“Let’s have a song:” Musicals inspired by Shakespeare

If musicals be the food of love, they might also be the gateway to a love of William Shakespeare.

One of Shakespeare’s earliest plays, in fact, inspired the earliest example of a musical based on his works. The Boys from Syracuse (1938) infused the Greek setting of The Comedy of Errors with 20th-century American language and jokes by book writer George Abbott, including the moment when Dromio of Syracuse, after hearing an actual line from the original play, leaps out of the wings to announce, “Shakespeare!” The witty swing-infused songs by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart like “Dear Old Syracuse,” “This Can’t Be Love,” “What Can You Do With A Man,” and “Falling in Love with Love” were in constant rotation on the turntable in my college dorm room.

More recently, the Q Brothers updated the same 16th-century text to turn-of-the-21st-century hip-hop in The Bomb-itty of Errors, which received several off-Broadway award nominations and won awards for Best Production in Chicago and the HBO US Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen in 2001. The success of Bomb-itty of Errors led the Q Brothers to create an entire canon of Shakespearean musical “add-rap-tations”, including I Heart Juliet, Funk It Up About Nothin’, the award-winning Othello: The Remix, Chicago Shakespeare Theatre’s recent Rome Sweet Rome (based on Julius Caesar), and their high school hip-hop reimagining of Two Gentlemen of Verona called Dress the Part (and originally known as Q Gents).

Shakespeare’s possibly-first play also inspired Galt MacDermot’s second musical Two Gentlemen of Verona which, while it didn’t spawn as many hit singles or leave as lasting a cultural footprint as MacDermot’s first show Hair (1967), nonetheless won the 1971 Tony Award for Best Musical. (Hair also contained its own Shakespearean song, the lovely “What a Piece of Work is Man,” which sets Hamlet’s speech to a beautiful melody.)

Shakespeare’s most popular plays have inspired some of the most varied examples of the form. A disco-style adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream called The Donkey Show opened off-Broadway in 1999, ran in London’s West End and throughout Europe, and played for 10 years in Harvard Square in a now-closed club/performance space called OBERON. Twelfth Night-inspired Play On!, conceived by Sheldon Epps with a book by Cheryl L. West, transformed Illyria into 1940’s Harlem and incorporated the music of Duke Ellington (and was revived at Virginia’s Signature Theatre in the summer of 2025). Composer/lyricist Shaina Taub adapted both Twelfth Night and As You Like It for New York’s Public Theatre’s Public Works program, writing songs in a variety of styles. Midsummer, Twelfth Night, As You Like It, and Much Ado About Nothing combined to inspire the plot of the Elvis Presley jukebox musical All Shook Up (2004). Also in 2004, the bluegrass musical Lone Star Love ran briefly off-Broadway and had a variety of productions around the country under its original title, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Texas.

The Fantasticks about two neighboring fathers who pretend to feud so their children will inevitably fall in love, is the world’s longest-running musical—42 continuous years off-Broadway. It has its origins in Edmund Rostand’s 1894 play Les Romanesques, which in turn is inspired by elements from both Midsummer and Romeo and Juliet.

Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet inspired both Rockabye Hamlet, which lasted for only 7 performances on Broadway in 1976 (after 21 previews), and The Lion King, which opened on Broadway in 1997 and is the third longest-running Broadway musical after more than 11,000 performances. The Lion King, both the musical and the successful Disney film, is inspired by both parts of Henry IV as much as it is Hamlet. Like that layered sourcing, Return to the Forbidden Planet is a campy 1980s jukebox musical based on the 1956 science-fiction film Forbidden Planet, which in turn was loosely inspired by Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and contains dialogue drawn from Shakespeare’s original.

Cole Porter’s Kiss Me, Kate—or its original cast album that my parents owned—might well have been my actual introduction to Shakespeare (sorry, Star Trek). The 1948 script by Bella and Samuel Spewack recontextualizes The Taming of the Shrew by telling the story of a touring theater company performing Shakespeare’s problematic play whose director and star is playing Petruchio opposite his ex-wife playing Katherine; their combative feelings for each other onstage and off drive the plot. Like the show’s title song, many of Porter’s lyrics are taken from Shrew’s original text. “I Come to Wive it Wealthily in Padua” is a direct quote from Shakespeare (as is its next line, “If wealthily, then happily in Padua”). “Where is the Life That Late I Led” also comes from the play, intriguingly from a moment where Petruchio is singing a possibly popular song from Shakespeare’s day. “I Am Ashamed That Women Are So Simple” is an almost verbatim setting of the last 18 lines of Katherine’s final speech. And the classic “Brush Up Your Shakespeare” is both a pun-filled collection of Shakespearean in-jokes, and a celebration of the joy of discovering Shakespeare’s plays for the first time.

Probably the most well-known Shakespeare musical, both on Broadway and onscreen with revivals and remakes of each in the last five years, is West Side Story (1957), which transforms the Montagues and Capulets of Romeo and Juliet into the Jets and Sharks of Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Stephen Sondheim wrote the lyrics to Leonard Bernstein’s music, and though Sondheim is rightly regarded as a modern Shakespeare—he set “Fear No More” from Cymbeline to music for his adaptation of Aristophanes’s The Frogs—Carla Della Gatta points out that it was book writer Arthur Laurents who echoed Shakespeare’s lines in the scenes he wrote for Tony and Maria, the musical’s young lovers, and turned Juliet’s famous balcony into a New York City fire escape.

Even Shakespeare’s life has inspired playwrights and songwriters. & Juliet is another jukebox musical that repurposes the songs of producer Max Martin (“Oops!…I Did It Again,” “I Want It That Way”) to speculate about what would happen if Anne Hathaway had been able to convince her husband to let Juliet live. The British production opened in London in 2019 and a Toronto production transferred to Broadway in 2022…where it played the Stephen Sondheim Theatre.

Something Rotten! (2015) is both a determinedly silly Broadway musical and a satirical celebration of the prominent space Shakespeare occupies in the cultural imagination. Songwriting brothers Wayne and Karey Kirkpatrick, with the help of book writer John O’ Farrell, created a story about a pair of playwriting brothers in 1595 England struggling to write a hit play and wondering where their next great idea will come from — at the same time that celebrity poet William Shakespeare is also struggling to write a hit play and wondering where his next great idea will come from. Featuring songs like “God, I Hate Shakespeare,” “Will Power,” and “Hard to Be the Bard,” Something Rotten! explores in a farcical-yet-serious way the struggles of living in Shakespeare’s shadow, 400 years ago and today.

This list doesn’t even mention all the times Shakespeare or his characters get name-checked in other musicals ranging from Anything Goes to Hamilton, Thoroughly Modern Millie and Newsies to Six, and The Music Man to Reefer Madness.

As an alumnus of the BMI Musical Theatre Workshop who’s written both musicals and comic songs drawn from Shakespeare, I can testify that Shakespeare’s poetry is its own kind of music. But it’s his characters, plots, and situations—many of them drawn from previous sources—that provide inspiration for dozens of shows from nearly 100 years of musical theater.