Musical

Musicals are plays that are performed in completely in song and dance form. Musicals were made
immensely popular by London’s West End to New York’s Broadway theatre.

Fringe Theatre

Fringe theatre is a form of theatre that is experimental in its style and narrative. One of the highlights of
fringe theatre is that it’s pretty frugal in nature – in terms of technicalities, production value etc. In its
earlier days, fringe plays were held in small scale theatres and little rooms above pubs. Often, these kind
of plays are also full of edgy and unconventional stories, led by one person and wrapped in a single act.
This helps a fringe play stay low cost and have multiple showings in one day.

Immersive Theatre

DirectSubmit-DirectAuditions-Self-TapesImmersive theatre is perhaps the most interesting and

interactive form of theatre there is today. Unlike conventional forms of theatre, where the line of
communication is just one way i.e. performers to audience, in an immersive theatre, the audience too
plays an active part in the performance, in however small a way it may be. This kind of play transcends
the limitations of venue, narratives and flow of a story. The play may be staged in a dilapidated building;
it may be set up as a treasure hunt across town or may even usher the audience from room to room.
The audience is also involved in the plot movement – i.e. a member of the audience may be asked a
question or to choose between two doors. It’s like watching a film in 3d, but even more experiential.

Melodrama

Melodrama is a form of theatre wherein the plot, characters, dialogues are all exaggerated in order to
appeal directly to the audience’s emotions from the very beginning. Orchestral music or songs are often
used to accompany the scenes or to signify specific characters. This form of theatre was most popular
during the 18th and 19th century.

Autobiographicals
Autobiographical plays are, as the name suggests, plays told from a first person perspective. The lead
walks (or talks, for that matter) the audience through his life and its many moments. Autobiographicals
can either be a solo play or a multi-character play.

Comedy

Now, don’t we all know what a comedy play is! Comedy plays could cover various themes spanning
satire, malapropisms, characterizations, black comedy and so on. Shakespearean plays explain that if a
play has a happy ending then it’s a comedy, but over the years, comedy has come to denote so many
other things – one of them being conveying a social message to the audience in a more palatable
format.

Tragedy

Tragedy play is based on human suffering and emotionally painful events. These plays have evolved
from Greek tragedy plays that focused on a single theme and plot, to its present day form that tackles
multiple themes, storylines and sub-plots. Earlier tragedy plays chronicled only the royalty and people in
places of immense power, however over the course time they have become the stories of the common
man’s struggle.

Historic Plays

These plays are based on a historical narrative – they are either an enactment of a historical event or
personality, or an adaptation of the same. This genre has been best defined by William Shakespeare’s
plays like Julius Caesar and Henry IV.

Broadway MusicalsFarce

Farce is a variation of comedy, wherein the play uses absurd and exaggerated events in the plot. A
farcical play is loaded with ridiculous and highly preposterous elements; in such a play the character
sticks out like a sore thumb from his surroundings. It can be said that farce mostly relies on slapstick
humour.
Solo Theatre

Again, like the name suggests, solo theatre is led by only one actor. These plays could be anything, from
comic acts to theatrical representations of poetries and stories. This style of theatre stems from the rich
and ancient history of oral storytelling present in almost every culture for a thousand years, where
people gather around one person who enacts out the whole story (including multiple characters). What
makes solo plays so interesting is the fact that actor has to make sure the act does not get boring or
monotonous for the audience; s/he has to keep adding different strokes and shades to his performance.
Internationally, Sir Patrick Stewart has enacted all 43 characters of Charles Dickens’s novel A Christmas
Carol (which is the only novel to be turned into a Solo act).

Epic

An epic is often mixed up with a tragedy play, although both are completely different concepts. In an
epic, the focus is less on making the audience identify with the characters on stage and more on bringing
out the connection with the setting of the stage. Epic theatre is more about scale, and it relies on making
people react to the story more rationally than emotionally