Shows Within Shows in theatre.
Examples with characters involved in production
- Shakespeare's work contains quite a bit of meta musing on theater, which takes the form of Show Within A Show several times.
- The Murder of Gonzago in Hamlet, which is a play put on by Hamlet and has parallels with the actual murder of Hamlet's father.
- The play staged by fairy spirits by Prospero for his guests in The Tempest.
- The Pyramus and Thisbe play rehearsed during A Midsummer Night's Dream and performed at the end.
- The entire play of The Taming of the Shrew — the story about a man who marries a shrewish woman and tames her — is actually a "play within a play". The play opens with a framing scene in which actors are summoned to put on a play. (Once the inner play starts, the framing device only returns once, then is never referred to again.)
- Love's Labour's Lost ends with an amateur pageant of the Nine Worthies
put on by the Absent-Minded Professor Holofernes, Sir Nathaniel, Don Armado, and Costard. The King, Princess, and their retinues laugh and heckle the players as they get lines wrong, repeat things, and it's all good fun until a messenger announces that the Princess' father is dead.
- Act 4 of Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy involves a performance of a play, during which two of the actors take murderous revenge on the other two using Not So Fake Prop Weapons.
- Several of Thornton Wilder's best-known plays are meta-examples, where the show is framed as actors (who therefore are themselves fictional characters) in a performance. The Skin of Our Teeth is particularly rife with moments of this.
- The play (and later movie) Deathtrap centers around a fictional play of the same name.
- In Pedro Muñoz Seca's theater play Don Mendo's Revenge, exiled Don Mendo reappears in disguise with a troupe and manages a play-in-play reflecting his own, wrongful punishment; some of the people who had wronged him recognize themselves, Hamlet-style.
- Hannibal, Il Muto, and Don Juan Triumphant in Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera.
- La Princesse Zenobia and Slaughter on Tenth Avenue in On Your Toes.
- The Small House of Uncle Thomas in The King And I.
- A musical adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew is the show-within-a-show for Kiss Me, Kate.
- Adelaide works at the Hotbox in Guys and Dolls; "A Bushel and a Peck" and "Take Back Your Mink" are actually her performances there.
- Cabaret is set almost completely at the Kit Kat Club, a seedy cabaret in Berlin. The songs "Wilkommen", "Don't Tell Mama", "Two Ladies", "Sitting Pretty" (or in later productions, "Money Money"), "If You Could See her", and "Cabaret" are performances at the Kit Kat Club.
- Lucy's nightclub act in Jekyll & Hyde.
- Several characters in Victor/Victoria (both the stage version and the original film, which wasn't an all-out musical).
- The Drowsy Chaperone. The Man in Chair does a significant amount of Lampshade Hanging, though.
- Me and Juliet: the show within a show is also called Me and Juliet.
- 42nd Street
- The abysmally bad Springtime for Hitler is the entire foundation of The Producers.
- In Moonlight And Magnolias, director Victor Fleming and producer David O. Selznick act out scenes from Gone with the Wind for script doctor Ben Hecht, who's never read the book and needs to rewrite the screenplay in five days.
- Noises Off is a 3-act play about a traveling production of a British comedy called Nothing On. Each act is the same show at different points in the show's run. This type of show is also known as a backstage comedy.
- The Tsukiuta series has several. It revolves around some 13 Idol Singer groups who perform in plays... and, from time to time, end up getting sucked into the worlds of the plays they perform. Some productions are the full play of the show-within-a-show, with the idol characters performing only the end concert part as "themselves".
- Opera within an opera: Richard Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos, in its first act, has "the richest man in Vienna" commissioning two after-dinner entertainments: a serious, dramatic opera, and a light musical comedy. Shortly before the first is about to begin, the majordomo arrives and informs the two companies that their sponsor has changed his mind: the two are to be performed simultaneously. The second act is the resulting production.
- Louis Nowra's Cosi is a play (and subsequent film) involving the members of a mental asylum rehearsing and (in the final act) performing Mozart's Così Fan Tutte.
- Anthony Shaffer's play Whodunnit opens it as a bad/obviously satirical parody of an Agatha Christie type mystery (it seems to draw from Christie's Cards on the Table), before revealing that it's actually a play being put on by the characters, who are often very different from their "stage roles".
- Marat/Sade is about a group of inmates performing a play.
- Man of La Mancha is roughly about a bunch of prisoners performing a play for their own amusement. The production focuses on two storylines: Don Quixote's misadventures, and the "reality" that Miguel Cervantes goes through in prison.
- Konstanin's play in The Seagull.
- Vanya's play in Christopher Durang's "Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike" is a homage to The Seagull. Its' a hysterically bad story of The End of the World as We Know It from the point of view of a molecule who's also a TV weather person. It also has some parallels with the play itself. Sonia and Vanya discuss what they miss from their old life as themselves (Sonia misses, "her self pity. It was fun.") and it mentions motifs of the blue heron and the wild turkey.
- The Complete History Of America Abridged has several shows within the show spoofing various time periods:
- Lewis and Clark do a corny vaudeville act.
- The golden age of Radio Drama is represented by Dodge Rambler, Boy Buckaroo, which partway through changes over to Rock Fury, Super GI.
- The second half of the twentieth century is done as a Film Noir parody.
- The entirety of Pippin is this, leading up to most of the cast urging the actor playing the titular role to undergo Self-Immolation.
- The Play That Goes Wrong is about an amateur dramatic company attempting to stage a play The Murder at Haversham Manor which goes more and more spectacularly wrong as the production goes on.
- Since La Musica is speaking to an audience of nobles in her opening monologue, some versions of L'Orfeo have it being watched in-universe as well as out, usually in a period style.
- At least one version of Orfeo ed Euridice has Orpheus's actor seeing and participating in the show to drown his sorrows over losing Eurydice, and eventually realizing the happy ending is all an illusion to keep him from dealing with grief.
- The Critic by Richard Brinsley Sheridan involves the two theatre critics Dangle and Sneer being invited to a rehearsal of The Spanish Armada by Mr. Puff, who is the play's author. They all watch the play being rehearsed, and misadventures ensue.
- The Knight of the Burning Pestle by Francis Beaumont is about a grocer who is fed up with the current state of the theater and how it doesn't have any representation for the common folk, so he decides to be his own role in the play (the titular Knight of the Burning Pestle), while the play that is performed, The London Merchant, struggles to keep going.
- A Chorus Line features dancers auditioning for an upcoming Broadway production.
- Something Rotten!: The main character is a playwright. (The show also features Shakespeare himself.)
- Goosebumps The Musical is all about students putting on a production of The Phantom, a show similar to The Phantom of the Opera.
- In Gutenberg The Musical all the people on stage are involved in the inner show itself, either as creators or musicians.
- In A Little Night Music Desirée acts in a play, which doubles as the third type of Show Within a Show where Anne's suspicions of her having an affair with Fredrik are confirmed, as she plays an irresistible countess who looks at Fredrik frequently and delivers her lines in a rather...sultry tone.
Examples where characters are fans
- Wiz-O-Mania in Wicked.
- The Drowsy Chaperone. Man in Chair is listening to a record of the show.
- A Running Gag in the Hatchetfield series is the Christmas movie Santa Claus is Goin' to High School, a So Bad, It's Good musical involving Santa disguising himself as a teenage boy and attending high school for some reason. The characters who watch it are left trying to figure out what on earth the creators were thinking. It's an Affectionate Parody of High School Musical and 17 Again (2009), of which the creators are big fans.
Examples where show is plot point
- Stage Blood by Charles Ludlam is a little bit extreme in this. The whole plot is an adaptation of Hamlet that takes place during a production of Hamlet, while another show (an experimental play written by one of the characters) is performed in place of The Mousetrap Scene.
- Cyrano de Bergerac — "The Clorise", the play presented at the Hotel de Bourgougne in the first act, is a real play (that gets interrupted at the third line by the protagonist!). The first act is titled "A Representation at the Hotel de Bourgogne", where actors are playing The Clorise. The Hotel de Bourgogne was the oldest and most famous stage in Paris during that time and The Clorise was a real play written by Balthazar Baro, a real author of the time Cyrano de Bergerac is settled on. Balthazar Baro's theatrical output includes the innovative play Célinde (1628), which makes imaginative use of the play-within-the-play, as Edmund Rostand, a french theatre scholar himself, was aware. So the play within a play is a real play that was popular in his time, but now is obscure at the very least. Is even lampshaded (and mocked) by this dialogue:ACT I, SCENE I:
The young man: (to his father) What piece do they give us?
The Burgher: The Clorise.
The young man: Who may the author be?
The Burgher: Master Balthazar Baro. It is a play and a half!... - Nixon in China, where in act II Nixon, his wife, and Henry Kissinger attend a ballet and sing the opinions of the ballet dancers in a manner highly suggestive of a strawman of their own views. Based on an actual ballet staged by Chairman Mao's wife, who yells at the dancers en scene when they mess up.
- The Drowsy Chaperone, again. Man in Chair mentions that his mother gave him the record before his father left him. "He didn't leave because of the record, although I'm sure it didn't help."
- The Funny comes when he puts on the record for Act II, and it turns out to be the record for an entirely different show (The Enchanted Nightingale); Man in Chair's monologue explains how the records got confused.
- The Real Inspector Hound is a play about two theatre critics watching a play. The play enters serious Mind Screw territory when the lines between the 'inner' play and the 'outer' play are blurred, though. Moon and Birdboot inadvertently become part of the play in the third act, whilst the characters they replace then take their places in the audience and critique them.
- [title of show] tells the story of how its characters create a musical, which happens to be [title of show] itself.
- Jeff and Hunter are also shown shooting the first episode of their real life YouTube series the [title of show] show, the success of which helps them gain the support to bring [title of show] to Broadway.
- Gutenberg The Musical is essentially a pitch for a musical of the same name, presented as a one-night staged reading by the two creators of the show.
- Something Rotten!: This musical show is largely about the creation of "Omelette: The Musical".
- Goosebumps The Musical: The play-within-a-play, and the spooky events that transpired when that play was previously produced, are central to the plot.
Examples with Plot Parallel
- The Murder of Gonzago in Hamlet is performed because it mirrors the suspected crime of Claudius. Hamlet organizes the performance to see how he reacts. The quality of the writing (and, in most competent performances of Hamlet, the acting) in The Murder is much less naturalistic than that of the "outer play", to the point of seeming truly stilted to modern audiences. But there's a genius even in the wince-worthy lines: it's a remarkably spot-on imitation of the writing style of the pre-Renaissance morality plays put on by that type of strolling players.
- Taken to extremes in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which makes Gonzago even closer to the plot of Hamlet, including the deaths of two old friends of the young prince, which in the outer play hasn't happened yet. Ros and Guil recognise there's something familiar about the situation, but don't make the connection. In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Gonzago even has a play within a play!
- Canio, protagonist in Leoncavallo's opera Pagliacci and a commedia dell'arte actor, resolves not to submit to the same fate as his show-within-show character Pagliacci: Canio will not allow himself to be cuckolded and humiliated, and the end, he brings on stage his revenge against his wife and her lover.
- A Chorus Of Disapproval by Alan Ayckborn is about a production of The Beggar's Opera where the actor playing Macheath ends up in the same love triangle with the actresses offstage as their characters have on stage.
- Goosebumps The Musical: The characters observe, in the song describing the play-within-a-play ("The Story of the Phantom"), that it parallels the events the characters are themselves living through.
