Portal:Theatre

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Ancient Greece theatre in Taormina, Sicily, Italy

Theatre or theater is a collaborative form of performing art that uses live performers, usually actors or actresses, to present the experience of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place, often a stage. The performers may communicate this experience to the audience through combinations of gesture, speech, song, music, and dance. It is the oldest form of drama, though live theatre has now been joined by modern recorded forms. Elements of art, such as painted scenery and stagecraft such as lighting are used to enhance the physicality, presence and immediacy of the experience. Places, normally buildings, where performances regularly take place are also called "theatres" (or "theaters"), as derived from the Ancient Greek θέατρον (théatron, "a place for viewing"), itself from θεάομαι (theáomai, "to see", "to watch", "to observe").

A theatre company is an organisation that produces theatrical performances, as distinct from a theatre troupe (or acting company), which is a group of theatrical performers working together. (Full article...)

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Jacques Offenbach
Orpheus in the Underworld (Orphée aux enfers, 1858) is a comic opera with music by Jacques Offenbach (pictured) and words by Hector Crémieux and Ludovic Halévy. It was extensively revised and expanded in 1874 for a run that broke box-office records at the Théâtre de la Gaîté, Paris. In the opera, a lampoon of the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice, Orpheus is a rustic violin teacher who is glad to be rid of his wife when she is abducted by the god of the underworld. The reprehensible conduct of the gods of Olympus was widely seen as a veiled satire of the court and government of Napoleon III, Emperor of the French. Some critics expressed outrage at the librettists' disrespect for classic mythology and the composer's parody of Gluck's opera Orfeo ed Euridice; others praised the piece highly. It was Offenbach's first full-length opera and remains the one that is most often performed. Can-can cabaret acts still use its "Galop infernal", adopted later in the 19th century by the Moulin Rouge and Folies Bergère.

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Chikamatsu Monzaemon

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John Millington Synge
John Millington Synge was an Irish dramatist, poet, prose writer, and collector of folklore. He was a key figure in the Irish Literary Revival and was one of the cofounders of the Abbey Theatre. He is best known for the play The Playboy of the Western World, which caused riots in Dublin during its opening run at the Abbey. Although he came from a middle-class Protestant background, Synge's writings are mainly concerned with the world of the Roman Catholic peasants of rural Ireland and with what he saw as the essential paganism of their world view. Synge suffered from Hodgkin's disease, a form of cancer that was untreatable at the time. He died just weeks short of his 38th birthday and was at the time trying to complete his last play Deirdre of the Sorrows.

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Ralph Richardson
Acting is merely the art of keeping a large number of people from coughing.

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