Modern Plays
Modern plays, especially Broadway musicals and grand operas, sometimes incorporate a contemporary version of the chorus, although they serve a different purpose. Per Six Plays by Rodgers and Hammerstein:
The singing chorus is used frequently to interpret the mental and emotional reactions of the principal characters, after the manner of a Greek chorus. —Rodgers and Hammerstein.Read more about this topic: Greek Chorus
Famous quotes containing the words modern and/or plays:
“I lately met with an old volume from a London bookshop, containing the Greek Minor Poets, and it was a pleasure to read once more only the words Orpheus, Linus, Musæus,—those faint poetic sounds and echoes of a name, dying away on the ears of us modern men; and those hardly more substantial sounds, Mimnermus, Ibycus, Alcæus, Stesichorus, Menander. They lived not in vain. We can converse with these bodiless fames without reserve or personality.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“[Allegory] should ... be very sparingly practised, lest, whilst the writer plays with his own fancies and diverts himself by cutting the air with his wide spread wings, he should soar out of view of his readers, leaving them in confusion and perplexity to explore his viewless track.”
—Sarah Fielding (1710–1768)