Othello starts as an apparent domestic comedy - a couple marrying despite the intentions of the bride's parents, a hopeless young suitor to said woman, and the dock/drinking scenes in Act 2 are all staples of comedy.
The Winter's Tale turns from tragedy, to comedy, to uneasy reconciliation.
Twelfth Night does this, too: Malvolio's treatment transforms from simple humiliation to something far less easy-going, as Feste takes an increasingly sadistic pleasure in his imprisonment (and 'treatments') as a supposed 'madman'. Malvolio ends the play planning his revenge on his peers.
On a more upbeat note, the final scene of the play has things getting worse and worse for Viola: she's been accused of eloping with Olivia, injuring Sir Toby and Sir Andrew in a duel, and betraying Antonio — and then Sebastian shows up, which clarifies everything and allows Viola to reunite with her long-lost twin and reveal her true identity to Orsino, who promptly decides that now that he knows she's a woman, he'd like to marry her.
Macbeth, Act II: Scene III Starts off with an amusingly drunk porter hamming it up while Macduff and Lennox knock to be let in, and ends with Macduff finding King Duncan's dead body, Lady Macbeth passing out "from shock," and the Crown Prince and his brother deciding to flee the country out of fear for their lives.
Hamlet can be like this. Interspersed between the dark, angsty, and sometimes violent scenes are scenes that, given the right actor and director, can be utterly hilarious. Act II, scene i, Act III, scene iii and Act IV, scenes ii and iii see Hamlet gleefully and cleverly messing with the minds of, respectively, Polonius, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (twice), and Claudius. One of these takes place immediately after Hamlet kills Polonius, another not long after Old Hamlet appears to tell Hamlet of his murder. The second half of the play mostly settles down to dark tragedy (with a break for the comic Gravediggers), but the first half can epitomize this trope.
Romeo and Juliet actually starts off pretty light, despite the feud between the Montagues and the Capulets and the brief mention in the introduction about 'young lovers did take their life'. But then the previously comic Mercutio is mortally wounded, and dies cursing the two families, and the play turns into a tragedy. Mercutio's death scene itself is a narrower example of this trope: His fight with Tybalt initially appears to be an inconsequential skirmish, with both duelers walking away. The other characters on stage even berate Mercutio for his overdramatic (as ever) reaction to a seemingly minor injury. Half a minute later, the tragedy's Breakout Character is dead.
The best example of this is probably Love's Labour's Lost: In the last act of a hilarious geeky rom-com, where some amateur actors are putting on a play and doing it badly and getting made fun of by the audience of couples, a minor lord bursts in to say that one of the women's father has died, which means that she has to leave for a year of mourning and they can't get married.
The Comedy of Errors goes in the other direction: "Proceed, Solinus, to procure my fall / And by the doom of death end woes and all" are the first two lines of Shakespeare's most hilarious comedy.
Much Ado About Nothing Act IV Scene 1 has a lot of this. The play has been a lighthearted comedy up until this point, with wacky hijinks (tricking the Belligerent Sexual Tension pair Beatrice and Benedick into falling for each other) and misunderstandings easily cleared up, but the tone shifts to near tragedy as Claudo publicly (and often violently) shames Hero for what he thinks is her unfaithfulness. Hero's father Leonato then joins in, raging at Hero for her supposed behavior. After the friar manages to calm everybody down, Benedick and a weeping Beatrice are left alone. Benedick tries to comfort Beatrice, but she's too distracted to really notice, so he just goes for it:
Benedick: I do love nothing in the world so well as you. Is not that strange?
Beatrice: As strange as the thing I know not. It were as possible for me to say I loved nothing as well as you.
At this point the scene swings back to comedy, with Benedick and Beatrice flirting for a minute, but then it rockets back to intensity with these lines
Benedick: Come, bid me do anything for thee.
Beatrice: Kill Claudio.
The audience often laughs at this line, expecting more comedy, but it soon becomes apparent that she's serious; she believes Claudio deserves death for shaming her cousin. She rails against the societal limitations put on women and the cowardice she sees from men until Benedick agrees to challenge Claudio in a duel and leaves to do so. Then comes yet another whiplash with the scene change, as the next scene is a goofy one with the Watch.
A few whiplashes in a row in Henry V. It starts with the "Once more unto the breach" rah-rah England speech, where Henry exhorts his men to take the town of Harfleur, "on, on you noblest English!" Then, after a goofy comic relief scene, Henry threatens the governor of Harfleur (and in some productions the citizens huddled around him) with rather graphic depictions of rape, pillage and murder if they don't surrender, "your naked infants spitted upon pikes!" The next scene is Princess Katherine flitting about with her maid, learning important English words like "elbow." That entire scene is a set-up for a dirty pun. Whiplash indeed.
The Merchant of Venice starts out dark, then turns into a romantic comedy, then steadily becomes darker with frequent comic interludes, then becomes really dark, then appears to wrap up happily, then darkens a bit again, then finally ends - ostensibly happily if you're willing to disregard the Unfortunate Implications, which most modern adaptations do not. In general, it's labeled a comedy.
The radio play All Is Calm, being about the Christmas Truce of 1914 during World War I, feels like nothing but this trope. It goes from some painful parts to some hilarious parts at breakneck speed and right back 'round again. High points include a tearjerker Christmas radio broadcast that's propaganda, supposedly a singalong from the soldiers in the trenches telling their family that they're all just glad to be there doing their noble duty, being drowned out by a hilarious Last-Second Word SwapBawdy Song, and a scandalised-sounding German officer's account of playing a game of football against Scottish soldiers and discovering exactly what was being worn under their kilts being read in much too close proximity to another reader talking about everyone heading off into No-Man's-Land to bury their dead friends from back in November. The worst part of it is, all the material is real.
In Into the Woods, the Witch's line played for comedic effect: "BANG! FLASH! THE LIGHTNING CRASHED AND well that's another story, never mind, anyways..."
In The King and I, the King becomes closer than ever to Anna when he learns to dance with her. He is eagerly leading an encore of "Shall We Dance?" when Kralahome bursts in and announces the arrest of Tuptim. Anna's sympathies obviously lie with the fugitive, and so the King is "now miles away from her" (according to the stage direction). The confrontation that follows is the most serious part of the play and leads to the King's Death by Despair in the final scene.
The Vagina Monologues consists of, well, a series of monologues about vaginas. They range in mood from "My Angry Vagina," a humorous rant about tampons and OB/GYN tools, to "My Vagina Was My Village" and "Say It," which are about the experiences of women in serial rape camps, and boldly straddle the line between Tear Jerker and Nightmare Fuel. Now imagine if your local production decided to arrange the monologues so that "My Angry Vagina" was between the other two...
"My Vagina was My Village" is Mood Whiplash within the monologue. The speaker switches between excitement and wonder (describing how she experienced her body before the assault) to terror (describing the assault itself and the damage it left her with). It's to the point where some productions will actually have two actresses do the piece, one for the before and one for the after, rather than make one actress repeatedly shift back and forth.
The Wedding Singer musical goes from "A Note From Linda" (sad), to "Pop" (perky) and back to "Somebody Kill Me" (pretty self-explanatory).
Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind, a Chicago-area production performed for nearly 20 years by The Neo-Futurists, consists of up to 30 varying plays performed in no more than 60 minutes. Because all the plays are independent, the mood can jump immediately from silly to nearly pornographic to euro avant-guarde to darkly depressing without warning. The plays included are constantly changed as well and the order is random, so even repeat audiences will get whiplash from time to time.
Used and lampshaded by Gad Elmaleh in his show "The other, it's me". He says to the audience that this is a special night for him because his mother is here and then he confess that actually no, she's not and then joke about the audience reaction.
The final act of Puccini's opera La Bohème has a very light, funny scene of the four Bohemians goofing off together. It's interrupted mid-phrase by the arrival of Musetta and the dying Mimì, putting the opera quickly back on the path to its Tear Jerker ending.
Fame does it more gradually than most, more like a Mood U-Turn than a Whiplash, but once you notice it, it's downright bipolar. For example: the third song is about the comic relief character not being able to keep "it down" whenever he sees a certain girl; the third-to-last song is about that same girl dying of a cocaine overdose after having her chance at dancing fame utterly crushed.
In Iolanthe, after nearly two hours of silliness, the title character suddenly delivers an incredibly intense, moving and completely non-comic song by way of appeal to the Lord Chancellor - and to top that, when it doesn't work she prepares to sacrifice her life, something often Played for Laughs in G&S but here played absolutely straight. (Gilbert wrote it that way to give the comic actress playing Iolanthe a chance to show she could be serious as well.) And then the whole thing is resolved by an utterly daft ending.
The ten-minute finale of The Yeomen of the Guard lashes back and forth. The women's chorus happily heralds the bride, who sings that this is the happiest day of her life. Then her supposedly dead husband arrives to claim her. She begs him to relent; he refuses. Then it turns out he was just playing a joke on her, and everyone rejoices. Then the man she scorned enters in despair, delivering the only Downer Ending in G&S.
The first-act finale of Yeomen has a pretty good one as well, as Phoebe's lighthearted goofing around with Fairfax (posing as her brother Leonard) and the Yeomen is interrupted by the bell tolling to announce Fairfax's impending execution. While we know Fairfax has already escaped, the change in mood is startling.
Hair is, at first, a fairly lighthearted musical. Then the second act happens. Claude goes on a horrifying bad trip then, despite all the attempts of the tribe to save him, is sent off to fight in Vietnam and promptly killed. Then he starts singing The Flesh Failures/Let the Sunshine in and the audience is reduced to tears. Total Downer Ending.
The second act of Ragtime is rather tense, with Sarah dead and Coalhouse (and Younger Brother) planning violent revenge. Things are getting pretty strained for the family too... so Father decides to take the Little Boy to a baseball game. The wholly comedic number "What A Game!" (wherein Father talks about what a noble and genteel game baseball is, while continually interrupted by the spitting, swearing, and general rudeness of the other spectators) ensues. Then it goes right back to the tension. (The scene was a little out of place in the book as well, but wasn't quite so much Played for Laughs there.)
The song Contact in RENT whips first from an uncomfortably frank look at the sex lives of the main characters (harder faster wetter) to a funny scene of unsatisfying sexual experiences all around as they stumble through trying to maintain safe sex practices without losing their rhythm and fail ("I think I missed... don't get pissed"/ "It was bad for me, was it bad for you?"). Then, when it has the audience giggling, it wrenches back around and gut-punches you with Angel's death.
And, as it's a modern retelling of La Bohème above, it has the scene above. Mark, Roger and Collins are singing in the apartment about how they'll get to Santa Fe yet... Then a dark reprise of I Should Tell You kicks in, we hear Maureen cry for help, and instinctively, you're thinking "Oh SHIT."
Anything by Martin McDonagh; "The Lieutenant of Inishmore" switches from two Irish yokels dismembering corpses at gunpoint to the same two finishing an earlier argument over whether or not a cat will eat corn flakes.
The concluding sextet from Mozart's Don Giovanni was often omitted in productions until the mid-20th century, since its lightheartedness clashes with the intensely melodramatic preceding scene in which Don Giovanni is Dragged Off to Hell.
The most shocking moment in the play is when Don Giovanni and Leporello are laughing about the former's new amorous adventure, only to be interrupted by the ghostly voice of the Commendatore's statue telling Don Giovanni: "You don't have much time left for laughter."
Cyrano de Bergerac: Given this play is a blend between Farce and Tragedy, there first three acts are more of a comedy with some dramatic elements, and the two last acts are more of a drama with comedic elements, but in all acts the contrasting elements resonate against each other.
The Masquerade scene from The Phantom of the Opera. Everyone's singing gaily about dancing and Costume Porn to a happy orchestra. Then the Leitmotif blares when the title character appears...
Which picks up right where Act One left off, with Christine and Raoul singing "All I Ask of You" and generally being sweet and adorable young lovers together...followed by the revelation that the Phantom overheard the entire thing and is heartbroken. He doesn't take it well.
In the second act of Spring Awakening, the show goes from the heartbreaking scenes of Moritz's suicide and funeral to the fast-paced song, "Totally F***ed", basically going from a scene of depression and mourning to one big, energetic "eff you".
The show is a big fan of this trope. For instance, Melchior is introduced with his signature song "All That's Known", a yearning, hopeful and elegant declaration from Melchior about how he is (of course) terribly sick of all these adults telling him to trust what's written and be quiet and subservient. The next song that immediately follows, from his sexually-frustrated, nervous wreck of a friend Moritz, is a song, ultimately, about how horny they all are. Melchior even joins in eventually, which makes it incredibly awesome and eye-opening about the overall themes of the musical.
Snoopy! the Musical has the heartwarming songPoor Sweet Baby, in which Peppermint Patty sings to Charlie Brown the way he wishes that a girl would sing to him. When the song is over, we get this:
Peppermint Patty: Like that, Chuck?
Charlie Brown: Just like that, Patty.
Peppermint Patty: Forget it. It'll never happen.
The strip the song was based on obviously didn't have a song at all, just Charlie wanting to be called "poor sweet baby", so the punchline was a lot less abrupt.
The Wicked musical has quite a bit of this. In-between the depression, even after Cerebus Syndrome kicks in, you have light hearted comedy.
Miss Saigon has a beautifully subverted version, as we, the knowing audience, already know what's going to happen and are already saddened, whereas Kim, the title character, is blissfully ignorant. She's preparing to reunite with her lost love Chris, dressing in wedding gown, joyfully singing. She rushes to his hotel room... only to be greeted by Ellen, Chris' wife. The devastation evident in Kim's entire body is staggering.
Madame Butterfly, which inspired Miss Saigon, unsurprisingly has a similar scene. Having decorated her house with flowers, dressed in her wedding gown and waited all night for Pinkerton to arrive, Butterfly hears her maid Suzuki crying out, thinks Pinkerton is there, and bursts into the room in ecstasy, searching everywhere for him... only to be greeted by his wife Kate. As in Miss Saigon, the audience knows the truth full well before she does.
In yet another piece by Puccini, Tosca, the first act has Mood Whiplash practically every ten minutes. It starts with angst and drama as an escaped prisoner rushes onstage, then we have sweet romance with a dash of humor with the Tenor Boy and the jealous soprano, then there's a cheerful chorus of Sacristan and the choir boys about the victory over Napoleon... and then Scarpia arrives.
Elisabeth features a very tender, moving love song between the titular heroine and her fiance, "Nichts ist schwer", that is abruptly and immediately followed by Ominous Pipe Organ and a choral piece predicting the singers' doom... at Elisabeth's wedding.
Fiddler on the Roof has a sombre wedding ceremony, during which the older characters sing "Sunrise, Sunset", a melancholic rumination on how fast time flies. Then, there's the joyous, celebratory bottle dance - but the celebration is broken up by the Russians riding into the village, breaking up the party.
The touring 1990s-era revival of The Sound of Music was mostly cute singing kids and nuns, while occasionally adults sitting around a mansion spoke about vaguely troubling developments. Then it was time for the talent contest to take place—and three Nazi banners abruptly dropped down from the ceiling. Cue audience gasp as everyone suddenly remembered just what was on the horizon.
The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee: "The I Love You Song" is a massive mood whiplash, as the play is almost entirely a raunchy comedy up until this point and there's utterly no warning that the upcoming song is going to be leading to more than a few tears until it finally starts.
Godspell reimagines the New Testament as a quirky, lighthearted comedy about the formation of a community, rife with Slapstick and vaudeville routines. Things take a sudden turn in Act 2 when Jesus encounters the Pharisees in "Alas For You". From there, Jesus is betrayed and crucified just as in the source material, and his disciples can only watch helplessly as the man who brought happiness and meaning into their lives bleeds to death in front of them.
Claudio Monteverdi's landmark opera L'Orfeo features a pretty good example early in Act II. Everyone's preparing for Orfeo's wedding to Euridice, and most of the opera up to now has been one long celebration of the 'happy and fortunate day'... and then suddenly a Messenger arrives and announces that Euridice has just died. Monteverdi went out of his way to ensure that the music drove home the sudden change of mood, and even 400 years after the opera's premiere it's still a pretty shocking moment.
The musical In the Heights has a fun, high energy Crowd SongCarnival del Barrio in the middle of Act II which they celebrate in remembrance of the times they had all shared, that is broken by an upset, and visibly shaken Nina, as she urgently searches for Usnavi. Abuela Claudia, has died from a heart attack. The community that was celebrating gather in the streets to hold vigil.
A few songs later, after the vigil and a heartbreaking song from Nina about Abuela Claudia immediately transitions into the incredibly upbeat Piragua - Reprise, in which Piragua Guy celebrates the success of his Piragua stand. The song is immediately followed by Nina and Benny trying to figure out the future, whiplashing us back again. Given that Piragua Guy has literally nothing to do with anything else in the show, except that he talks to Usnavi in the opening, it's a bit of a Big-Lipped Alligator Moment.
The second act of Jasper in Deadland begins with a fun, happy flashback of Jasper and Agnes rollicking around in bed, talking about their favourite moments of an old Star Trek movie, before Jasper comments how the world of fiction is so amazing in comparison to reality, lamenting all the awful things that happen every day in his life.
Can happen accidentally with Hamilton , as 'Ten Duel Commandments' and The World Was Wide Enough have the same intros of the chorus counting up to ten. 'Ten Duel Commandments' is an energetic song, with an ultimately neutral outcome. The World Was Wide Enough ends with Hamilton dying, and Burr's horrified reaction to commiting the murder. If a fan has the playlist on shuffle, guessing wrong can make some impressive whiplash.
Not to mention the upbeat 'Blow Us All Away' switching immediately into the tearjerker 'Stay Alive Reprise'
Additionally, 'Say No To This', the song in which Hamilton cheats on his wife and pays to keep sleeping with the other woman segues into one of the more upbeat numbers in the show (although not exactly happy, persay), 'Room Where It Happens', complete with a jazzy tone, catchy melody and banjo.
The difference between It's Quiet Uptown and The Election of 1800 is so drastic that they even address it in the show, where Jefferson and Madison emerge suddenly asking if we can "please get back to politics?". Madison is visibly shaken and a little teary-eyed.
And then the next song, Your Obedient Servant, is whiplash-y within itself: the song begins with Burr absolutely furious, saying that Hamilton has prevented his success "for the last time". The rest of the song is a fairly light-hearted series of letters between Hamilton and Burr that consists of them snarking each other until Burr challenges Hamilton to a duel.
Happens a few times in Les Misérables. Given how dark the show is, any moment of light is bound to succumb to this.
Lovely Ladies is a darkly funny song about being a prostitute and is filled to the brim with innuendos and penis jokes. It's bookended by Fantine's "I Want" Song about how her life is in shambles, and Fantine defending herself from a rapist and promptly being arrested for it.
Castle on a Cloud, which serves as Young!Cosette's "I Want" Song, is a touching (if a little irritating to some) song about how Cosette just wants to live somewhere where she isn't forced to be a servant for wicked people. It's immediately followed by Master of the House, a song sung by said wicked people about the tavern that they run, and is the only comic-relief song in the musical.
The ABC Cafe/Red and Black ends with the revolutionaries eagerly making plans for their revolution, confident that it'll succeed. Cue Gavroche entering to tell them that Gen. Le Marche, the most prominent supporter of the revolution and an important army official, is dead. There's several beats of silence as the revolutionaries absorb the information, and Enjolras has to repeat it a few times for it to sink in.
A Heart Full of Love, a song where Cosette and Marius declare their love for each other, is immediately followed by The Attack on Rue Plumet Thenardier attempting to rob Cosette and Valjean's house and threatening to beat Eponine for trying (and succeeding) to stop him.
Eponine's death is followed rather quickly by Gavroche's upbeat song Little People, which is about how great little people are. It's then whiplashed again, when Gavroche reprises the song while getting shot to death. The words and melody are unchanged, what makes it dark is the fact that Gavroche can barely get the words out, and dies before he can finish the last line.
A Heart Full of Love - Reprise, wherein Cosette and Marius re-declare their love and support for each other, is proceeded by a triple whammy of Javert killing himself, women mourning the dead revolutionaries and eventually declaring that God is either dead or just doesn't care, and Marius's Survivor Guilt that nearly goes into full Heroic BSoD, complete with hallucinations of his dead friends.
Marius and Cosette's wedding is a happy occasion, with the chorus singing a wedding choral and Marius and Cosette dancing as a happy, newly married couple. Naturally, it's crashed by the Thenardiers, who try to bribe Marius and, at the end, rub their new station in the audience's faces more than anyone else: they've won, they're the richer for it, and they will suffer no ill consequences for their misdeeds. One scene later, we see Valjean on his deathbed.
A Very Potter Musical is mostly a light-hearted parody of Harry Potter but there is the occasional moment where-based on it following the series's plot of all things-you will get serious whiplash.
The stage adaptation of Persona 4 pulls this with its use of Adaptation Distillation: the school festival scene's cross-dressing contest is interrupted by Dojima barging into the school with the threatening letter he received before Nanako is kidnapped and thrown into the TV World.
The Original Work Wonderland by Studio East Training for the Performing Arts ([[www.studio-east.org]]) has this in spades. Or maybe hearts.
The original West End staging hits this early in Act Two — after the reveal of the Chocolate Room and Willy Wonka's heartfelt "I Am" Song "Simply Second Nature", a shriek from Veruca reveals that Augustus has disobeyed Wonka's orders and is drinking from the chocolate waterfall. He falls into the river shortly afterward, and the Black Comedy that's been bubbling throughout Act One explodes as the Oompa-Loompas arrive and gleefully sing about the boy's impending demise as the formerly Cheerful Child is sent to an Uncertain Doom. From there the show works its way through each successive brat's nasty comeuppance, the factory's atmosphere getting grimmer and grimmer in the process, before Charlie proves himself a worthy successor to Wonka and the mood begins to brighten once more.
The Broadway Retool rotates several of the West End songs out in favor of numbers from the famous 1971 film adaptation of the source novel and has a significantly Lighter and Softer atmosphere/setting and less Black Comedy in Act One (for instance, the Buckets live near a pop-up candy shop rather than a garbage dump). Thus, once the kids start getting picked off in Act Two — almost immediately after "Pure Imagination" — it's substantially more shocking than in either the West End version, which foreshadowed their fates as being the way the world of the story works, or in the 1971 film, which didn't suggest their fates would be so gruesome. Moreover, one character's fate is more grisly than in the West End, as Veruca is literally torn limb from limb by the squirrels rather than being sent down a garbage chute. After all that, the ballad "The View from Here", sung by Mr. Wonka and Charlie as the former reveals the latter's true prize, seems inappropriately cheery and heartwarming — especially as up to this point Wonka has been a total jerk to the kid with one or two exceptions.
The initial burglary plot of Sleuth is quite silly, as Milo disguises as a clown and makes a mess of the robbery attempt, but after the first or second plot twist it becomes extremely dark.
In the first vignette of The Apple Tree, "The Diary of Adam and Eve", an older Eve, after going through the trauma of God banishing them from Eden and Cain murdering Abel, has a beautiful, tender ballad of how much she loves Adam, "What Makes Me Love Him?", followed immediately with Adam's entry. "Eve Died Today."
In Orfeo ed Euridice, Cupid interrupts Orpheus's sorrow in the first and last acts with lighthearted exclamations, and his songs are much lighter than what came before.
Unfortunate Implications, which most modern adaptations do not. In general, it's labeled a comedy.