Theatre goes back a long way, back to the days of the ancient Greeks. While theatre itself remains popular, times have changed and some aspects that were once popular are now seen as 'old hat' and 'trite'.
Theater[]
- The infamous Happily Ever After version of Shakespeare's King Lear by Nahum Tate. The 1681 rewrite (which Tate boasted "rectifies what was wanting in the Regularity and Probability of the Tale") ends with the good guys surviving, Lear regaining his throne, and Edgar and Cordelia marrying. It proved so popular with Restoration audiences (who hated Shakespeare's Kill'Em All Downer Ending--purely his own invention and diverging drastically from his source material, the Historia Regum Britanniae, in which the legendary king's story has a cheerful conclusion) that it completely eclipsed Shakespeare's King Lear for the next 150 years, enjoying hundreds of productions, while the original Lear languished in obscurity and went all but unperformed. In the 1830s reverent fans of the Bard began to restore Shakespeare's original ending to performances, and the Tate version gradually fell out of favor, increasingly derided by Victorian critics as sentimental and trite. Since the start of the twentieth century, the Tate play has only been revived a few times, and then only as a quaint historical curiosity. It's mostly remembered today as one of the earliest and oddest examples of Disneyfication.
- Vaudeville (a series of unrelated acts, such as musicians, dancers, comedians, trained animals, magicians or acrobats), was one of the most popular types of entertainment in America for several decades between the 1880s and the 1930s. It waned due to the arrival of cinema and radio, and is today remembered mainly for having been the breeding ground for many of the talents of Golden Age Hollywood.
- Minstrel Shows were some of the most popular forms of entertainment in the 19th and early 20th centuries, being viewed as good, clean, light comedy. They were also very culturally significant as one of the first uniquely American forms of artistic expression. As times changed, however, the nasty racial undertones that lay at the core of the genre fundamentally discredited it. Today, it is only used in period works as a way to highlight the Values Dissonance of the era.
- A notable turning point was in White Christmas, the 1954 remake of sorts of 1942's Holiday Inn. Like Holiday Inn, White Christmas had a minstrel-show number; unlike Holiday Inn, the performers wore tuxedoes, top hats, and gloves, but not black makeup.
- Blackface, within minstrel shows and for any other reason, is now extremely taboo in much of the Western world and is used only for historical reasons, irony, or to make a statement about racism. However, this is not the case for some countries that the trope spread to, where it's detached from race relations. One of the most notable examples is Japan, where many people don't understand why it's so offensive and it still has influence on popular culture, leading to many a Cross Cultural Kerfluffle.
- Cyrano De Bergerac: In-Universe, this play shows us a French literary movement at The Cavalier Years that has become synonymous with Fan Dumb: les Précieuses, who loved and produced a extended literary work around one trope: Beauty Equals Goodness. Unfortunately, their taste was questionable, to say the least, and soon they found their work ridiculed and even themselves were parodied by Moliere. The play lampshades it with Dramatic Irony at Act I Scene II, with a Long List of authors that were big at their time but now are completely forgotten. Obviously, this is Truth in Television.
- In The Eighties, there was an international craze for European, Scenery Porn-heavy musical spectacles ("megamusicals") such as Les Misérables, Miss Saigon, and the bulk of Andrew Lloyd Webber's output, which reached a commercial apex with The Phantom of the Opera. But at the turn of The Nineties, starting with Lloyd Webber's Aspects of Love, newer megamusicals began underperforming or outright flopping in North America. By the Turn of the Millennium the style, never popular with theater critics, became deader than disco there. Attempts at exporting Tanz der Vampire, Notre Dame de Paris, The Woman in White, and The Pirate Queen to North America proved failures (and a heavily retooled one in the first case) as audiences turned to straight-up musical comedies (spearheaded by The Producers) and jukebox musicals instead. Even Lloyd Webber's Phantom sequel Love Never Dies hasn't launched a Broadway production yet. However, the various Disney stage musicals, Wicked, and Spider Man Turn Off the Dark can be seen as following on from the megamusical with their massive production values, and Les Miserables and Phantom in particular still have huge fanbases.