Shakespeare in Love is a play with music adapted for the stage from the Oscar^®-winning 1998 film by Lee Hall, based on the screenplay by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard. A romantic piece of historical fiction, the story centers around a young Will Shakespeare as he struggles to find his inspiration.  This play brings Shakespeare’s dialogue to the forefront and highlights its theatrical origins. Much of the dialogue is taken from Shakespeare’s cannon (with Romeo and Juliet featured heavily throughout) and many of the plot devices employ tactics commonly found in plays of the Elizabethan age: cross-dressing disguises, mistaken identities, suspicions of adultery, sword fighting, a comedic nurse, and even visions of ghosts are all present, as is the enduring “play-within-a-play” convention that Shakespeare fondly adopted for many of his works.

Overall, Shakespeare in Love delivers a delightfully crowd-pleasing, deeply romantic, and highly adventurous tale of love and drama in Renaissance-era England.

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