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)
“The plays of children are nonsense, but very educative nonsense. So it is with the largest and solemnest things, with commerce, government, church, marriage, and so with the history of every man’s bread, and the ways by which he is to come by it.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)