Venus and Adonis (Shakespeare Poem) - Adaptations

Adaptations

• Doom metal band My Dying Bride used extracts of the poem in the song For My Fallen Angel, on their 1996 album Like Gods of the Sun.
• The Lone Star Ensemble, a theatre company, has presented a fully staged performance of the poem.
• The original poem is read by several British actors (among them David Burke, Eve Best and Benjamin Soames) on a Naxos audiobook. The audiobook also includes "The Rape of Lucrece."
• Richard Burton once recorded a spoken word album of the poem for Caedmon Records.
• Melbourne-based company Malthouse Theatre collaborated with Sydney's Bell Shakespeare to produce a musical adaptation of the work. Directed by Marion Potts, with music by Andree Greenwell, the work was first performed in the Malthouse Theatre in Melbourne in 2008 and again in Sydney Theatre Company's Wharf 2 in February 2009. In March 2009, the show travelled to Auckland, New Zealand and was performed in The Bruce Mason Centre as part of the 2009 Auckland Festival. It was an unusual version of Venus & Adonis starring Melissa Madden-Gray and Susan Prior, both playing the character of Venus. The Adonis character is absent from the stage and is 'played' by the audience. Throughout the performance Venus (Madden-Gray and Prior) attempt to seduce the audience. Venus & Adonis received good reviews in all of its three seasons.
• The popular theme song for the Haunted Mansion attractions at Disneyland, Walt Disney World, and Tokyo Disneyland, "Grim Grinning Ghosts," is derived from a line in Venus and Adonis, in this context:

...Hateful divorce of love,’—thus chides she Death,—

‘Grim-grinning ghost, earth’s worm, what dost thou mean

To stifle beauty and to steal his breath,

Who when he liv’d, his breath and beauty set

Gloss on the rose, smell to the violet?''

• A theatrical adaptation, William Shakespeare’s Venus & Adonis, with an original score and songs by Christopher Reiner, was performed by Zombie Joe’s Underground Theatre Group in North Hollywood, California for five weeks in August and September 2006. The L.A. Weekly described it: "six women, clothed in black, recite the poem while weaving around the stage in a sensual, interpretive dance."