Portal:Theatre

The Restoration spectacular, or elaborately staged "machine play", hit the London public stage in the late 17th-century Restoration period, enthralling audiences with action, music, dance, moveable scenery, baroque illusionistic painting, gorgeous costumes, and special effects such as trapdoor tricks, "flying" actors, and fireworks. These shows have always had a bad reputation as a vulgar and commercial threat to the witty, "legitimate" Restoration drama; however, they drew Londoners in unprecedented numbers and left them dazzled and delighted. Basically home-grown and with roots in the early 17th-century court masque, though never ashamed of borrowing ideas and stage technology from French opera, the spectaculars are sometimes called "English opera". The expense of mounting ever more elaborate scenic productions drove the two competing theatre companies into a dangerous spiral of huge expenditure and correspondingly huge losses or profits.

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• November 1773 – Christoph Willibald Gluck moved to Paris and fused the Italian and French operatic styles, revolutionizing 18th-century opera
• 1 November 1611 – First recorded performance of Shakespeare's play The Tempest was held at the Palace of Whitehall in London, exactly seven years after the first certainly known performance of his tragedy Othello in the same building
• 3 November 1793 – French playwright, journalist and outspoken feminist Olympe de Gouges was guillotined for her revolutionary ideas
• 4 November 1737 – The Teatro di San Carlo in Naples, Italy, currently the oldest active opera house in Europe, was inaugurated
• 6 November 1884 – Death of William Wells Brown (pictured), widely regarded as the first published African-American playwright
• 7 November 1956 – Premiere of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night, for which he won the 1957 Pulitzer Prize for Drama
• 16 November 1922 – John Barrymore began playing Hamlet on Broadway for 101 consecutive performances, breaking a record previously set by Edwin Booth
• 22 November 1903 – Pope Pius X ended the practice of producing castrati, replacing them with boys

Dmitri Shostakovich was a Russian composer of the Soviet period. He is best known for his satirical opera The Nose (based on the story by Gogol) and his cycles of symphonies and string quartets, 15 of each. Since his death in 1975, reports about his true personal opinions about life in the USSR have been controversial. While he outwardly conformed with the state and was a public face for state-crafted propaganda, it is now widely known that he deeply disliked the Soviet regime —a view confirmed by his family, by private letters to Isaak Glikman, and the satirical cantata "Anti-formalist Rayok", which ridiculed the "anti-formalism" campaign in Soviet arts and was known only to his closest friends until after his death.

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• ... that while preparing for War Horse, theatre set designer Rae Smith spent weeks pretending to be a First World War British Army captain?
• ... that the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre was known as the John Golden Theatre before the John Golden Theatre was?
• ... that the Mark Hellinger Theatre has been occupied by the Times Square Church since 1989, when its then-owner said the church's five-year lease will "pass before you know it"?
• ... that the projector at the Walter Reade Theater had to be modified to screen Nathaniel Dorsky's short film Triste?
• ... that before being restored as a Broadway theater, the Ritz Theatre was used as a television studio, pornographic theater, vaudeville house, children's theater, and poster warehouse?
• ... that in 1959, the new owner of the Coronet Theatre wanted to rename the theater after his favorite playwright, Eugene O'Neill, whose widow objected?

The business of the dramatist is to keep out of sight and let nothing appear but his characters. — Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

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