Trivia / A Doll's House

• Referenced by...:
  • BoJack Horseman: In "Free Churro", BoJack mentions that his mother Beatrice once locked herself in her room to cry after seeing the play. This is likely due to the play featuring a couple who married due to societal expectations and their relationship becoming loveless and abusive; this definitely mirrors Beatrice's own relationship with her husband Butterscotch, as they had a Shotgun Wedding after Beatrice got pregnant and they would later grow to resent each other.
  • The 1982 musical A Doll's Life, written by Comden and Green, begins where the play ends and follows Nora as she tries to build a new life for herself. The show closed after only five Broadway performances, though a cast recording was made that reveals some of the music (by Larry Grossman) to be very fine.
  • In the Angel episode "Eternity", Cordelia stars as Nora in an LA production. The episode opens with Angel and Wesley fearfully conversing about a means of escaping a situation, implying there are live-or-die stakes. The camera then pans to reveal they are in the audience of the premier, and it's a very poorly made production. Cordelia cannot even remember her lines properly and cannot get over her stilted delivery. They then lie to her afterwards claiming they loved it. Later in the same episode, after Angel briefly turns evil, he viciously tears into Cordelia for her awful performance, which inspires her to turn the tables on him by convincingly acting like she has a bottle of holy water on her desk. He buys it.
  • Interview with the Vampire (2022): In "...After the Phantoms of Your Former Self", Louis de Pointe du Lac and Lestat de Lioncourt (a same-sex couple) are planning to attend a live performance of A Doll's House, but because Louis wants to visit his family first, Lestat is worried that "They'll seat us late, and we'll miss Nora's entrance with the Christmas tree." The mention of this play foreshadows the Season 1 finale, where Louis and Lestat become Nora and Torvald respectively because Louis — a Pretty Boy who's the "feminine" partner in their relationship — is being treated more like Lestat's doll than a person because Louis is now trapped in Lestat's Gilded Cage ("the dollhouse").

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