Line #11 HarsherInHindsight/Theatre


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9	* In the Broadway (later off-Broadway) musical ''Theatre/AvenueQ'', Gary Coleman is depicted as a character. The misfortunes of his life are mocked extensively; he actually works as the building super in the show and, at one point, sings about the fact that his purpose in life is to bring happiness to others via schadenfreude, or making others happy that they're not him. All of this is slightly cringe-worthy given Gary Coleman's sudden death.
10	** In the Hungarian version of the same musical, Gary Coleman was decided to be too unrecognizable to the Hungarian audience, so was replaced by Michael Jackson. As can be imagined, there was originally a joke about him moving to Avenue Q after losing his fortune to a lawsuit from a pair of 5-Year-Olds. After his death, however, the joke was changed to a joke about his spending too much, and thus faking his death.
11	* In Christopher Durang's "Beyond Therapy," Prudence asks Bob, who is a pharmacist, "What exactly is in Tylenol, anyway?" Shortly after the play opened, several bottles of Tylenol were contaminated with cyanide in the Chicago area, leading to the tragic deaths of consumers.
12	* ''Theatre/BillyElliot'' has the song "Merry Christmas, Maggie Thatcher", which contains the lyrics "We all celebrate today, 'Cause it's one day closer to your death." Upon the day of the death of Baroness Thatcher it was put to an audience vote as to whether the song ought to be performed or not. Although the previously humorous song seemed to be in bad taste, the audience decided to keep the ironic song in the show anyway, mainly because [[ItMakesSenseinContext it made sense in context]].
13	* The title song in ''Theatre/{{Cabaret}}'' has always been an emotionally loaded number, but after the death of Natasha Richardson, who played Sally in the 1998 revival, it's almost physically painful to listen to, especially in the verses about Elsie.
14	** The harshness of that song goes back even earlier: Liza Minelli, who won an Oscar as Sally, struggled with drug addiction in real life. The song Cabaret glorifies dying of an overdose as going out with a bang, so to speak. When Minelli performs the song in concert today, she actually changes the line, "When I go, I'm going like Elsie," to "When I go, I'm not going like Elsie," to make it less depressing.
15	* The now-classic "I Am What I Am" from ''Theatre/LaCageAuxFolles'' became even more poignant when it became so connected to the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, and sung at dozens of memorials.
16	* ''Theatre/CharlieAndTheChocolateFactory'' has two songs in Act One that play as this given the events of Act Two:
17	** "More of Him to Love", the IAmSong for FatBastard Augustus Gloop and his parents, celebrates how there will be even more of him to love now that he's going to receive a lifetime supply of sweets. When the audience last sees him, he's on his unwilling way to the Fudge Room and the potential fate of being turned into fudge...and as the Oompa-Loompas cheerfully point out, "everyone loves fudge!"
18	** "The Double Bubble Duchess", the IAmSong for ShamelessSelfPromoter Violet Beauregarde and her {{Slimeball}} dad, is built around a HurricaneOfPuns involving gum and the word "pop" (pop culture, BubblegumPopping, etc.), with her declaring "I'm never gonna stop/Pop!" in her rise to superstardom. TheVillainSucksSong for her downfall, "Juicy!", uses that HurricaneOfPuns to a darker end, culminating in her actually popping -- that is to say, ''exploding'' -- offstage as the result of her helplessly swelling into a giant blueberry.
19	* Creator/{{Aristophanes}}' play ''Theatre/TheClouds'' poked fun at Socrates. A few years later, Socrates was executed for pretty much the exact things Aristophanes made fun of, even though some of them were things which Aristophanes made up for RuleOfFunny.
20	* During a live stage performance on 4th October 2004, Creator/BillyConnolly made an off-the-cuff remark about wishing people threatening to behead British hostages in Iraq "would just get on with it". Sadly [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kidnapping_and_murder_of_Kenneth_Bigley three days later they did]]. Connolly was heavily criticised by the British press for the poor timing and tastelessness of his joke, eventually being described by the Guardian newspaper as "the most vilified public figure of 2004".
21	* In ''Crimes of the Heart'', middle sister Meg has been lying to her grandfather about how successful her singing career is (it's not). After a particularly good evening, she is so giddy that she resolves to tell him the truth - "And if he can't take it, if it sends him into a coma, that's just too damn bad." Guess what happened to ol' Granddaddy overnight. Played literally in that Lennie and Babe can barely tell Meg the news because they are ''laughing hysterically''. Black comedy, indeed.
22	* ''Theatre/{{Dreamgirls}}'' ends with Effie White gaining the recognition she long deserved for being a talented BigBeautifulWoman, and her originating actress, Creator/JenniferHolliday, was praised to the moon and back for her showstopping number "And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going." Unfortunately, Holliday's career sank into obscurity after the musical, as her attempts at launching a mainstream music career stalled due to her record label not wanting to promote a heavyset woman, the exact same problems Effie faced. That being said, Holliday did experience a CareerResurrection when the film version of ''Dreamgirls'' reignited public interest in the original Effie.
23	* Parodied in ''Theatre/TheDrowsyChaperone''. In-Universe, the Man in the Chair mentions that it's very hard to watch or listen to anything with Roman Bartelli in it knowing that after he died he was partially consumed by his poodles. There's nothing in the first scene with Bartelli's character (or ''any'' scene) remotely relating to poodles, but it squicks him out nonetheless.
24	* The song "Try to Remember" from the musical comedy ''Theatre/TheFantasticks'' took on a much more somber meaning after the September 11th terrorist attacks. Lyrics like "Try to remember the kind of September when life was slow and oh so mellow... Try to remember when life was so tender that no one wept except the willow" reflected the loss of innocence many people felt right after the tragedy. Jerry Orbach brought many people to tears singing it at a memorial service at Ground Zero Deep in December, and many lounge singers in Las Vegas added it to their repertoire as some way of trying to make sense of it all.
25	** ''Wall Street Journal'' critic Amy Gamermann [[http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100086742441207000 recalled attending a performance of the show]] three days after 9/11, along with only about two dozen other people. By the end of the song, she was in tears. So was one of the actors.
26	** In the same article, Gamermann compared the opening scene where the Mute throws a handful of colorful paper squares in the air to the bits of paper that had filled the air all day after the Twin Towers fell.
27	* ''Theatre/{{Hamlet}}'': Watching Alan Cumming and Hilary Lyon act out the scene in which Hamlet rejects Ophelia is just... odd now, as they were married at the time but now aren't.
28	* Creator/WSGilbert's last play [[http://diamond.boisestate.edu/gas/other_gilbert/hooligan/Hooligan.txt ends with the criminal protagonist dead from heart failure, just as his death sentence was commuted, because he thought the people coming in to tell him he wasn't going to be killed were about to take him to be hanged, and he had a weak heart.]] Gilbert died of heart failure shortly after, while rescuing a young woman from a pond. He had diabetes, which weakens the heart. Context? Very different. Cause of death? The same.
29	* French theater celebrity Creator/{{Moliere}} died from tuberculosis a few hours after a performance of one of his work, in which he also had the main role. Which one? ''Le Malade imaginaire'' (''[[Theatre/TheImaginaryInvalid The Hypochondriac]]'').
30	* The original production of ''Theatre/InTheHeights'' had Benny, a black man, bragging about what will happen when he's rich, including "UsefulNotes/DonaldTrump and I on the links and he's ''my'' caddy". At the time it was written, Trump was merely a household name for "generic rich guy in real estate." Creator/LinManuelMiranda had the name changed to golfer Tiger Woods after he saw audience members cringing thanks to Trump's extremely divisive term as the UsefulNotes/PresidentOfTheUnitedStates, especially his opinions and policies on Black men like Benny and Latino people like the rest of the cast. The change is effective for all further productions, including [[Film/InTheHeights the 2021 film adaptation]].
31	* Edward Rochester's (of ''Literature/JaneEyre'' fame) attitude towards women is problematic at the best of the times, but TheMusical makes matters worse: James Barbour, the actor who originated the role (and thus the one on the cast recording) would later be arrested for statutory rape. This gives certain lines in songs like "[[http://www.allmusicals.com/lyrics/janeeyre/asgoodasyou.htm As Good As You]]" a creepy (creepier?) subtext. Plus, when you consider that in the book Jane is a teenager and Rochester is in his late thirties, well...
32	** Became disturbing MetaCasting when that same actor went on to play the title role in ''Theatre/ThePhantomOfTheOpera'', another show about a man obsessively in love with a much younger woman.
33	* ''Theatre/JosephAndTheAmazingTechnicolorDreamcoat'' has the song "One More Angel in Heaven," in which patriarch Jacob is [[DeathFakedForYou falsely]] told that his favorite son Joseph is dead. It's PlayedForLaughs, but two subsequent RealLife examples of OutlivingOnesOffspring have made it a bit harsher: Creator/RichardAttenborough, who played Jacob in the film version, lost his daughter Jane and granddaughter Lucy when they were killed in the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami, and the show's composer Creator/AndrewLloydWebber lost his son Nicholas to cancer in 2023.
34	* Creator/CirqueDuSoleil's ''Theatre/{{KA}}'' has a lot of {{Spectacle}} involving characters seeming to fall, sometimes to their doom, from the two moving stages that create its various settings. Sadly, it was during the climactic WireFu sequence that a performer [[FatalMethodActing actually fell 50+ feet to her death]] during the late show on June 29, 2013. What's worse was that the show also had some black humor in its NoTalkingOrPhonesWarning when the "audience member" who breaks the rules is pushed into a seemingly bottomless pit (that the show's moving stages emerge from) by the villains. After going on hiatus for investigation, the show reopened July 16 with the scene in question cut. In late 2014, the full "Battlefield" sequence was completely restored.
35	* ''Theatre/TheLionKing'': [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p05cVqNiPco&feature=related Endless Night.]] The song tends to be quite creepy, and ridiculously heart-breaking when you realize the man singing this version, Creator/JasonRaize, proceeded to hang himself at the age of 28.
36	* Puccini's opera ''Theatre/MadameButterfly'' is seen in some circles as a critique on the then-concurrent WhiteMansBurden mentality as far as the East was concerned. But the theme resounds much more strongly to modern ears when you consider the opera is set in ''[[UsefulNotes/AtomicBombingsOfHiroshimaAndNagasaki Nagasaki]]''. To make matters worse, the opera itself was banished from the Metropolitan Opera after Pearl Harbor in 1941, and it remained out of the Met repertory for the remainder of UsefulNotes/WorldWarII.
37	* In January 1996, 62-year-old tenor Richard Versalle performed in ''The Makropoulos Case'', an opera written by Czech composer Leos Janacek. While climbing up the ladder to a file cabinet, he sang "You can only live so long", suffering a heart attack and falling to the stage below, and putting the opera on hold. At first, people thought it was a dramatic gesture, only to later discover that he had died from a heart attack.
38	* An UrbanLegend holds that when Creator/TheMarxBrothers were performing the {{Vaudeville}} circuit in a small Illinois mining town, Jack Wells, the theater manager, pointed out a "No Smoking" sign (which was inconspicuously placed so you could barely see it) to Groucho and fined him $10. Chico, acting as spokesman, informed the manager that unless he cancelled the fine, they wouldn't perform. Harpo proposed that they would donate $10 to the Salvation Army if the manager agreed to donate the $10 fine to the Salvation Army. He begrudgingly accepted, and later paid each of the Marxes $112.50 in pennies. As the train left, Harpo jokingly yelled out: "Here's hoping your lousy theater burns down!" The next day, the Marxes read that the theater they had just performed in the night before had burnt to the ground, and the rest decided that Harpo shouldn't speak in their routines. [[note]]The real reason was much more benign: Harpo just wasn't that good at verbal comedy, particularly in contrast to his brothers, so he chose to give up that part entirely and created the silent persona to focus on his strength (visual comedy).[[/note]]
39	* "Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again" from ''Theatre/ThePhantomOfTheOpera'' is sung by Christine as she deals with the feelings of grief she's been experiencing since her father's death. The father of Music/SarahBrightman (who originated the role) committed suicide in 1992.
40	%%* Pretty much all of ''Theatre/{{Rent}}'' after Jonathan Larson DiedDuringProduction (and he died on ''the night of the final dress rehearsal'' Off-Broadway). ZCE
41	* An example that doesn't have an event in real life mirroring it, (and played for comedy), the main antagonist of ''Film/SisterAct'', Shanke is singing about getting back his girlfriend after she saw him commit a murder. He uses the line, "When I find my baby, I ain't letting her go." The song is LyricalDissonance and sung to sound like a love song, but the verses following are actually about him drilling, shooting, stabbing, drowning, disemboweling, and [[ThereIsNoKillLikeOverkill giving "her skull a big dent with a blunt instrument"]]. He repeats the line after each verse, (including the first, where he already establishes that he wants to kill her) but by then we get the point.
42	** He also says it towards the end, but this time he says it [[DarkReprise threateningly.]]
43	* ''Theatre/TheVaginaMonologues'' features one monologue wherein a girl is raped by her father's friend, her father kills the guy, and her mother won't let her father see her anymore. Then her mother took her to an older woman who [[DoubleStandardRapeFemaleOnFemale taught her to masturbate]]. After Abu Ghraib, Eve Ensler admitted she couldn't see women as brutalizers before that.
44	* ''Theatre/WestSideStory''
45	** The scene where Anita is almost a victim of gang rape is much harsher to watch in the 2020 revival knowing the [[https://www.onstageblog.com/editorals/2019/8/28/why-you-should-boo-amar-ramasar-in-west-side-story-revival massive controversy]] over the casting of Amar Ramasar, who was fired for sharing nude photos of a woman without her consent. This isn't helped by how the 2020 revival makes Anita's assault particularly graphic and even has one member of the Jets ''film it with his smartphone.''
46	** After Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico in 2017, it may be a while before the show can be performed again in Puerto Rico. At least not without heavily editing the song “Maria”, featuring lyrics like “And suddenly that name / Will never be the same / To me, and "Puerto Rico/You ugly island/Island of tropic diseases/'''always the hurricanes blowing'''.” in "America".
47	* In the song "Dancing Through Life" from the musical ''Theatre/{{Wicked}}'', the character Fiyero sings, "Life's more painless for the brainless." This line is nonchalant and humorous the first time around, until later on in the play when [[spoiler:Elphaba removes Fiyero's brain to prevent him from feeling pain while he is tortured, turning him into the Scarecrow]]. Suddenly the line isn't so fun anymore. Also in this song, "woes are fleeting, blows are glancing" becomes cringe-worthy listening a second time, after you know [[spoiler:Fiyero gets beaten within an inch of his life]].
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Context HarsherInHindsight / Theatre