Breaking the fourth wall...

Our Town, Skin of Our Teeth, Midsummer Night's Dream, Twelfth Night, As You Like It...most of Shakespeare, actually.

EXIT THE KING

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PATTILuPONEGYPSY

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How did Next To Normal do this?
The one that stands out for me was "Passing Strange" when Stu started talking with the audience and telling us a stupid story. It broke that 4th wall down and I felt it was self-indulgent. It ruined the show for me. Did he think he was doing a concert?? anyway, that's my short list

^Thats about it. I had to think hard about where they did it as well.

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If it's a monologue in character they do not break the flow. Sometimes they are the making of a great play as in The Little Dog Laughed. Much of Shakespeare is like that.

However you can have a narrator, or an introducer, of a play as in a prologue speaking directly to an audience that does not even have a character, as in Chorus at the start of Shakespeare's Henry V, or as in an intermittent Greek chorus, speaking directly to the audience or commenting in reflection on the action. These players are not "within" the play, yet they are part of a style within the structure of a play that have traditionally been very effective.

I think it is the quality of how well it is conceived and realized that makes it work or not work. It can be part of an artistic flow and it works for me.

I am not fond of the Brechtian style of interruption of the flow to break the audience's emotional connection to a piece. That ruins a play for me. But Brecht has his fans.

To me it can be the Theater of Vulgar Interruptions rather than the Theater of Alienation/verfremdung/distanciation.

So my question to you is do you not like it because it is poorly conceived or effected, or because it alienates you from the rest of the piece? Do you not like what it is, how it is done, or that it interrupts your enjoyment of the rest of the piece? You are not limited to one!

Hair

Spelling Bee
Fiddler on the Roof
The Will Rogers Follies

Also, when I read that Peter Pan was a show listed as breaking the fourth wall, I thought the op was talking about when he flies into the audience, literally breaking the fourth wall.

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels
Flower Drum Song revival

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I think in N2N's case, the whole song "Just Another Day" is to the audience, so it's not like one line out of the entire show is breaking the 4th wall.

Would Drowsy Chaperone count? I don't think that show even has a fourth wall to break.

But isn't it a like being "a little bit pregnant"? You either break the wall or you don't.

Where do they break the wall in Ain't Misbehaving, Allthatjazz? It's been so long since I've seen it.

"The one that stands out for me was "Passing Strange" when Stu started talking with the audience and telling us a stupid story. It broke that 4th wall down and I felt it was self-indulgent".

So with you on that one, raulmark. I thought the entire show was incredibly self-indulgent. Also he's a hypocrite. Stew talks of "scaryotypes", then goes blithely on to stereotype black Christians, German performance artists and others. I never understood why people loved this show so much. It's the only show that I ever really wanted to walk out of. It also annoyed me that he had "Youth" rather rudely rebuffing his mother's repeated pleas to come home, then had him fall apart when she dies while he's away. Where was that devotion while she was alive? Adding insult to injury, he has his mother (as an angel?) come back to forgive him after her death. Really thought that was despicable, an insult to his mother's memory.

Topic? Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.