Title Drop/Theatre

"Helena: All's Well That Ends Well; still the fine's the crown; Whate'er the course, the end is the renown. ... Duke: Haste still pays haste, and leisure answers leisure; Like doth quit like, and measure still for measure. ... Prince: For never was a story of more woe Than this of Juliet and her Romeo. ... This purse of ducats I receiv'd from you, And Dromio my man did bring them me: I see we still did meet each other's man, And I was ta'en for him, and he for me, And thereupon these errors are arose. ... He that knows better how to tame a shrew, Now let him speak; 'tis charity to show."
 * Frequently done with title songs in musicals (too many to list).
 * Shakespeare does this occasionally:

"Got a dream, boy? Got a song? Paint your wagon and come along!"
 * When the curtain opens on the prologue of Fiddler on the Roof, we see and hear the fiddler playing, and a is the very first line in the show. The fiddler, who plays no part in the plot, is explained by Tevye to be a metaphor for the tenacious existence of Anatevka and its people.
 * The opening scene of the musical Damn Yankees has one in dialogue (what Joe says when Meg asks him if the Washington Senators won the game he was watching) and another in the song "Six Months" ("Those damn Yankees! Why can't we beat 'em?")
 * The Importance of Being Earnest is both the title of Oscar Wilde's play, and what one of the main characters announces that he has learned in the very last line of that play.
 * "There are no Angels in America" re: the lack of spiritual or ethnic history in the nation's culture—it's a big rant about how everything is political.
 * Although, in the context of this play, there, and Louis is, as Belize says "so full of piping hot crap that the mention of [his] name draws flies" in the monologue/monolith in which he makes the above statement.
 * In the opening scene of The Music Man, one of the salesmen on the train calls Professor Harold Hill a "music man" during the "Rock Island" patter.
 * Paul Rudnick's I Hate Hamlet does this unabashedly, as the script calls for a lightning strike for emphasis upon delivery of the line.
 * In You Can't Take It with You, Grandpa drops the title in reference to Mr. Kirby's wealth.
 * "Thou hast come to join The Yeomen of the Guard."
 * "They are pirates! The famous Pirates of Penzance!"
 * Les Misérables is generally considered to be an untranslatable title. It is dropped in the finalé in the original French version of the musical; it is translated as "the wretched of the Earth" in the more widely-heard English libretto, but this is a loose translation and loses the effect of the Title Drop.
 * In Drew Hayden Taylor's Someday, the word "someday" is pronounced exactly twice: at the very beginning of the play, by the mother, Anne, who states that she'll be rich "someday." She wins the lotto and also fulfills her dream of meeting Grace/Janice, her daughter who was taken away by children's aid 35 years earlier. The family reunion seems to be going well until Grace, now the rich lawyer Janice, asks why she was taken away and Anne tells her the truth, that it's because they were Native Canadian and poor. Janice can't accept that answer and realizes how different she is from her birth family, having been raised by an upper-middle-class family while her mother and sister live on reservation. She leaves quite brutally and merely states "I'll be back...someday." This is the most chilling line of the play, especially since it started set up as a play about dreams being fulfilled. Made even more poignant since in the sequel, Only Drunks and Children Tell the Truth, she does come back....
 * Given that the word "Wicked" is spoken often in the 2nd act of the eponymous show, there is one conversation where Elphaba emphasises to Glinda that she is now "the WICKED witch of the west," which is important.
 * More whimsically: "For the first time, I feel...wicked."
 * And of course, the very first song of the show is 'No One Mourns the Wicked', which ends with the ensemble shouting the title in unison.
 * Inherit the Wind has Matthew Harrison Brady quote scripture. It becomes considered for his.
 * "Don't forget that a few years ago we came through the depression by The Skin of Our Teeth. One more tight squeeze like that and where would we be?"
 * In Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the Title Drop occurs as a bit of drunken singing (parodying "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf," of course).
 * Paint Your Wagon does it in its theme song "I'm On My Way," which is technically not a title song:

"Lee Marvin: Gonna paint your wagon, Gonna paint it fine, Gonna use oil-based paint 'Cause the wood is pine. Choir: Ponderosa pine! Wooo-ooh!"
 * And in the Simpsons parody, its

"Stella: But there are things that happen between a man and a woman in the dark--that sort of making everything else seem--unimportant. Blanche: What you are talking about is brutal desire--just--Desire!--the name of that rattle-trap streetcar that bangs through the Quarter, up one old narrow street and down another..."
 * In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Maggie uses the phrase to describe her life.
 * In Up The Down Staircase, the title (an offense one of the protagonist's students is detained for) is rather painfully dropped twice, once near the beginning and once at the play's "climax."
 * "When he died--- and by the way he died the Death of a Salesman, in his green velvet slippers in the smoker of the New York, New Haven and Hartford, going into Boston---when he died, hundreds of salesman and buyers were at his funeral. Things were sad on a lotta trains for months after that."
 * Subverted in Ah, Wilderness! by Eugene O'Neill: the character is interrupted just before getting to that line in a poem.
 * Arthur Miller's All My Sons: Joe says at the end, "Sure, he was my son. But I think to him they were all my sons. And I guess they were, I guess they were."
 * "You're a good man, Charlie Brown." Not only the first song, but the last line of the play (said by Lucy, of all people).
 * The Cole Porter musical Out Of This World drops its title in the song "No Lover."
 * A Streetcar Named Desire has a literal Title Drop in its first scene, where Blanche tells how she came to the house on Elysian Fields. Later, there is a less literal but more meaningful reference:

""Take a bird--a canary in a cage--put it on a table--then let a cat jump up and walk around the cage, glaring at the canary. What happens? The canary, seeing its enemy so close to it, is frightened almost to death. But if it had understanding, it would know that the cat couldn't reach it while it had the protection of the cage. Not knowing this, it suffers a thousand deaths--through fear.""
 * A double title drop is done in Andrew Lloyd Webber's Tell Me on a Sunday. There's the title song of course, but it also contains the lyrics "let me down easy, no big song and dance". Tell Me on a Sunday was combined with Variations to form the reworked show Song and Dance, consisting of one "song" act (Tell Me on a Sunday) and one "dance" act (Variations), so this one is a retroactive title drop as well.
 * In The Cat and the Canary, no cats or canaries are brought up until the second act, when Annabelle starts flipping through a random book and finds herself reading about fear and how to overcome it through understanding:


 * In the last line of the Brandon Thomas comedy "Charley's Aunt", Jack(who had been impersonating Charley's aunt so Charley could tell his sweetheart's father that he had a chaperone) gratefully tells Dona Lucia(Charley's real aunt) that from now on, "I will gladly cede to you the title of Charley's Aunt."
 * Phone rings, door chimes, in comes Company
 * George Bernard Shaw's You Never Can Tell has no less than five Title Drops, all by the same character, who considers it philosophy.
 * Several characters in Dog Sees God title drop the scene titles, and Beethoven mentions in The Vipers Nest that it's said "a dog sees god in his master." Interestingly, the play also drops the title of another Charlie-Brown themed work in the final monologue, as CB reads a letter from his mysterious pen pal CS (Charles Shultz) who tells him that despite his struggles, he is a good man.
 * "The sight is dismal, and our affairs from England come too late. The ears are senseless that should give us hearing, to tell him his commandment is fulfilled, that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead."
 * Not a title song, but the last lyric in the musical Ordinary Days: "... the color of an ordinary day."


 * Back to