Examples of Adaptation Displacement where an existing work has been adapted into some form of theatre (including plays, musicals and opera). In some cases these are examples of existing theatrical works adapted into different works for the stage.
A No Recent Examples rule applies to this trope. Examples shouldn't be added until six months after the adaptation is released, to avoid any knee-jerk reactions.
- Almost all of William Shakespeare's plays were based on earlier sources.
- Hamlet - The original story comes from a very old Danish Legend, recorded in detail by Saxo Grammaticus in the Gesta Danorum. There was also an earlier Hamlet play of unknown authorship, seemingly lost; it may have been what Shakespeare based his play off of, or an earlier draft by Shakespeare himself.
- Romeo and Juliet was adapted from Arthur Brooke's poem "The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet," which was itself adapted from an older Italian story.
- Othello was originally the Italian short story "A Moorish Captain" by Cinthio, in which Disdemona [sic] is the only named character. Compared to the original, Shakespeare's version was very Fair for Its Day.
- King Lear is based on an ancient British legend. Another play based on the same source material was around when Shakespeare's play was written.
- Measure for Measure is from Cinthio's work: "The Story of Epitia"; and also some borrowing from George Whetstone's Promos and Cassandra.
- All's Well That Ends Well is from a short story in The Decameron (day 3, story 9).
- As You Like It is based on Thomas Lodge's "Rosalynde, Euphues' Golden Legacy", which in turn was derived from "The Tale of Gamelyn", wrongly attributed to Chaucer and printed in some editions of The Canterbury Tales.
- The Comedy of Errors is based on an Ancient Roman play, Plautus' Menaechmi.
- Twelfth Night is based on Matteo Bandello's story of "Apollonius and Silla."
- Troilus and Cressida proves that not even Shakespeare could beat The Iliad, but it did largely displace Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde.
- This happened to Shakespeare himself.
- Nahum Tate's rewrite The History of King Lear (1681), which returns to the more upbeat ending of the original source material and pairs Edgar off with Cordelia, displaced Shakespeare's version until the nineteenth century.
- George Granville's The Jew of Venice (1701) was almost as successful. It displaced Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice for most of the eighteenth century.
- Colley Cibber's Richard III (1700) displaced Shakespeare's version until the late nineteenth century, and remained well-known until at least the 1920s. A handful of the lines Cibber wrote remain popular and are sometimes interpolated into modern productions and adaptations.
- The Phantom of the Opera musical has displaced the original Gaston Leroux novel in the minds of many. And also — though not quite to so grotesque an extent — the silent Lon Chaney movie, which was relatively faithful to the book. Other movie and stage adaptations have long faded from public consciousness thanks to the Andrew Lloyd Webber version.
- Rodgers and Hammerstein:
- Their first two musicals, Oklahoma! and Carousel, are legendary works of American theatre, whereas the plays on which they are based, Green Grow the Lilacs and Liliom (by renowned playwright Ferenc Molnar), are all but unknown in America. In Europe, Liliom is more popular than Carousel.
- One of their most famous works, South Pacific, was based on two stories from James A. Michener's short story collection Tales of the South Pacific, now mostly forgotten.
- The phrase 'amazing technicolor dreamcoat' is not used in the Book of Genesis to describe the garment given by Jacob to his son Joseph ("technicolor" wasn't even a thing until 1916). However, the popularity of the Andrew Lloyd Webber/Tim Rice musical Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat means that many are more familiar with this description of the coat (and the story of Joseph) than the more simple 'coat of many colours' found in the King James Version of The Bible – let alone the even simpler "ornate robe" or "long robe with sleeves" found in more recent and likely more accurate translations. In fact, some especially liberal Jewish families reference the musical during the retelling of the story of the Exodus at Passover to help explain why the Jews were even in Egypt in the first place.
- The operatic adaptations of The Marriage of Figaro and The Barber of Seville are both far better-known than the Beaumarchais plays that they're based on. Also that the Rossini version of Barber is the second (popular) version. Which makes sense if you consider that he wrote his opera 30+ years after Mozart wrote the sequel. Rossini's version completely displaced the earlier opera treatment of the same play by Paisiello; which makes the attempts by Paisiello's admirers to wreck it by disrupting its first performance appear Harsher in Hindsight.
- George Gershwin's famous opera Porgy and Bess was faithfully adapted from a once-famous play called Porgy, which itself was adapted from a novel of the same name. DuBose Heyward wrote or helped write all three.
- Colm Wilkinson, who starred in Les Misérables on Broadway and the West End, has spoken publicly about his shock at people who didn't know the musical was based on a novel. Liam Neeson, while working on the 1998 film version, was reportedly annoyed with all the people asking him if he was going to sing. Even fewer people are aware that the book is partially based on real history - there really was a student-inspired republican rebellion in France in 1832, sparked by the death of General Lamarque.
- The famous ballet The Nutcracker is actually based on a book with a slightly different plot and a different backstory for the Nutcracker himself. The ending is also different — many productions of the ballet have Clara awaken at the end to learn it was All Just a Dream, whereas the book ends with Marie discovering that it was all real and her love for the Nutcracker breaking his curse. Some productions of the ballet actually include elements of the original ending anyway; Mark Morris' tongue-in-cheek Setting Update The Hard Nut spends much of the second act telling said backstory.
- Puccini's opera La Bohème has handily displaced Henri Murger's novel Scènes de la Vie de Bohème (interestingly, there was a rival operatic adaptation by Ruggiero Leoncavallo, composer of Pagliacci; this is also forgotten). It, in turn, is probably displaced with the masses by RENT.
- David Belasco's once-popular plays Madame Butterfly and The Girl of the Golden West have been displaced by Puccini, as has Victorien Sardou's play Tosca.
- The musical My Fair Lady is much more popular than the original Pygmalion.
- Maurine Watkins' play Chicago was highly acclaimed when it was first produced in 1926, but now remembered only as the source of the musical adaptation written half a century later, which in turn became the source of a film adaptation a quarter-century after that.
- The musical Little Me seems to be better known than the Patrick Dennis book it was based on — which is somewhat odd considering that the show was neither a Broadway hit nor made into a movie.
- Before Kismet became a musical, it was a play by Edward Knoblock popular enough to have been filmed more than once. Since "Stranger in Paradise", the non-musical original has been forgotten. The melody for "Stranger in Paradise" comes from the "Polovtsian Dances" from Alexander Borodin's opera Prince Igor. While the opera itself is fairly obscure, the Polovtsian Dances are a popular symphonic favorite - but people still always think of the melody as "Stranger in Paradise". And other tunes in the show are also pillaged from Borodin's portfolio, including his 2nd Symphony ("Fate"), his String Quartet No. 2 ("And This Is My Beloved") and In The Steppes of Central Asia ("Sands of Time").
- Hello, Dolly!:
- It is only arguably more popular than Thornton Wilder's play The Matchmaker, but that in turn was a revision of Wilder's earlier play The Merchant of Yonkers, which was adapted from the 19th-century Austrian farce Einen Jux will er sich machen (He'll Have Himself a Good Time) by Johann Nestroy, which was in turn adapted from the English one-act farce A Day Well Spent by John Oxenford.
- And many fans of WALL•E are unaware that the latter's title music is from Hello, Dolly! — even though the relevant clip is included in the movie.
- Many people have seen Guys and Dolls; few today have read any of Damon Runyon's stories.
- Georges Bizet's popular opera Carmen was originally based on a novel by Prosper Merimée. Merimée also wrote the novel "Chronicle of the Reign of Charles IX" (1829) on which Giacomo Meyerbeer and Eugène Scribe based Les Huguenots, one of the most successful operas of the 19th century.
- Though the book series is still popular, most people when they hear Wicked think of the musical first. Due to the book being much Darker and Edgier, most fans of the stage show haven't read it, and many aren't even aware of its existence.
- Trivia clue for Aida: "Disney musical by Elton John and Tim Rice". The actual source material Disney bought the rights to was a picture book written by Leontyne Price, most famous for portraying the title character of the original Verdi opera.
- Little Shop of Horrors is remembered as a film adaptation of an off-Broadway musical by Alan Menken and Howard Ashman, but few remember that the musical was in fact based on a (non-musical) comedy made in The '60s.
- Similarly, the original 1988 film version of Hairspray is seldom remembered.
- Before the 1954 play, the 1956 film, and the respective 1985 and 2018 TV movie remakes, The Bad Seed was originally a novel by William March.
- The Threepenny Opera has become considerably more popular than the 18th-century Beggar's Opera it was based on.
- So maybe the film hasn't completely displaced the musical, but how many people knew that everyone's favorite Ax-Crazy barber Sweeney Todd originated in The String of Pearls, a serialised penny dreadful novel from Victorian Britain? Even the musical's immediate source material, a play by Christopher Bond, is obscure in comparison.
- More people will be familiar with The Ring of the Nibelung by Richard Wagner than will have read either of the medieval works on which it is based, the Nibelungenlied, the Poetic Edda/Prose Edda or the Völsunga saga.
- Everyone knows Cabaret either as a stage musical or a film. People familiar with the film often forget that the original Broadway version was not choreographed by Bob Fosse, didn't use the Movie Bonus Songs that revivals often insert, had a slightly different plot and presented some of the songs in different contexts. Many people will be aware that it was Very Loosely Based on a True Story, but few have read the original novella, Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood. Cabaret itself was based on a previous non-musical theater adaptation, I Am a Camera, and that has been quite decisively displaced.
- Most people familiar with Damn Yankees and its film adaptation don't know it was based on the novel The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant.
- The Mousetrap, the play by Agatha Christie is much better known than "Three Blind Mice", the short story it was based on, which in turn was based on a radio play also called "Three Blind Mice". This is because, since Do Not Spoil This Ending is Serious Business for the play, "Three Blind Mice" has not been reprinted (or rebroadcast) for 60 years. At least, not in the UK.
- Modern opinion of Uncle Tom's Cabin - particularly the titular Uncle Tom - has been strongly tainted by minstrel shows and early cinema based on those shows. Whereas the original book was about the horrors of slavery, and Uncle Tom died refusing to give up the location of two escaped slave women, the stage shows and movies whitewashed the harsher aspects of slavery and flanderized Uncle Tom's passivity into outright cowardice. (As you probably guessed by now, the pejorative use of "Uncle Tom" stems from the shows, not from the books).
- Vincenzo Bellini's Norma (famously played be Maria Callas) is based on the five-act tragedy Norma, ou l'Infanticide by Alexandre Soumet. The operatic adaptation opened less than a year after the play it displaced.
- Benjamin Britten's opera Peter Grimes is based on the 1810 poem The Borough by George Crabbe.
- Claude Debussy's opera Pelleas and Melisande is based on the play of the same name by Belgian writer Maurice Maeterlinck.
- Outside of the English-speaking world it is a safe bet to say that Gaetano Donizetti's opera Lucia di Lammermoor is better known than Walter Scott's story The Bride of Lammermoor.
- Leos Janacek's opera Jenufa was adapted from the play Její pastorkyna ("Her adoptive daughter") by Gabriele Preiß.
- The operas Manon Lescaut by Francois Auber and Giacomo Puccini, and also Manon by Jules Massenet are more well-known worldwide than Les Aventures du Chevalier Des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut, which forms part of the 1728 novel Mémoires d'un homme de qualité by the Abbé Prévost d'Exiles.
- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart:
- The libretto to Idomeneo was adapted and brought up to current tastes from that of the earlier French opera by Antoine Danchet and André Campra.
- Die Entführung aus dem Serail is based on Christoph Friedrich Bretzner's libretto for Belmonte und Konstanze oder die Verführung aus dem Serail by Johann André (1781), which in turn was based on a 1769 British operetta called The Captive. Bretzner even public protested against Mozart and Johann Gottlieb Stephanie using his libretto and making changes to it.
- World-wide, Don Giovanni is more well-known than any earlier or later adaptation of the Don Juan story, including Moliere's classic play.
- The Magic Flute started out as a straight adaptation of the fairy tale Lulu oder die Zauberflöte from Christoph Martin Wieland's Dschinnistan. However, when another adaptation of the same plot hit the stage first, Mozart and Emanuel Schikaneder completely reworked the libretto, so it became something else.
- Modest Mussorgsky's opera Boris Godunov is closely modeled on Alexander Pushkin's play, which in turn is deeply indebted to Nikolay Karamzin's multi-volume "History of the Russian Empire".
- Jacques Offenbach's bio-opera The Tales of Hoffmann is based on the bio-stage play Les Contes d'Hoffmann by Michel Carré and Jules Barbier.
- Sergei Prokofiev's "The Love of Three Oranges" (best known for the march which was used as the theme for Gangbusters) is based on the 1761 play of the same name by Carlo Gozzi; Gozzi also wrote the play Turandot, on which Puccini based his last opera.
- Giuseppe Verdi:
- The opera Rigoletto has displaced the play on which it is based, Le roi s'amuse by Victor Hugo. Not the first time this happened: one of Verdi's earliest operatic successes, Ernani, was based on another Hugo play, Hernani.
- Il trovatore is based on the Spanish play El Trovador by Antonio García Gutierrez. Gutierrez also wrote the play Simón Bocanegra, on which Verdi based the opera Simon Boccanegra.
- La Traviata is based on the novel La dame aux camélias by Alexandre Dumas, fils, which was also adapted into the 1936 movie Camille.
- Un ballo in maschera is based on Eugène Scribe's libretto for Francois Auber's earlier opera Gustave III; the censors forced Verdi to transpose the story from Sweden to Boston, Massachusetts.
- La forza del destino adapts the now largely forgotten "Don Alvaro or the Force of Destiny" by Angelo de Perez de Saavedra, Duke of Rivas.
- The opera Aida is based on a little-known text story by the French archaeologist Edouard Mariette.
- Richard Wagner adapted Rienzi (which later became Adolf Hitler's favourite opera) from the 1835 novel Rienzi, the Last of the Roman Tribunes by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. He also clearly lifted the plot for Der fliegende Holländer from the description of a fictional play in Die Memoiren des Herrn von Schnabelewopski by Heinrich Heine.
- Carl Maria von Weber and Ludwig Kind loosely adapted Der Freischutz from the story of the same name in the Gespensterbuch by August Apel and Fr. Laun. The same obscure story was later adapted by Robert Wilson, Tom Waits and William S. Burroughs into the musical The Black Rider.
- The Woman In Black is best known as a play (or even as the more recent Daniel Radcliffe film and sequel), but was originally a novel.
- Most fans of the musical Waitress would not know it was a film first, which is justified due to the nature of its release. note
- A theme that Ludwig van Beethoven originally composed for the ballet with songs The Creatures of Prometheus is vastly better remembered as the theme of two other Beethoven works: a large set of variations for piano (Op. 35), and the finale of his "Eroica" Symphony. The piano variations therefore have become commonly known as the "Eroica" variations.
- Tumblr's favorite musical, Be More Chill, is based on a 2004 novel of the same name by Ned Vizzini. Few fans of the show have actually read the book, and even among those who have, the musical is far more popular.
- Hamilton, an immensely popular hip-hop musical, is far more popular than Rob Chernow's Alexander Hamilton. Although, given that Lin-Manuel Miranda is not shy about being a fan of the author, fans of the show have taken to reading the original book.
