The jukebox musical All Shook Up challenges current definitions of what constitutes an adaptation. Not only have most productions refrained from announcing the musical as an adaptation, but the question of what All Shook Up is an adaptation of is almost infinitely contestable, given the sheer number of potential combinations of source texts that any one audience member is capable of recognizing. This essay argues that All Shook Up engages with the unstable identities of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night by playing with its own status as an unannounced adaptation: by inviting audiences to recognize All Shook Up ’s status as an adaptation—not only of Twelfth Night , but of multiple other works—as the work unfolds itself, the musical reveals the queer potential of adaptation, its potential to destabilize categories of identity. All Shook Up , ostensibly a light-hearted Elvis Presley vehicle, carries out quiet political work, harnessing this queer potential and expanding on Twelfth Night ’s unstable identities in order to destabilize various forms of modern identity-markers, including gender, sexuality, race, class, region, and age. All Shook Up thus makes a claim for the adaptation as an art form in itself, with its own particular aesthetic and political strengths and values.

Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor contains several features that make it unusual within his dramatic output and that thus render problematic the idea of a unified 'Shakespearean' canon. Until very recently, literary criticism has either largely ignored or denigrated the play, with a sustained interest in its portrayal of female agency, family life and the natural world only consolidating in the early twenty-first century. However, earlier operatic adaptations, such as Salieri and Defranceschi's Falstaff, ossia Le tre burle, demonstrate an engagement with those issues which literary criticism has only lately addressed. While approaches to adaptations of The Merry Wives often focus primarily on the character of Falstaff, Salieri and Defranceschi's opera's engagement with the play's issues beyond Falstaff suggests it might give added weight to a growing awareness of a positive alternative reception history of the play beyond literary criticism. At the same time, a consideration of the opera's engagement with the play's themes of female agency, family life and the natural world might shed light on Falstaff, ossia Le tre burle beyond the shadow cast by Verdi's central character.

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In 2012, Barrie Kosky opened his first season as head of the Komische Oper Berlin by staging adaptations of three Monteverdi operas. Alongside using more familiar forms of adaptation, Kosky commissioned Elena Kats-Chernin to adapt the scores, focusing on instrumentation. While opera-to-opera adaptation is comparatively rare today, it has a long and rich history. The article first proposes three categories of reasons for opera-to-opera adaptation in the past. It then sets Kosky and Kats-Chernin’s Monteverdi productions in the context of this largely forgotten history, arguing that a historical awareness allows the Monteverdi Trilogie to be understood in terms of continuity rather than rupture, and clarifies some of Kosky and Kats-Chernin’s approaches in terms of a vigorous but respectful engagement with opera and its place in the modern city, in terms of recuperating aspects of operatic reception now frequently lost, and in prompting a reconsideration of localization and community inclusion. The article argues that the combination of Kats-Chernin’s adaptation for a variety of western and non-western, classical and non-classical instruments, and the visibility of the instrumentalists, including migrant musicians, that Kosky’s staging enabled set the tone for Kosky’s tenure at the Komische Oper, especially in terms of community and inclusion.

This article uses Eva Noer Kondrup’s chamber opera Den Rejsende (Copenhagen 2018) to examine the challenges and opportunities provoked by the operatic form when attempting to create socially responsible theatre. Focusing on how opera reflects and contributes to contemporary discourse on migration, it examines how opera’s unusual performance and reception demands differentiate it from, for example, spoken verbatim theatre. The article first considers the most common way opera companies today engage with migration – through productions of existing operas – in which socially responsible decisions are primarily in the hands of directors and designers and relate mostly to interpretation, and it explores some of the risks and opportunities of engaging with migration in recent revivals of repertoire works. It then analyses how questions of social responsibility in new operas extend to structural issues that are the field of the composer and librettist. The article examines Kondrup’s decisions as librettist-composer of Den Rejsende, demonstrating the potential for opera to use non-realist operatic techniques to engage with some of the issues with which spoken verbatim theatre has wrestled, including questions of authority, authenticity and authorship, and of empathy, engagement, and identification. The production, performed by two Swedish singers from non-refugee backgrounds in multiple roles, favoured distanciation techniques over “authenticity effects” and avoided tensions between giving voice to and speaking for contemporary refugees that can arise in spoken verbatim theatre. While the libretto contained found text, this was from historical refugee situations, and from the words of Inger Støjberg in her role as Danish Minister for Immigration, Integration and Housing. By throwing a spotlight on the words of an elected representative, Den Rejsende indicated an area in which audience members of what is often thought of as an affective theatrical form might have some influence in effecting practical change.