Foreshadowing/Theatre
Examples of Foreshadowing in Theatre include:
- In Street Scene, the Gossipy Hens' talk about Mrs. Maurrant's Cheating with the Milkman includes this ominous prediction:
Olsen: Some day, her hoosban' is killing him.
Mrs. Fiorentino: Dot would be terrible!
Jones: He's li'ble to, at that. You know, he's got a wicked look in his eye, dat baby has.
Mrs. Jones: Well, it's no more than he deserves, the little rabbit--goin' around and breakin' up people's homes.
- In a Doll's House, Nora has a causal conservation with her children's nurse asking her "if anything ever happens, will you...".
- The song "The Wizard and I" from the musical Wicked has several examples of foreshadowing. In this song we see starry-eyed teenage Elphaba, who we already know is going to become the infamous Wicked Witch of the West, fantasizing about being the Wizard's right-hand girl one day. She dreams about "a celebration throughout Oz that's all to do with me" after we've just seen the townspeople rejoice at her presumed death. She also says "I'd be so happy I could melt" and "when people see me they will scream." This could also be considered an interesting example of a Funny Aneurysm Moment.
- Also in Wicked, there is foreshadowing with Fiero in the song "Dancing Through Life" whe he sings Life's more painless, for the brainless, hinting to his becoming the scarecrow with no brain later in the show.
- There's a nice one in the musical version of The Secret Garden where Martha sings to Mary about what she can do now that she lives out in the middle of nowhere. She talks about all kinds of fantastical things to explore out there, including pirate caves and fairies. Tucked into all this fantasy, she sings If you chance to see a garden guarded by a tree and meet a bird who speaks to thee... which of course turns out to be real.
- In Vanities: The Musical, Mary warns Kathy in the song "Let Life Happen" that her obsession with organizing will "drive her mad", foreshadowing her later nervous breakdown. Kathy recalls this in "Setting Your Sights (What You Wanted)" and "An Organized Life (1974)".
- In A Very Potter Musical this moment near the beginning:
Snape: Can anyone tell me what a portkey is?
Hermione: A portkey is a enchanted object that will transport whoever touches it to a location decided upon by the enchanter.
Snape: Very good. Now can anyone tell me what foreshadowing is?
Hermione: Foreshadowing is a literary device in which an important plot point is brought up early in a story to return later in a more significant way.
- And shortly after:
Lavender: Professor, can, like, a person be a portkey?
Snape: No, that's absurd! Because then if a person were to touch themself they would be instantly transported. A person can, however, be a horcrux.
Harry: What's a horcrux?
Snape: I'm not even going to tell you, Potter, you're just going to have to find that out for yourself.
- Cyrano De Bergerac:
- In the first act, Christian lampshades that he really would prefer his personal life to (stay with Roxane and defy De Valvert) to save his friend Ligniere’s life, but he chooses to do the right thing. He will chose the same at Act IV when he discovers that Roxane really love him for his soul (meaning that she really loves Cyrano).
- The first act show us Montfleury, a fat, deluded man who thinks of himself as a tragic actor still capable of romancing the ladies. Cyrano utterly and implacably destroys his delusions of love and glory. Guess what happens to Cyrano in the final act.
- At Act IV, Scene VIII, Roxane says that if Ulises have sent Penelope the letters Roxane had received, she also would have risk everything for his love sake like Helena did. At Act V, we see that Roxane, who at Act IV acted as real Guile Heroine like Helena, has settled to be a tragic I Will Wait for You heroine like Penelope, because she has got into a nunnery to devote all her life to Christian’s memory.
Roxane: Oh! wise Penelope
Would ne'er have stayed to broider on her hearthstone,
If her Ulysses could have writ such letters!
But would have cast away her silken bobbins,
And fled to join him, mad for love as Helen!
- Floyd Collins is chock full of this. Such as right before Floyd breaks into his first song:
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