The Boys from Syracuse is a musical with music by Richard Rodgers and lyrics by Lorenz Hart, and based on the play The Comedy of Errors, as adapted by librettist George Abbott. The score includes swing and other contemporary rhythms of the 1930s. The show was the first musical based on a Shakespeare play. The Comedy of Errors was itself loosely based on a Roman play, The Menaechmi, or the Twin Brothers, by Plautus.
The show premiered on Broadway in 1938 and Off-Broadway in 1963, with later productions including a West End run in 1963 and in a Broadway revival in 2002. A film adaption w released in 1940. Well-known songs from the score include “Falling in Love with Love”, “This Can’t Be Love” and “Sing for your Supper”.
Identical twins Antipholus of Ephesus and Antipholus of Syracuse were separated from each other in a shipwreck as young children. Their servants, both named Dromio, are also long-separated identical twins. When the pair from Syracuse come to Ephesus, a comedy of errors and mistaken identities ensues when the wives of the Ephesians, Adriana and her servant Luce, mistake the two strangers for their husbands. Adriana’s sister Luciana and the Syracuse Antipholus fall in love. But all ends happily.
A film version was released in August 1940 by Universal Pictures. Directed by A. Edward Sutherland, the film starred Allan Jones in the dual roles of the two Antipholuses, Joe Penner in the dual roles of the Dromios, Martha Raye and Irene Harvey.
