The Broadway stage musical gained prominence in American culture throughout the 1940s and 1950s, largely thanks to the works of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II. Their Oklahoma!, from 1943, was the first musical to fully integrate songs and music into the play's story. The duo had further Broadway hits with 1951's The King and I and 1959's The Sound of Music.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a pioneering composer in a number of genres, but pioneered new realms for opera with his compositions. Don Giovanni and The Marriage of Figaro restructured and transformed Italian opera, while The Magic Flute helped pioneer opera in German.

Arthur Sullivan helped pioneer English language comic operas with his writing partner, the librettist W. S. Gilbert. Gilbert and Sullivan became immensely popular on both sides of the Atlantic in the last decades of the nineteenth century writing works like HMS Pinafore, The Mikado, and The Pirates of Penzance.

The "Theater of the Absurd" was a dramatic movement begun by figures like Samuel Beckett and Luigi Pirandello in the 1920s that subverted and exploded theatrical conventions regarding settings, storytelling, and character development. This style was developed as a reaction to the hyper-realism of playwrights like Eugene O'Neill and August Strindberg. The movement was hugely influential, with playwrights of the next generation like Eugene Ionesco and Edward Albee picking up the mantle for themselves.

In Greek drama, the ultimate fates of the characters, particularly the tragic heroes, were known to the audience, usually thanks to the chorus. The chorus was a group of actors who would explain the background and major events of the play's story. The chorus is one of the key features of ancient Greek theater.

In a large theater, the "pit" is a small area between the stage and the audience that is lower than the stage itself. This area is made to hold the orchestra, which places them next to the performers on stage, but out of the view of the audience. This position also allows for the performers in a musical to see the orchestra's conductor.

The ancient Greeks largely invented the Western dramatic tradition, but their own style was highly specific in the nature of its performance. All shows were held in open amphitheaters with all male ensembles performing in masks. Stories were also highly regimented, with a chorus being required to explain events and tragedies and comedies being presented as entirely separate kinds of work.

In every play, as it is written and often in a playbill, a cast list is necessary to describe the characters and the actors needed to play them. In Shakespeare's time, the Latin phrase "dramatis personae," meaning the "dramatic people," was used to indicate such a list. Today the Latin terminology is not universal, but still in widespread use.

Theater "in the round" is a format which features the audience sitting in a circle around the stage. This creates a different environment for the performers and audience, which forces a play to be performed in a different manner than usual. This approach has typically been used in more modern theater to differentiate it from film.

William Shakespeare's plays, whether comedies or tragedies, typically are divided into five separate acts. This was based off of Roman structures, and was the popular format in Renaissance drama. This structure was formally described and analyzed by the German author Gustav Freytag in his 1863 Die Technik des Dramas.