Tales recycled in new settings in theatre.
- All My Sons is Henrik Ibsen's Pillars of Society IN AMERICA DURING WORLD WAR TWO!
- Annie is Oliver Twist meets Cinderella IN 1930S DEPRESSION-ERA NEW YORK!
- All Shook Up is Twelfth Night IN THE 1950S! IN THE AMERICAN MIDWEST! WITH ELVIS SONGS!
- Avenue Q on the other hand, is RENT WITH MUPPETS INSTEAD OF AIDS! Alternately, it's Sesame Street WITH ANGST!
- Bare: A Pop Opera is Romeo and Juliet IN A CATHOLIC SCHOOL AND GAY!
- The Boys in the Band is Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? BUT GAY!
- Brother Wolf is Beowulf IN 1800S APPALACHIA!
- Cats is Hair WITH FURRIES!
- Cavalia is Cirque du Soleil WITH HORSES!. (In fact, it is directed by Normand Latourelle, one of Cirque's original founders.)
- Cirque du Soleil's Crystal is Alice IN WINTERLAND!
- The Desert Song is The Sheik WITH A Two-Person Love Triangle!
- Dog Sees God is Peanuts IN HIGH SCHOOL!
- Fiddler on the Roof is Pride and Prejudice WITH JEWS! AND RACISM!
- The Golden Apple is The Trojan Cycle IN AN AMERICAN SMALL TOWN!
- The Hard Nut isThe Nutcracker IN 1960s USA!
- Head Over Heels is Philip Sidney's Arcadia WITH THE MUSIC OF THE GO-GOS!
- The Hungarian Rock Opera King Stephen is Jesus Christ Superstar IN HUNGARY!
- Kiss Me, Kate is The Taming of the Shrew AS A MUSICAL WITHIN ANOTHER MUSICAL!
- Little Shop of Horrors is Faust WITH A SINGING CARNIVOROUS PLANT!
- Miracle! is The Miracle Worker IN 1990's SEATTLE WITH DRAG QUEENS!
- Mourning Becomes Electra is Aeschylus's The Oresteia IN AMERICA AT THE TIME OF THE CIVIL WAR!
- The Music Man is The Rainmaker WITH A BOYS' MARCHING BAND INSTEAD OF RAIN! AND A HOT LIBRARIAN, TOO!
- One Man Two Guvnors is the 18th century Italian comedy The Servant of Two Masters AS A FARCE WITH GANGSTERS IN 1960S BRIGHTON!
- Plain and Fancy is Oklahoma! IN PENNSYLVANIA!
- Alternatively, Amish Fiddler on the Roof MINUS THE POGROMS!
- Not a musical: Seven Supermans is Seven Samurai WITH RIPPED OFF SUPERHEROES!
- She's The Man is Twelfth Night WITH SOCCER!
- William Shakespeare gets this treatment often:
- Disney's The Lion King (1994) and its sequel are essentially Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet, respectively, AS TALKING ANIMAL CARTOONS! With happy endings!
- The Lion King 1 ½ is Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Were Eaten by a Lion.
- 1999's Titus, set WHENEVER JULIE TAYMOR FELT LIKE IT! No, seriously. One minute it's Ancient Rome, the next it's the 1940s.
- Forbidden Planet (1956) is The Tempest IN SPACE!
- Whilst Return to the Forbidden Planet is THE MUSICAL! of that!
- Twilight is even described by the author as Romeo and Juliet WITH VAMPIRES AND WEREWOLVES!
- It also supposed to be Romeo and Juliet except TOTALLY SERIOUS!
- Gnomeo and Juliet. There's GNOMES!
- West Side Story is Romeo and Juliet IN AMERICA! THE MUSICAL!
- The Akira Kurosawa film Throne of Blood is Macbeth WITH SAMURAI!
- Of course, O is Othello IN HIGH SCHOOL!
- Strange Brew is Hamlet IN CANADA, WITH HOSERS!
- Director John Bell is a huge fan of this trope. He's done Macbeth in post-apocalyptic Russia, Titus Andronicus in a Library, and King Lear on a really bad acid trip.
- Orson Welles once put on a production of Macbeth set IN HAITI!
- Of course, the Bard wasn't scared of doing this himself. The Comedy of Errors is the Menaechmi with an extra pair of twins, after all.
- And the similarities between Romeo and Juliet and the ancient Roman myth of Pyramus and Thisbe are too many to ignore.
- Servant of two masters by Carlo Goldoni is Romeo and Juliet AS A COMEDY! With HAPPY ENDING!
- Modern stage productions of Shakespeare use this trope so frequently that it's a long-standing joke among Shakespeare fans that the most daring and original thing a Director can do with Hamlet is set it in Denmark.
- Amaluna is The Tempest ON A TROPICAL ISLAND WITH LOTS MORE WOMEN!
- Waterfall is Miss Saigon IN PRE-WORLD WAR II THAILAND!.
