Karma Houdini/Theater


 * The Duke in Verdi's opera Rigoletto.
 * And by extension King Francois I in the play on which it was based, Victor Hugo's Le roi s'amuse.
 * Alberich in Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen is the Big Bad, yet somehow manages to not get killed; he's nowhere seen in the Kill Em All ending of Götterdämmerung. It's debatable if he survived that long, however: an indefinite amount of time passes between Siegfried and Götterdämmerung, and Alberich's only scene in the latter is him appearing as a dream-like vision to his son Hagen. One could easily interpret this as him being a Spirit Advisor already dead of old age, but Wagner (who relied heavily on the extended Info Dump) never says anything about what happened to him after he was last heard laughing in Siegfried.
 * Which, incidentally, is also the current status of Doctor Who's.
 * Jigger in Carousel. "He got away."
 * Oberon in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Nights Dream. Essentially, to allow himself to steal a human servant from his wife (whom she won't give up because he's the son of a close human friend who died in childbirth), he drugs his wife to make her lovestruck, and then tricks her into handing over the child when she's not herself. He also tells Puck, completely on a whim, to help out a human couple he found in the woods, indirectly causing a significant portion of the conflict in the play. While he does eventually solve the conflict with the star-crossed lovers, when he releases his wife from her spell, not only is she not angry with him for enchanting her, but also appears to have completely forgotten the entire reason for their feud.
 * Jim Conley in Parade.
 * Medea in Euripides' play Medea.
 * Cinderella's Stepmother in Into the Woods. While her daughters get blinded by pigeons, she, who is probably the most responsible for Cinderella's misery, makes it through the show more or less intact.
 * However, it is strongly implied in the finale that
 * And there are the princes, both of whom
 * More true for Cinderella's Prince than Rapunzel's, as the reason Rapunzel's Prince was out wandering in the second act was that he was searching for her.
 * In the musical Little Shop of Horrors, Audrey II is an alien plant that convinces meek Seymour to kill people for him. Despite the play being a comedy, Audrey II not only survives at the end of the play, but gets away with his alien invasion.
 * Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire. This was changed for The Movie, where Executive Meddling added a scene of his wife Stella leaving him. In the original play, though, she remains willfully ignorant of the fact that he raped her sister. However, considering that this happened before, it's likely that Stella will come back to Stanley.
 * Evelyn in "The Shape of Things"
 * The Thénardiers in Les Misérables. Given that they're effectively living manifestations of the evils of nineteenth-century France, this was pretty much inevitable.