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Post by Backdrifter on Jul 22, 2017 12:40:50 GMT
I was amused by a thread on another board where people listed film tropes and clichés. I wondered if there were equivalent theatre ones. I was thinking of general ones that is, rather than e.g. specific directors (Katie Mitchell with her falling sand, ballgowns and slo-mo, etc) but what the hell, suggest those by all means. In an earlier thread here the RSC-style soldiers' hearty backslapping and manly hugging was mentioned. I'm struggling to think of others but there must be some.
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Post by floorshow on Jul 22, 2017 12:46:31 GMT
Can't have a good farce without french doors.
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Post by samuelwhiskers on Jul 22, 2017 13:06:49 GMT
That stupid tinsel confetti stuff (I don't know what it's called, you know what I mean) raining onto either the stage or the audience.
Flooding the stage seems to be increasingly popular.
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Post by Deleted on Jul 22, 2017 13:11:26 GMT
A musical with a tap routine?
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Post by BurlyBeaR on Jul 22, 2017 13:54:10 GMT
I was amused by a thread on another board WHAT. OTHER. BOARD.  |
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Post by Tibidabo on Jul 22, 2017 13:56:53 GMT
Can't have a good farce without french doors. ..and a tennis racquet..... |
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Post by Deleted on Jul 22, 2017 13:57:59 GMT
Musicals have a lot of such tropes; the 'I Want Song' or the 'Eleven O'Clock Number', for example or, in previous times, the forties/fifties 'Dream Ballet'. An incredibly pervasive one was the the end of act Finaletto or Finale that reprises snatches of songs heard earlier, a convention reaching from the thirties right back to the days of operetta.
Shows that humorously pastiche these include 'The Boy Friend' with the twenties or 'Little Mary Sunshine' with Friml/Romberg operetta. 'Follies' has a lot of this too but going beyond pastiche and layering it with contemporary styles so that the whole score is about memory and its distortions.
Pastiche comes when something becomes repetitive and predictable, once it becomes so then the best writers start to try and subvert or use it ironically (the Gershwins in 'Of Thee I Sing' for example, which was effectively a jazz age Gilbert and Sullivan score).
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Post by lynette on Jul 22, 2017 18:09:12 GMT
My favourite for musicals is 'let's put the show on here!' the basis for many.
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Post by emsworthian on Jul 22, 2017 20:01:03 GMT
Audience plants; e.g a heckle from audience member which has been scripted or an apparent random member of the audience is dragged on staged reluctantly to become involved in the action, when you know they are a member of the cast.
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Post by Backdrifter on Jul 22, 2017 20:09:37 GMT
This one might have receded now but at one point I was seeing it a lot: the show opens in blackout with loud pounding music, then lights go up on stage and the music quietens down, and is now seen to be coming from a radio during the first scene.
Speaking of musicals tropes, of course Spamalot did a brilliant take on one: 'At this point in every show, there's a song that goes like this...'
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999 posts
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Post by Backdrifter on Jul 22, 2017 20:10:42 GMT
Audience plants; e.g a heckle from audience member which has been scripted or an apparent random member of the audience is dragged on staged reluctantly to become involved in the action, when you know they are a member of the cast. Apart from agreeing with this, I also wanted to say how striking your avatar is. |
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Post by Deleted on Jul 22, 2017 22:15:24 GMT
My absolute least favourite is fake corpsing. I know theatre's not real, but there's a difference between a fiction and a lie.
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Post by hitmewithurbethshot on Jul 22, 2017 22:27:00 GMT
The heroine who receives a mortal injury but stays alive just long enough to sing a heartbreaking reprise with the hero.
Also, dead prostitutes.
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Post by glossie on Jul 23, 2017 10:38:43 GMT
The 'heartfelt' "NOOOOOOO" when a main character dies...... Yes, I'm talking about you, Ragtime and Martin Guerre. If you want to know how to show grief just watch/listen to David Hobson at the end of Australian Opera's La Boheme. Devastating.
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Post by peelee on Jul 23, 2017 10:49:52 GMT
Can't have a good farce without french doors.
Nor without French knickers.
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Post by Dawnstar on Jul 23, 2017 12:30:39 GMT
The top opera cliche has to be furniture abuse. It sometimes feel like there is barely an opera produced nowadays (apart from those stagings so minimalist as to have no furniture onstage) that does not involve usually chairs being overturned & flung round the stage in moments of high emotion. In second place is updating to a generic 20th century dictatorship with most of the cast dressed in trenchcoats & toting Kalashnikovs.
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Post by Deleted on Jul 23, 2017 16:47:47 GMT
Post-apocalyptic Jukebox musicals sneaking their way into the cliche range too.
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Post by Backdrifter on Oct 31, 2018 17:30:35 GMT
This isn't so much the on-stage action but synopses that mention 'dystopian'.
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Post by BurlyBeaR on Oct 31, 2018 17:48:04 GMT
Mary Warren in The Crucible being portrayed with a country bumpkin accent.
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