Awesome (theatre): Difference between revisions

 

 

Sir Robin }}

 

** I'd be really happy if anyone could find that clip again.

*** This line from the skit sums it up beautifully-

* ''The Man Who Came to Dinner'': Throughout the play, the flustered Nurse Preen has been silently taking verbal abuse from Sheridan Whiteside. At long last, she has had enough:

* ''The Lion In Winter''. Nearly every character has at least one, and Henry and Eleanor are the finest walking Crowning (or Crowned?) Moments of Awesome in twentieth century theatre. There are far too many to expound upon here, but for example:

* Quite a few in ''[[Angels in America]]''. The best could be when {{spoiler|Prior Walter wrestles an angel to the ground, climbs a fiery ladder to Heaven, tells the other angels that he refuses to accept the mission they charged him with, lectures them on how humanity cannot be ordered to stay the same forever, and demands that they cure the "plague" (AIDS, though unfortunately they cannot).}} Another good one is when Harper, who spends most of the play in a Valium daze, {{spoiler|stands up for herself and leaves her husband to set out and get a new life for herself.}} Roy Cohn gets one when he pretends to be dying to get the ghost of Ethal Rosenberg to sing a lullabye to him, only to sit up and laugh at her {{spoiler|and then fall dead shortly after.}} Hannah, pretty awesome in her own right, gets one when Prior implies that he thinks she automatically dislikes him for being homosexual because she's a Mormon, leading her to tell him off for making assumptions about ''her''.

* [[Tom Stoppard]] tends to have at least one in every play. For example, in ''Travesties'' there's an entire scene where all of the dialogue forms a series of limericks.

** And in ''Arcadia'', when Hannah confronts Bernard with some research that disproves his thesis:

** How about in ''Rock 'N Roll'' when Alice beats a newspaper to shreds over Candida's head for writing an unflattering article on Syd Barrett?

* ''[[Waiting for Godot]]'': Lucky, a character who has said nothing up to a certain point that he's onstage, has a hat placed upon his head and is told to think. For about seven or eight straight minutes, Lucky spouts off a monologue that is so complex and repetitive and nigh-nonsensical that when the hat is taken off his head, he COLLAPSES. It is the only time he speaks in the whole show.

== Musical Theater/Opera ==

* ''tick, tick...BOOM!'': Louder Than Words. And what Jon says before the song:

* ''[[Wicked (theatre)|Wicked]]''. Elphaba. "Defying Gravity". That is all.

** In particular, the last two lines, "[[Calling the Old Man Out|No wizard that there is or was]] / Is ever gonna bring me down!", never fail to give this troper the shivers.

*** Possibly one of then best CMOA's in musical theater period.

*** SECONDED! (Thirded? Fourth'd?) specifically for this troper:

** and the dialogue leading up to it is chillingly cool, too. This exchange, right after Elphaba is dubbed a [[Wicked Witch]], her worst fear of being reviled by everyone she meets effectively realized:

'''Elphaba:''' I'm not. It's ''The Wizard'' who should be afraid. Of ''me.'' }}

** [[BSOD Song|No Good Deed]] also fits in: it not only gives the shivers, it draws you right into Elphaba's mind. ("Fiyero...FIYERO!!!", just for a start).

** "Let the green girl go!" Okay, so the line is a little [[Narm|narmy]], but isn't everything about [[Fan Nickname|Yero]] like that? He was [[Building Swing|swinging in on a vine and/or rope]] that magically went from the Great Gillikin Forest to somewhere in the heart of Munchkinland for crying out loud. [[Fan Girl|He's just that flipping awesome.]]

** Elphaba, after confirming both that Glinda is truly her friend and also that she won't come with her, pauses for a moment...then sings out ''loud'' that she knows where she's going:

* [[Man of La Mancha]] has "The Impossible Dream". The song itself, while good, is not a CMOA. No, the CMOA comes right at the end, when all the prisoners join together and sing it in choral form as Cervantes and his manservant are taken to the Inquisition. Cue waterworks.

* The stage version of ''[[Chitty Chitty Bang Bang]]'' when on a darkly lit stage Chitty has been driven over Beachy Head cliff and the car raises up into the air to simulate the fall, then the slowly the wings unfirl, the edges of them lit up and the cast begin singing a stirring reprise of "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" (called "Chitty Takes Flight") and then the show goes to interval.

** Don't forget "Do You Hear the People Sing"!

*** Especially the more universal reprise version:

(Epicness ensues, because ''that'', ladies and gents, is how you do a crescendo.) }}

** "Who am I? Who am I? I'M JEAN! VAL! JEAN!" "Who am I? TWO-FOUR-SIX-O-ONE!"

** Don't forget this, please~

'''''I'll do what must be done!''' // I am from the gutter too!'' }}

** I've seen the show four times, and Jean Valjean breaking the chair at the end of this number, making it very clear that means what he says has never failed to send chills down my spine. And when he then punches Javert out and escapes, it cranks the moment [[Up to Eleven]].

** The scene on the barricades when Gavroche (who is a pretty [[Badass]] little kid anyway) calls undercover Javert out.

* Ragtime. "Make them hear you". Especially Brian Stokes Mitchell's rendition of the song.

** Haaving been part of a choir that keeps that song as a staple of our repetoire, can tell you that ANY performance, regardless of context, of "Make Them Hear You" is a CMOA.

* Freddy, [[Shallow Love Interest|Shallow Male Love Interest]] of ''My Fair Lady,'' gets the short end of the stick in many ways, story-wise. However, his song "On the Street Where You Live" has got to be one of the sweetest and most emotionally powerful [[Stalker with a Crush]] songs ''ever'', even out of context!

* The end of "Gethsemane" from Jesus Christ Superstar...

* The finale of ''Pacific Overtures,'' "Next!" turns all of Japan's history from the Meiji Restoration to the present into a [[Crowning Moment of Awesome]] for the ''entire country.''

* [[wikipedia:The Cradle Will Rock|The Cradle Will Rock]] bridges the gap between theater and [[Real Life]]. Someone in the government in 1938 was opposed to a musical glorifying labor unions and did their best to shut it down. Come opening night the doors to the theater were locked and chained shut. But they hadn't counted on [[Orson Welles]]. He moved the cast and the entire crowd across the street to a theater he had rented for the day. The actor's union had prevented the cast from performing onstage, but there was no law about the audience joining in on the songs. So the composer sat down on the piano and played the score while the actors sang their parts from wherever they were seated. The audience was loving it, and at the end of it all they went to the front of the stage to take their bows. Epic.

** Benny standing on his fire escape at the beginning of Act 2. . .and an obviously post-coital Nina coming out to join him. When I first saw the show, the audience clapped and cheered so loudly and for so long that the actors had to start the dialogue over.

*** Which is follwed by a [[Crowning Moment of Funny]]:

{{spoiler|...And then she starts to test Benny on Spanish vocab words. Similarly to above, the theater I was in laughed so hard that they almost missed the beginning of the incoming song!}} }}

** Camila's solo "Enough," in which she tells her family that they messed up royally, and that they ''better'' fix it.

* At the end of ''[[Parade]]'' Lucille's reply to Craig's condolences on her husband's death:

* Mid Act II of ''[[Spring Awakening]]'', an essay of a sexually educational nature is found amongst Moritz's belongings {{spoiler|following his suicide}} and as Melchior is interrogated about the authorship, the song ''Totally Fucked'' begins. Now, with a song titled like that, you already have to know it's going to be pretty cool but the Crowning Moment is right in the middle when they ask him, "For the last time! ''Did you write this?''" Melchior faces up to them, and yells, "'''''YES!'''''" Gives this troper shivers ''every damn time.''

* In the second act of ''[[Gilbert and Sullivan|Ruddigore]]'', [[The Dragon]] has carried off a maiden -- {{spoiler|Dame Hannah}}. In a beautiful subversion of the [[Distressed Damsel]] trope, she ''{{spoiler|appropriates a [[BFS]] and goes after Sir Ruthven}}''.