Better Than It Sounds / Theatre

"A man is haunted by his father's ghost.
A boy and girl love while their families fight.
A Scottish king is murdered by his host.
Two couples get lost on a summer night.
A hunchback murders all who block his way.
A ruler's rivals plot against his life.
A fat man and a prince make rebels pay.
A noble Moor has doubts about his wife.
An English king decides to conquer France.
A duke learns that his best friend is a she.
A forest sets the scene for this romance.
An old man and his daughters disagree.
A Roman leader makes a big mistake.
A sexy queen is bitten by a snake."

—Shakespearean Sonnet, R.S. Gwynn

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• 1776: An obnoxious lawyer, an emo farmer, a horny scientist, and a bunch of middle-aged white men bitch about the heat and call each other names while trying to start a revolution. There are more sex jokes than you might expect. A lot more.
• 42nd Street: A big-time director hires a random groupie in desperation. Luckily, said groupie just happens to have enough raw talent to make any Parody Sue jealous.
  • Alternatively: Director should have flipping double casted the main female lead like any sensible director would!
• Áfram Latibær!: A mayor is sad that the people in his town are too busy eating candy, watching TV, eating unhealthy food, complaining about their stiff limbs, bullying each other, claiming ownership of everything, spending all their money and singing about their vices to participate in a sports competition. An elf comes out of nowhere and solves all of these problems.
  • Glanni Glæpur Í Latabæ: A criminal disguised as a rich guy tricks the town's residents into worshipping him and eating canned food. Also, after the last play, some characters have left the town and the rest have changed their look, and one of them raps now.
• Ajax: A guy goes nuts when a fallen hero's armor is given to someone else. Written by a pedophile.
• A Little Night Music: Rich Swedish people who are unhappy with their relationships end up in better relationships.
• A Night In The Old Marketplace: With the help of a statue and a drunk, a guilt-ridden Jewish comedian tries to resurrect a woman who committed suicide the day her parents forced her to marry a rich guy. The rich guy in the hero. Everyone sings lots of klezmer, and They Might Be Giants show up for the finale to sing about dead people getting drunk.
• Alice: Schoolteacher uses alias to attempt to seduce his student. When that fails, he turns into a rabbit. That, too, fails, because she is more interested in discussing the life of Johnny Eck with a drug-addicted larva and becoming royalty. Music by Tom Waits.
• All's Well That Ends Well: To avoid bedding his wife, a Jerkass goes off to war alongside a Dirty Coward. His bride is determined to get pregnant by him, and sabotages a Florentine widow's reputation to attain this goal.
• Amadeus: An old man is still obsessed with his rival, decades after killing him.
• Androcles and the Lion: Married man's affair with Pantomime Animal makes emperor get religion.
• Angels in America: God hires Roy Cohn to represent him in a parental abandonment suit.
• An Upside-Down Cancer Ribbon: The author of the musical talks to the audience about the Dutch language, interrupts her own flashbacks of her learning the Dutch language, and demolishes the fourth wall to smithereens. The Dutch language's finer grammatical aspects are anthropomorphized through a bunch of wacky characters. Hilarity (and education) ensue.
• Arcadia: Girl discovers thermodynamics, dies in a fire. Meanwhile, in the Future…, a lot of academics are wrong.
• As You Like It: Princess gets banished to the woods with her cousin, crossdresses, and runs into her crush, who she teaches how to woo her.
• Assassins: A bunch of emo losers try to kill a man.
• Avenue Q: Twenty-something Muppets search for a purpose in life and extol the virtues of porn while living in a building run by a short black man played by a woman.
• The Band: A exploration of grief, what it means to grow up, and the life-long meaning, comfort and community that can be found in fandom, set to the music of Take That (Band).
• The Barber of Seville: The barber is an Almighty Janitor who helps a nobleman marry an orphaned girl, whose guardian is a customer of said barber.
  • The Marriage of Figaro: Romantic Comedy sitcom hijinks, as written by Mozart.
• The Birds: A guy persuades feathered friends to claim divinity. Hilarity Ensues.
• The Birthday Party: A boarding house occupant is told that it is his birthday even though it might not be. Two of his old friends show up to celebrate.
• Bells Are Ringing: A lazy writer enjoys a whirlwind affair with a beautiful mystery woman who seems to know all about him. He then finds out that she's his Mom.
• Be More Chill: Teenage boy eats Japanese computer in attempt to get a girl to notice him.
  • Or, Why you should NOT take a chill pill, the musical.
• Black Friday: A group of people try to kill each other for a toy.
• The Book of Mormon: Two mormons are sent to foreign Uganda. Hilarity Ensues.
  • Alternatively: Americans start a Star Wars cult in Uganda. One of them gets a girlfriend out of it. The other one gets raped.
• Cabaret: People sing and dance suggestively while Nazis take over. The Beta Couple is a landlady and an elderly Jewish fruit vendor.
• Camelot: A French man destroys a utopian English government.
• Candide: A really drawn-out straw man argument about an obscure philosophical thesis.
• Carmen Jones: An African-American Setting Update of a classic French opera.
• Cat on a Hot Tin Roof: Drunk refuses to have sex with his wife because he blames her for turning his dead best friend gay by having sex with him.
• Cats: Household pets from the Unintentional Uncanny Valley sing, dance, and poke the people sitting in the expensive seats.
  • Alternatively: A book of children's poems is turned into an opera with an all-furry cast.
  • Alternatively: a bunch of people in lycra sings about who they are while gyrating sensually so they can die the good death.
• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: Five kids enter a Mad Artist-Scientist's False Utopia and the undoings/possible deaths of the four who misbehave are cheered on by him and his surreal workforce. The show is on the Mad Artist-Scientist's side, and it's a musical.
• Chess: The Cold War boils down to a Jerkass facing an adulterer over a really old board game. The adulterer falls for the jerkass's manager.
• Chicago: A corrupt lawyer saves a couple of Asshole Victims from being hanged on stage.
• Cirque du Soleil: A circus specializing in explorations of aspects of Life, the Universe and Everything...with next to no dialogue. It's All There in the Manual!
  • Alegría: The bourgeoisie and proletariat battle for control of a kingdom via acrobatics.
  • The Beatles LOVE: Across the Universe (2007) without all that distracting plot and dialogue.
  • Corteo: The death of a clown.
  • KOOZA: Loser receives and opens unexpected package; Hilarity Ensues.
  • La Nouba: A janitor opens a door and finds both idiots and love within.
  • Mystère: Two babies search for their "loveys". A heckler doesn't just mock the actors.
  • "O": Kidnapped man joins a passing parade upon/in a flooded stage.
  • Quidam: Young girl learns the commonality of alienation.
  • Saltimbanco: Humanity is boiled down to timid faceless people and mad gypsies.
  • Varekai: The untold aftermath of a famous air tragedy.
• The Caretaker: Homeless man is taken in by two brothers of dubious sanity, given handyman job. Refuses to believe he snores, blames black people.
• Carousel: A Domestic abuser is given one last chance to redeem himself to his family. Result: "Failure!"
• Come from Away: A bunch of foreign tourists are stuck at at a Canadian airport because 9/11 happened.
• The Comedy of Errors: A tourist in a foreign city tries to pick up a hooker and gets bitch-slapped by the wife of his long-lost twin brother; he then falls in love with a woman who thinks she's his sister-in-law... in the end, the brothers learn that their mom is a nun and their dad is on death row, and everyone lives happily ever after.
• Company: A single guy hangs out with his married friends.
• Coriolanus: A soldier is hated by his own people but his enemy is obsessed with him. It doesn't end well.
• Cyrano de Bergerac: An ugly man kills people and lusts after his cousin. Oh, and he writes a lot of poetry.
• Daddy-Long-Legs: Extremely wholesome musical about a young girl communicating with an older man that she addresses as Daddy, who pays for all her stuff and is in love with her.
• Dancing At Lughnasa: Five poor sisters dance a lot, the youngest sister's son is snarky, the older brother murders a rooster and the son's estranged father tears the family apart.
• Dear Evan Hansen: A teenager consoles a grieving family by making up complete bullshit about their deceased loved one.
• Dearly Departed: A dysfunctional Southern family brings their neuroses to the surface after the death of the family patriarch. This is all played for laughs.
• Dog Sees God: Charlie Brown and friends are teenagers in high school. Snoopy dies. Things get worse from there.
• Don Giovanni: A statue attempts to teach a sex pest the value of keeping it in his pants.
• Drood: A whiny writer dies midway through his final murder mystery. The guy who wrote "The Pina Colada Song" gets ahold of the story and turns it into a Broadway musical, forcing the audience to pick the ending.
• The Drowsy Chaperone: A man sits in his apartment listening to a record of his favorite musical and complains about stuff.
  • Or, a wedding falls apart and comes back together for no good reason, and then they all go to Rio.
• The Dybbuk: Romeo and Juliet meets The Exorcist. Alternatively: a young divinity student studies the wrong Jewish religious text. Tragedy ensues. (Was made into a classic Yiddish movie.)
• Einstein on the Beach: People sing scales, numbers, and nonsense poetry (some of it written by an autistic teenager) while a man (or sometimes woman) dressed as Albert Einstein plays the violin. For 4 1/2 hours with no intermission.
• Elisabeth:
  • Who would win: the Empress of Austria versus one random sexy Grim Reaper?
  • Prince Rudolf's subplot: How to talk to your child about Death.
  • Revolution subplot: Small, concerned group of Austrian citizens fail to change world.
  • Lucheni's rationale: Man kills woman because she wants to die.
  • The Problem with Fighting Death: The Musical.
• Equivocation:The bad guy wins, but Shakespeare makes fun of him.
• Equus: A sexually repressed teen murders horses, then a therapist reconsiders his job.
• Faust: A devil repeatedly tries to warn a man about the dangers of making a deal with him. The man doesn't listen. He regrets it.
• The Father: Old army scientist argues with his wife about their daughter.
• Fiddler on the Roof: An old Jewish man wants to be rich and have his daughters get married.
• The Flying Dutchman: A young girl really likes this moody Byronic hero she read about. When he suddenly appears, her father who, like, Oh my god, doesn't understand her, turns out to be OMG evil, selling her to him! Then he finds out who he is, and tries to back out! Her boyfriend begs her to come back, but she throws herself off a cliff rather than being one of the mundanes. As an opera.
  • Alternatively: Teenage girl gets the hots for a sexy but moody brunette man who is much older than she is. Said sexy but moody brunette freaks out when he learns the teenage girl already has a boyfriend. Teenage girl then kills herself so she can be with the sexy but moody brunette forever. This is considered a good ending.
  • Alternatively: Girl commits suicide so she can shack up with a hot ghost.
• Frank's Wild Years: Man returns to hometown, tries to convince everyone that he's famous.
• Frankenstein: Sherlock Holmes and Sherlock Holmes take turns being complete assholes to one another.
• Freewill in 2112: A ploughman and his android buddy try to defeat aliens that have invaded a dystopian America. America now looks like something straight out of colonial times mixed with the rule of Hitler. The ploughman's father loves the dystopian America. Contains songs by a philosophical Canadian band.
  • Or: The American Revolution in the 22nd century. With aliens. And androids.
• Der Freischütz: Man attempts to sabotage his romantic rival by tricking him into buying ammunition from a demonic Power Ranger.
  • The Black Rider: The above, as a rock opera. Written by Tom Waits and William S. Burroughs.
• The Frogs: A deity goes to the land of the dead to bring back a dramatist who can guide a small country through a crisis. Hilarity Ensues.
• Fun Home: A 43 year old lesbian cartoonist reflects on how much of an asshole her father was. Also there are 2 other versions of her.
• La gazza ladra: A girl sells a spoon that a bird steals. The girl then gets blamed for the theft, but she is saved when the bird steals a coin.
• The Ghost Sonata: University student moves into lodging house populated by vampires, mummies, and people only he can see. Finds love, but she's dead.
• Gilbert and Sullivan: The theatrical collaborations of a humorist and a hymn writer.
  • Thespis: The Greek gods go to Earth to drum up worshippers. The theatrical team that takes their place proves most incompetent. Hilarity Ensues. This play is now lost forever, but that's all right because new music has been written for it.
  • Trial by Jury: A biased judge arbitrates a Breach of Promise of Marriage case.
  • The Sorcerer: A couple of romantics hire a warlock to enchant the tea at their engagement party. To break the spell, one of them must go to a Fate Worse than Death.
  • H.M.S. Pinafore A sailor loves the Captain's daughter. Fortunately for the lovers, said tar and the Captain turn out to be each other.
  • The Pirates of Penzance: A guy's birthday screws up his love life and strains his relationship with his adoptive family. Who are pirates!
  • Patience: There are twenty-one maidens. There are twenty Heavy Dragoons and two aesthetic poets. You do the math.
  • Iolanthe: After their newest MP is outed as one, the House of Peers encounters fairies. By the end, everyone has become a fairy.
  • Princess Ida: In order to save her family, a ladies' college administrator must overcome her misandry and marry her fiance.
  • The Mikado: Japanese people threaten to commit suicide in order to avoid execution.
  • Ruddigore: A burning witch curses a baronet and all his heirs to commit a crime a day or die in agony. Hilarity Ensues.
  • The Yeomen of the Guard: A comedienne marries a condemned man for money. Tragedy Ensues.
  • The Gondoliers: Two naive idealists share the crown until the rightful heir is determined.
  • Utopia, Limited: An impressionable culture becomes a caricature of Victorian England. Two power-hungry apparatchiks and a man obsessed with making things go boom protest. Characters from other operas get cameos.
  • The Grand Duke: People "duel" with playing cards. Not an anime.
• The Glass Menagerie: Man recalls how he fell out with, and walked out on, his crazy mother and sickly sister.
• The Goat, Or Who Is Sylvia?: Man tells his family about his affair. They don't take it well.
• The Grouch: A grumpy Jerkass falls down a well. Hilarity Ensues. Someone thought so low of it that they used a copy of it in mummy wrappings.
• The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals: Musicals Are Bad: The Musical
• Hadestown: A man turns around. This makes him very sad.
• Hamilton: The American Founding Fathers rap a lot.
  • Man shoots immigrant, repeatedly calls his mother a whore.
  • Epic Rap Battles of History: The Musical
  • People of color star in a hip-hop musical about the whitest thing in American history.
  • The guy on the $10 bill has no idea what writer's block is.
• Hamlet: The most famous play in the English language is about an emo teenager who spends all his time moping.
  • Or: An emo contemplates suicide, a clown dies, and, in the end, someone is going to have to clean up all those bodies. Maybe the Norwegian guy will do it.
  • Or: son sets out to kill stepdad, procrastinates and inadvertently causes the deaths of 7 other people.
  • The Klingon Hamlet: Linguists change the nature of the son's character arc by re-setting the story in a different culture and translating it into a fictional language.
  • Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead: Shakespearean characters discover gravity and play a game of tennis with questions. They die, but you already knew that.
• Happy Days: A woman is buried up to her waist in sand. By Act Two, she's buried up to her neck.
• The Haunted Manor: Two Polish soldiers who vowed never to have sex hope to get married to two sisters but not until their aunt tells them a made-up story of hers. The title doesn't really prove it, but it's a comedy.
• Heathers: Mean Girls, but with murder.
• Henry V: A king uses rhetoric to convince his army that dying in the muck is the best fate they could possibly hope for.
  • Or: An English king punishes France for a poorly timed ball joke by conquering their country, marrying their princess, and talking a lot. Then he dies.
• The Heracleidae: One king threatens another with war if the other does not deliver up some orphaned children and their guardian to be killed.
• Hippolytus: The queen desires her misogynistic stepson, who spurns her. The King misunderstands her suicide note and things go downhill from there.
  • Phaedra: The same as above, except that the queen lodges a false accusation against her stepson while still alive.
• The House of Bernarda Alba: Widow has the great idea of locking up her daughters for eight years. One of them has sex with her boyfriend through a window. And then she dies.
• How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying: A magic book gives a window washer control of a Fortune 500 company.
• The Importance of Being Earnest: Two guys use the same alias to woo shallow girls. Hilarity Ensues.
• The Iceman Cometh: It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia but more depressing and about 70-80% less funny. Also make it set a hundred years ago. That's it. That's the play.
• In the Heights: A Latino neighborhood sings and raps about immigration, gentrification, the financial implications of sudden wealth, and how you get this gold shit off the tops of champagne bottles.
• Into the Woods: Various fairytales get Crisis Crossover'd with each other. The main conflict ends halfway through, and sometime later the narrator gets killed off.
  • Or, it's all fun and games until after the interval.
• Iolanta: Everyone is very nice. A blind girl gets cured and marries.
• Iphigenia in Tauris: A Fix Fic in which a Human Sacrifice victim has survived, and when she returns home she takes a statue from where she's been staying.
• L'italiana in Algeri: A misogynistic official dumps his wife for an exotic beauty. Hilarity Ensues.
• Jesus Christ Superstar: A really cool guy and his friends sing rock songs. Religious fanatics and a corrupt politician murder him. He gets better.
  • Alternatively: The Master of the Universe willingly goes through hell—literally—to save a species of utter bastards.
• Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat: A spoiled Fashion Victim is sold into slavery, but eventually becomes a VIP.
• King Lear: A king learns that dividing your legacy by flattery is a really bad idea.
• Kiss of the Spider Woman and Kiss of the Spider Woman, The Musical: Sorta like Oz (the prison show, not the thing with the wizard), and one version has songs.
• The Knights: A political Author Tract in which a landowner claims a meat vendor as his new major-domo.
• Lady in the Dark: Neurosis in successful businesswoman is linked to her inability to remember the words to a song.
• Leave It To Me!: "Stinky" bathtub man is upset because he's not in Kansas anymore, and tries to go back home the dishonorable way.
• Legally Blonde: The Musical: Is Legally Blonde: The Musical.
  • Manos: The Rock Opera of Fate Is Manos: The Rock Opera of Fate.
  • Shrek: The Musical: Is Shrek: the Musical.
• The Light in the Piazza: A head trauma victim finds true love on vacation.
• Long Day's Journey into Night: Dysfunctional family stew over their resentments. A dead baby is given the author's name.
• Lohengrin: A knight of the Holy Grail marries a woman who gave him Love at First Sight but must flee when she asks his name.
• Lucia Di Lammermoor: A girl is made to pretend to jilt her lover and marry a man she dislikes. Insanity Ensues.
• Lysistrata: Women go on a sex strike to protest a war with a Real Life Dystopia. Hilarity Ensues.
• Macbeth: War hero finally finishes his "honey do" list, which involves a lot of politically-motivated murder, only to see his wife retreat into obsessive-compulsive hand-washing. Then a guy who was born by Cesarean section cuts his head off.
  • Or: Witches stir a cauldron. This is the most memorable part of the play. If you trick an actor into saying the name of this play while in a theatre you win a prize.
• The Magic Flute: A guy falls in love with a girl whose parents are waging the most dramatic custody battle ever.
• Majora: A young man struggles to locate a missing wedding present before the apocalypse.
• Mamma Mia!: A woman on a Greek island doesn't know who the father of her daughter is. Blamed for popularizing the Jukebox Musical.
  • Or: Maury Povich: The Musical.
• The Marriage of Figaro: Horny French people being very horny.
• Me and My Dick: A musical about a young boy struggling to loose his virginity, and his best friend is his dick.
• The Merry Wives of Windsor: A fat man flirts with two married women in order to get at their money. His final attempt involves antlers.
• The Merchant of Venice: Nobody seems to know, just that it's racist now. Actually, it's about a guy who agrees to get maimed so his freeloading best friend (and, as it turns out, his freeloading friend) can go skirt-chasing. It's considered a comedy.
• Merrily We Roll Along: A composer breaks up with his wife, his lyricist and his best friend and it's told in reverse order.
• A Midsummer Night's Dream: A king has trouble with his marriage, so he uses a magic flower and a trickster to get back good with his wife. A teenage love story and a stage play complicates matters. The phrase "Make an ass out of yourself" gets used far more literally than we're used too.
• Les Misérables Police officer won't stop chasing baked-goods-thief with a penchant for adopting prostitutes's daughters.
  • Or: Fugitive eludes Knight Templar, who then goes crazy and kills himself. Meanwhile, a whiny Attention Whore tries to get another girl's boyfriend killed because she has a crush on him.
  • Or: Actual Inspector Javert spends his life hunting for a good man and they all get mixed up in a failed rebellion. It's not a happy show.
• Miss Julie: Servant convinces title character that suicide is the only way to go.
• The Mousetrap: Murders occur and the audience is sworn to secrecy about whodunnit.
• Much Ado About Nothing: A Card-Carrying Villain tries to ruin a Romantic Comedy as it unfolds. He fails when his plot is uncovered by a dumb policeman.
• Newsies: Corruption of the news media and manipulation of the working class vs jumpy boys.
• Next to Normal: It's a musical about bipolar disorder and electric shock therapy...
• The Night Thoreau Spent In Jail: Man refuses to pay taxes, hallucinates vividly.
• No Exit: Three people in a room talk about their lives in the past tense. Eventually one of them says something endlessly quotable and deeply misanthropic.
• Noises Off: Actors fail to perform a comedy correctly.
• Norma: A Gallic priestess sacrifices herself for having sex with a Roman soldier.
  • Mona: As above, but the priestess is a Briton and no sex is involved. Heavily influenced by Wagner and far worse than it sounds.
• The Nutcracker: A kid and her Christmas present deal with a rat problem. The Dance Party Ending takes up half the runtime.
• Oedipus Rex: A city is in trouble because its king is one mean motherfucker.
  • Alternatively: A man travels a long distance, unknowingly kills his father, and still unknowingly has sex with his mother (resulting in children). When the truth dawns on him it blinds him.
  • Or: A bad motherfucker invents the Eye Spork.
  • Antigone: Politician goes great lengths to stop a young inbred girl from burying her brother. A lot of people end up buried before all is said and done.
• Oklahoma!: A cowboy and a creepy farmhand fight over a girl's picnic basket. The cowboy talks his rival into suicide, and is still considered the hero.
• Oliver!: Kid does nothing in particular, but his very existence ends up killing a notorious criminal and his lover. In the end, the kid ends up living with his grandfather.
• On a Clear Day You Can See Forever: 1960s flower child unknowingly regresses a few centuries while trying to give up smoking.
• Once on This Island: A peasant lusts after a rich man and sells her soul to the devil to get him to like her. It doesn't work. She dies.
• Once Upon a Mattress: A prince goes against the wishes of his domineering mother and falls for a strange girl from a swamp. Meanwhile, the prince's mute father and the royal wizard try to rig a contest in opposite favors, and a lady of the palace must conceal her pregnancy out of wedlock.
• The Oresteia: Murder besets a Big, Screwed-Up Family. The arc ends in a squickfest that is now missing.
  • Agamemnon: A man comes back from war bringing a psychic concubine. His wife and her lover (who happens to be his inbred cousin raised to avenge his half-brother/uncles' murder by the homecomer's father) bump them off.
  • The Libation Bearers: An angry youth kills his mother and stepfather.
  • The Eumenides: His ultimate fate is decided by a conflict of interest.
• Othello: A disgruntled, racist military officer arranges the deaths of his superiors.
• Our American Cousin: An Eaglelander visits his British relatives. Hilarity Ensues—or did until a head of state was murdered at a performance of this play.
• Overtones: A snob and a poser talk about painting while the voices in their heads pine over each other's husbands.
• Pacific Overtures: A Kabuki style play with American showtunes.
• Pagliacci: A Sad Clown learns that his wife is imitating art. He then proceeds to sing about his clown suit. Tragedy ensues.
• Passion: A man is stalked relentlessly by a local crazy woman until he shoots her cousin and has a nervous breakdown. It's a love story.
• Peer Gynt: A man travels the world and gets involved in all sorts of interesting things to wind up physically, spiritually and emotionally back where he started.
• People Are Wrong!: Young couple run afoul of landscaping cult.
• Pericles, Prince of Tyre: A ruler who knows too much escapes Morton's Fork and takes a journey, where he gains a wife and daughter.
• The Persians: The oldest surviving play is about a Biblical king getting bad news from the front lines.
• The Phantom of the Opera: Pederast terrorizes the French upper crust from underground lair.
• The Pillowman: A man who writes fairytales about the violent deaths of several children is brutally interrogated about the violent deaths of several children. It's a comedy.
• Pippin: An alienated youth in the Dark Ages finds out the hard way that killing his father is a bad idea. The show ends with a blazing spectacular finale which is never performed.
• The Play That Goes Wrong: Mediocre actors run afoul of Murphy's law.
• Porgy and Bess: Cocaine-using floozy moves in with cripple who likes to gamble.
• Pressure: Two hours of characters who just talk about the fucking weather.
• The Producers: Investment Fraud: The Musical.
• The Real Inspector Hound: Critics watch and act in a knock-off of The Mousetrap while making snarky comments.
• Reefer Madness: The Musical: Anti-propaganda propaganda
• RENT: Hugely popular remake of arty French opera La Boheme in which one character is turned into a drag queen, another into a bisexual performance artist, and everybody got AIDS and shit.
  • Altenatvely: A bunch of Gen X kids pretend to be be Rage Against the Machine by singing about how being poor and suffering is cool. Until the dog killer died from AIDS.
• Rigoletto: A nobleman and his jester are cursed. The jester is worried about his daughter because of this, but the nobleman doesn't care and sings a famous showstopper.
• The Ring of the Nibelung: Three generations of a Big, Screwed-Up Family fight each other and their neighbors because of a ring, a spear, and some old women's prophecies. There are also fat ladies who wear helms and sing. Put together, it's all about twenty hours long.
  • Das Rheingold: No intermissions, mermaids demonstrate idiocy, Norse gods try not to pay for their new house, and a magic ring is made.
  • Die Walküre: Brother and sister hook up. A sword magically appears. The Flight of the Valkyries takes place and everyone only remembers that.
  • Siegfried: Hero makes the sword from part two again, kills a dragon and a dwarf and wakes a sleeping beauty. Magical spear is broken in halves.
  • Götterdämmerung: Hero cheats on his wife. Everyone dies, except for mermaids who get the ring.
• The Rocky Horror Show: Nice midwestern couple meet Human Aliens in drag. Hilarity Ensues.
• Romeo and Juliet: Two teenagers help their emo friend get laid. Said friend kills himself when the postal service arrives late.
  • Alternatively: Two horny teenagers behave like horny teenagers. Everyone dies because of it.
  • Alternatively: Two teens who are in love overreact and kill themselves. This is considered romantic by a depressingly large number of people.
  • Alternatively, as offered on The Dick Van Dyke Show: A couple of crazy mixed up kids run away from home and end up dead.
  • Alternatively: A horny young adult follows a meek 13-year-old girl home after a party and gets her to start sneaking around behind her parents' backs. He kills a member of her family, possibly has sex with her offscreen, and eventually she kills herself because she can't be with him. Most people who have heard of it think it's the ultimate love story.
• Saint Joan: Crossdressing schizophrenic religious fanatic joins the military and, despite being obviously mentally unstable, becomes a national hero.
  • Alternatively: Girl saves her country through the power of religious extremism and drag.
• The Scarlet Pimpernel French expatriate accidentally sends her husband to his death while simultaneously trying to save his life, and while being seduced by her former lover. Everyone wonders about the Secret Identity of a proto-superhero.
• Sera Myu: Sailor Moon: The Musicals. Yes, really. And they're great. With an all-women cast the second go around, in addition to being Truer to the Text of the manga. Also, the memetically useless token man is now the main attraction thanks to being played by an actress who flirts with the audience.
• Seussical: Stage adaptation of two famous children's books narrated by a character who appeared in neither.
• The Seven Against Thebes: Inbred brothers come to blows. Missing elements of the cycle are about the death of a king who ignored a prophecy telling him to stay single, the story of an unwitting mean motherfucker discovering the truth, and a squickfest in which the motherfucker rescues Always Chaotic Evil nature spirits from a psychotic feline by solving a riddle.
• The Shield, by Menander: A soldier goes missing and his major-domo/military batman mistakenly thinks him dead. This leads to the soldier's father Faking the Dead to deal comeuppance to his [the father's] miserly brother. Hilarity Ensues—assuming archeologists can find the second half of the play.
• Shockheaded Peter: Misbehaving children get what they deserve: a man in pancake makeup who plays the accordion and sings falsetto.
• Six: Hamilton, but it’s a Girl Group.
• Six Characters in Search of an Author: Play rehearsal gets interrupted by a dysfunctional family who don't exist.
• The Snow Maiden: Frigid teenager becomes Clueless Dude Magnet. After three acts full of drama, she gets herself a love spell, chooses her fiancé and dies on her wedding day. Everyone celebrates the coming of summer.
• Something Rotten!: The story of how musicals were created. Also Shakespeare was an ass.
• Spamalot: King Arthur on a budget with songs. Arthur and his knights are nearly thwarted in their quest because none of them are Jewish. Also, there's gay marriage in the 8th century.
• The SpongeBob Musical: A fry cook and his friends climb a mountain. The characters later accept their deaths while a heavily ironic song plays.
• Spring Awakening: Sexually repressed nineteenth-century German teenagers sing catchy indie pop songs.
  • Alternatively: German teenagers really need sex ed. The musical.
    • Or "Don't have sex because you will get pregnant and die", the musical.
• Starlight Express: A Cinderella-type story where all the characters are railway engines and train cars.
• Stomp: Everything Is an Instrument: The Musical.
• A Streetcar Named Desire: A fading Southern belle is driven insane by her brother-in-law.
• Sunday in the Park with George Struggling artist paints cardboard characters while his girlfriend starts dating other men. 100 years later, the picture fades away.
• Sunset Boulevard: Forgotten silent film star sings out her passions to a random passerby whom she entraps.
• Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street: A Straw Nihilist with a chip on his shoulder and a Lethal Chef decide to start a business together. It involves cannibalism.
  • Alternately, a barber kills his customers and his neighbor bakes the bodies into pies. It's a musical.
• Sweet Charity A woman doesn't end up with a man. Then she doesn't end up with a different man. She meets a third man and they go to a strange church together. Then she doesn't end up with him.
• The Tales of Hoffmann: A poet is telling increasingly improbable stories about his love life while getting drunk.
• The Taming of the Shrew: Two rivals pay a third man to marry their intended's sister so they can marry the other girl. A transient college student marries her instead. There are penis jokes.
  • Or: A man abuses his wife. Hilarity Ensues.
• Tanz Der Vampire: The lives of a mousy young guy, a cranky old man, a girl with a thing for sponges, an innkeeper and a busty scullery wench take an interesting turn when the local aristocracy has a little get-together.
• This House: Foregone Conclusion: The Play.
• Three Sisters: A family plan to move house, but never get around to doing it. One guy has a brief soliloquy about human nature, but gets interrupted by another guy's search for chocolate.
• 13: 13 Teenagers sing about being 13... Or a Jewish Weirdness Magnet moves to Indiana and somehow gets himself wedged between the politics of a Betty and Veronica Love Triangle between the Brainless Beauty (Betty) the Jerk Jock (Archie) and the Alpha Bitch (Veronica) and has to choose between the cool kids and the nerds, one of whom is the Girl Next Door, and the other one is a major subversion of the Littlest Cancer Patient.
• Timon of Athens: A wastrel snaps when his fair-weather friends desert him after his dough runs out. His approval fills a Real Life Depraved Bisexual with shame.
• [title of show]: Two guys write a musical about two guys writing a musical about two guys writing a musical.
• Titus Andronicus: A man slowly goes mad, several people end up dead in the woods, and a queen learns to regret accepting dinner invitations.
• Thyestes: A king who sees himself as Above Good and Evil tricks his brother into cannibalism.
• Tosca: Two revolutionaries are caught by authorities and die. A girl stabs her would-be rapist and kills herself.
• Tristan und Isolde (Wagner): A woman drinks love potion with her enemy by mistake. They fall in love and spend the rest of a four-hour long opera angsting over their hopeless love until they die.
• Twelfth Night: A Sweet Polly Oliver finds herself in a Love Dodecahedron, made even worse when her dead brother shows up. Drunkards trick an uptight man.
• Urinetown: A cheerily dystopian musical about really needing to go to the bathroom.
• Venus In Fur: An actress auditioning for a role in a play about sadomasochism has a sadomasochistic relationship with the director, who is engaged to another woman. It is a comedy.
• A Very Potter Musical: A bunch of college students Americanize a British book series with lousy sound quality, cheesy songs, and a complete change of nearly every character's personality.
• Waiting for Godot: Nothing happens. The next night, nothing continues to happen. It's a classic of modern literature.
  • Alternately: nothing happens. Twice.
  • Or: Two guys wait for somebody who never shows up.
• Well: a play theatric exploration of racial integration, allergies and the playwright's mommy issues. Ultimately, the actors all quit, leaving the playwright alone to face the themes of her own work. Needless to say, the fourth wall is a pile of smoldering splinters by this point.
• Westeros: An American Musical: An amateur cast retells the plot of an unfinished book series and its TV adaptation with a Seasonal Rot issue, setting it to the music of an existing Sung-Through Musical. The only thing in common between the plot's source and the music's source is being Very Loosely Based on a True Story depictions of outdated politics. From two radically different time periods, in two radically different locations.
• Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?: Bickering married couple has guests.
• Wicked: Passionate animal rights activist with a weird skin condition learns magic, befriends the Alpha Bitch, steals her boyfriend, and sets up the Alpha Bitch as a benevolent dictator by faking her own death. Her sister also becomes dictator of an agricultural Ruritania and then dies violently (though she might have survived after all).
  • Alternately: Published Fan Fiction of L. Frank Baum's work made into a musical.
• William Shakespeare's Star Wars: Retro stage plays based on space opera. A literal little green man talks in haiku.
• Wit: Crabbit, nerdy spinster dies in agony.
  • Alternatively, a professor finds an ideal candidate for his research, neglects to tell her that she's going to die and then leaves his intern to deal with it. Said intern goes on to desecrate the subject's corpse.
• The Witches of Eastwick: Three women having affairs conjure up the devil. They all sleep with him.
• World of Color: One of the least-loved Disney Theme Parks presents a half hour of clips and fountains arranged in a manner that doesn't really follow a plot. Each performance, only 4000 people can see the projections; everyone else who wants to watch has to settle for the backside of water.
• Woyzeck: Play, rewritten as an opera, and then again as a rock opera, about a soldier who eats nothing but peas and then goes crazy, murders his girlfriend and maybe accidentally drowns himself.

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