Plays within the genre of theatre of cruelty are abstract in convention and content. This theatre style originated in the 1940s when Antonin Artaud hypothesised about the effects of expressing through the body as opposed to “by socially conditioned thought.” In 1946, he wrote a preface to his works in which he explained how he came to write what and the way he did.Ībove all, Artaud did not trust language as a means of communication. Examples of musical productions include Wicked and Fiddler on the Roof. Musicals can be very elaborate in settings and actor performances. Musical productions have songs to help explain the story and move the ideas of the play along. A similar situation occurred during the 1960s, when composers were scarce and musicals lacked vibrancy and entertainment value.īy the 1990s, there were very few original Broadway musicals, as many were recreations of movies or novels. When the Great Depression came, many people left Broadway for Hollywood, and the atmosphere of Broadway musicals changed significantly. For musical theatre, this meant that composers gained the right to create every song in the play, and these new plays were held to more specific conventions, such as thirty-two-bar songs. Around the 1920s, theatre styles were beginning to be defined more clearly.

Modern Western musical theatre emerged in the Victorian era, with many structural elements established by the works of Gilbert and Sullivan in Britain and those of Harrigan and Hart in America. The first musical of American origin was premiered in Philadelphia in 1767, and was called “The Disappointment”, however, this play never made it to production. Tragedy īallad opera, a popular theatre style at the time, was the first style of musical to be performed in the American colonies. However, in recent years, it has become a topic of interest for theatre theorists, who have been looking into theatre styles that have their own conventions of performance.

This may give clues as to why, despite its original success, restoration comedy did not last long in the seventeenth century. The inconsistency between restoration comedy’s morals and the morals of the era is something that often arises during the study of this genre. It is commonly agreed that restoration comedy has origins in Molière’s theories of comedy, but differs in intention and tone.

However, since restoration comedy dealt with unspoken aspects of relationships, it created a type of connection between audience and performance that was more informal and private. Characters featured in restoration comedy included stereotypes of all kinds, and these same stereotypes were found in most plays of this genre, so much so that most plays were very similar in message and content. Restoration comedy is a genre that explored relationships between men and women, and was considered risqué in its time.

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