In the Broadway (later off-Broadway) musical Avenue Q, 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.
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.
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.
Billy Elliot 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 it made sense in context.
The title song in 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.
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.
The now-classic "I Am What I Am" from La Cage aux folles became even more poignant when it became so connected to the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, and sung at dozens of memorials.
"More of Him to Love", the "I Am" Song for Fat Bastard 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!"
"The Double Bubble Duchess", the "I Am" Song for Shameless Self-Promoter Violet Beauregarde and her Slimeball dad, is built around a Hurricane of Puns involving gum and the word "pop" (pop culture, Bubblegum Popping, etc.), with her declaring "I'm never gonna stop/Pop!" in her rise to superstardom. "The Villain Sucks" Song for her downfall, "Juicy!", uses that Hurricane of Puns 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.
Aristophanes' play The Clouds 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 Rule of Funny.
During a live stage performance on 4th October 2004, Billy Connolly made an off-the-cuff remark about wishing people threatening to behead British hostages in Iraq "would just get on with it". Sadly 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".
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.
Dreamgirls ends with Effie White gaining the recognition she long deserved for being a talented Big Beautiful Woman, and her originating actress, Jennifer Holliday, 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 Career Resurrection when the film version of Dreamgirls reignited public interest in the original Effie.
Parodied in The Drowsy Chaperone. 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.
The song "Try to Remember" from the musical comedy The Fantasticks 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.
Wall Street Journal critic Amy Gamermann 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.
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.
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.
French theater celebrity Molière 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 (The Hypochondriac).
The original production of In the Heights had Benny, a black man, bragging about what will happen when he's rich, including "Donald Trump 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." Lin-Manuel Miranda had the name changed to golfer Tiger Woods after he saw audience members cringing thanks to Trump's extremely divisive term as the President of the United States, 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 the 2021 film adaptation.
Edward Rochester's (of Jane Eyre fame) attitude towards women is problematic at the best of the times, but The Musical 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 "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...
Became disturbing Meta Casting when that same actor went on to play the title role in The Phantom of the Opera, another show about a man obsessively in love with a much younger woman.
Cirque du Soleil's KÀ 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 Wire Fu sequence that a performer 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 "No Talking or Phones" Warning 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.
The Lion King: Endless Night. The song tends to be quite creepy, and ridiculously heart-breaking when you realize the man singing this version, Jason Raize, proceeded to hang himself at the age of 28.
Puccini's opera Madame Butterfly is seen in some circles as a critique on the then-concurrent White Man's Burden 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 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 World War II.
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.
An Urban Legend holds that when The Marx Brothers 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).
"Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again" from The Phantom of the Opera is sung by Christine as she deals with the feelings of grief she's been experiencing since her father's death. The father of Sarah Brightman (who originated the role) committed suicide in 1992.
An example that doesn't have an event in real life mirroring it, (and played for comedy), the main antagonist of Sister Act, 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 Lyrical Dissonance and sung to sound like a love song, but the verses following are actually about him drilling, shooting, stabbing, drowning, disemboweling, and 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.
He also says it towards the end, but this time he says it threateningly.
The Vagina Monologues 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 taught her to masturbate. After Abu Ghraib, Eve Ensler admitted she couldn't see women as brutalizers before that.
The scene where Anita is almost a victim of gang rape is much harsher to watch in the 2020 revival knowing the 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.
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".
In the song "Dancing Through Life" from the musical 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 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 Fiyero gets beaten within an inch of his life.
. 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".