaissance until the end of the Neoclassical period were based on pre-existing play or histories, usually Greco-Roman. There were actually rules that playwrights HAD to do this.

** That's not exactly true for comedy. An examples is [[Niccolo Machiavelli]]'s comedy, ''La Mandragola'', set in modern Florence and were not based on any historical event or classical play.

* Fans of ''[[Rent]]'' and ''[[Dreamgirls]]'' cried [[They Changed It, Now It Sucks]] when some of the lyrics were converted to spoken dialogue in the movie versions. Not many people know it, but the spoken dialogue leading into the second act finale of ''[[Gilbert and Sullivan|H.M.S. Pinafore]]'' was originally sung as a recitative.

** The story of [[Rent]] is itself [[Older Than They Think]], being essentially the story of [[La Boheme]] by Puccini. Puccini's [[Madame Butterfly]] was updated and set in the Vietnam war for the sake of [[Miss Saigon]].

* The 1994 stage adaptation of Disney's ''[[Beauty and the Beast]]'' wasn't the first "legit" [[Screen to Stage Adaptation]] from the [[Disney Animated Canon]]. ''[[Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (Disney film)|Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs]]'' had ''several'' stage adaptations in varying cities/venues long before that, including a 1979 version that ran as a limited engagement in New York City at the huge Radio City Music Hall and had the same scope and scale as later Disney stage musicals (a videotaped version was one of Disney's early VHS releases).

 

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