Theatre

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The stage. The boards. The footlights. The roar of the greasepaint, the smell of the crowd.

The birthplace of the tropes of every performance medium to follow.

Older Than Feudalism, possibly Older Than Dirt, Theatre is the art of presenting a story to an audience as though it was happening right in front of them. A quantum leap beyond the performance of a single storyteller, it not only required an entire troupe to pull off, but could reach far more people at a single go, making it the first Mass Medium. Among other things, it invented the concept of Special Effects and gave birth to Reality Is Unrealistic. And over the centuries it has only gotten more complex, more sophisticated, and more engaging. A film may be able to overwhelm the viewer with visual spectacle, but a stage performance has an immediacy, a reality (however illusory), that gathers in is audience and shares itself with them.

For our purposes here at All The Tropes, Theatrical Productions include not just stage dramas, but also Ballet, Musicals, and just about anything else that can take place on a stage.

These are the tropes and works of Theatre.

Note: Do not use this category for individual works — use Category:Theatrical Productions instead. Also, do not confuse this with the "Theater" category, which is used to organize subpages that hold Theatrical examples of tropes.