History ExecutiveMeddling / Theatre

* Subverted in ''Don't Blame Me, I'm Just the Playwright'', a short play that features massive amounts of this trope InUniverse. The two playwrights are trying to make a serious play called ''Last Visit'' about a girl with two weeks to live. ExecutiveMeddling turns it into a musical comedy, adding fart jokes, vampires[[note]]''Literature/{{Twilight}}'' ShoutOut[[/note]], and a psychotic, anorexic diva for the lead. The playwrights come perilously close to [[DisownedAdaptation washing their hands of the whole thing]] ... then the finished play turns out to be a hit and they figure, what the hell.

* This is the reason ''Theatre/TanzDerVampire'' is a big hit in Europe (and elsewhere) and an abysmal flop on Broadway. Extensive rewrites were undertaken to make the show more appealing to an American audience, and to obliterate any similarities to ''Theatre/ThePhantomOfTheOpera'' at the behest of Michael Crawford, who didn't want to play "the same guy with bigger teeth". It culminated in Jim Steinman being fired ''from his own show'' for objecting to the meddling, and contributed a huge part to VampireMusicals being seen as failures (specifically on Broadway).

* ''Theatre/CyranoDeBergerac'': An example InUniverse: At Act II Scene VII, the play notes indicate that Cyrano is tempted to accept a patronage from [[MagnificentBastard Cardenal]] [[ManBehindTheMan Richelieu]], but then [[SpannerInTheWorks De Guiche mentions the one thing]] [[SmallNameBigEgo Cyrano will not tolerate: someone touching his verses.]] It’s necessary to empathize that [[RenaissanceMan Richelieu is a playwright himself, he knows about art]] and he will be paying for everything, so his ExecutiveMeddling could even [[TropesAreNotBad be beneficial to Cyrano’s work]].

* This is the reason the 2013 stage musical ''Theatre/CharlieAndTheChocolateFactory'' incorporates one song, "Pure Imagination", from the [[Film/WillyWonkaAndTheChocolateFactory 1971 movie adaptation]] of [[Literature/CharlieAndTheChocolateFactory the source novel]] into an otherwise completely new score -- Warner Bros. Theatre Ventures executives pushed for its placement. Given how well it goes over with audiences (it's TheElevenOClockNumber in this version), it's arguably a case of TropesAreNotBad.

* Subverted in ''Don't Blame Me, I'm Just the Playwright'', a short play that features massive amounts of this trope InUniverse. The two playwrights are trying to make a serious play called ''Last Visit'' about a girl with two weeks to live. ExecutiveMeddling turns it into a musical comedy, adding fart jokes, vampires[[note]]hilarious ''{{Twilight}}'' ShoutOut[[/note]], and a psychotic, anorexic diva for the lead. The playwrights come perilously close to [[DisownedAdaptation washing their hands of the whole thing]] ... then the finished play turns out to be a hit and they figure, what the hell.

* The authorities made Giuseppe Verdi completely rewrite ''AMaskedBall'' several times, because the original version was about the assassination of [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustav_III_of_Sweden King Gustav III of Sweden]]. He changed it to a fictional governor of colonial Massachusetts in Boston.