Unfortunate Implications/Theatre

Important Note: Just because a work has Unfortunate Implications does not mean the author was thinking of it that way. In fact, that's the point of it being unfortunate. So, please, no Justifying Edits about "what the authors really meant." The way an author handles a trope is an important factor here; handling a trope in a clumsy manner can certainly create unintentional impressions for readers. Likewise, if a work intends the offensive message (for example, a piece of Nazi propaganda about Jews), it wouldn't count. Also, for something that may not be offensive to you personally but may offend others in a different culture or time period, see Values Dissonance.

Examples of Unfortunate Implications in Theatre include:

The moral of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Phantom of the Opera can come across as "It doesn't matter how talented you are, or how much you desire love and acceptance -- if you are born ugly the world will forever shun and abuse you. Thus you are doomed to criminal insanity and a cold, lonely death."
- Except for the whole part where it's made obvious that the Phantom's insanity is something to be understood and pitied...
  - Except except for the part where A) While understanding and sympathy are fine and dandy, most people with disabilities and/or mental illness don't actually like being pitied and B) what the audience thinks or is meant to think of the Phantom doesn't change anything about the fact that in the universe of the play society hates him for his outward appearance and nobody even tries to change that. Meaning the take home message of the play can come across as less "lookism is bad, let's fight it" and more "it really is too bad that this guy's life ended up this way, just as it really is too bad when people's houses are destroyed by wildfire or something, and let's just feel sorry for him and leave it at that." and C) There are disproportionately few fictional character with facial deformities who aren't criminally insane, compared to the number of real people with facial deformities who aren't criminally insane.
- Consider the creepy paedophilic themes in the film version, due to casting younger actors than usual in the roles. Erik poses as Christine's father's ghost, starting when she arrives at the opera house at a very young age -- and continues posing as her father's ghost after attempting a romantic relationship with her. The stage version never specifically says when Christine came to the Opera and the Phantom started hanging around her (and it is generally assumed that, as in the original novel, she was a young woman by that point). The massive Electra complex overtones remain, though...As Phantom of the Opera in 15 Minutes says, "Daddy issues ahoy!"
- In the sequel Love Never Dies, late in Act One the Phantom introduces Gustave (Christine's ten-year-old son) to the wonders of his workshop with "The Beauty Underneath". Listening to it, it's easy to interpret their relationship as very, very wrong. And the entire second act revolves around the two male leads making a wager with the heroine as the stakes...and the choice she makes suggests that Stalking Is Love after all, with her choice to go with Raoul at the end of the first show something she came to regret.
Seussical: the Musical, in its effort to give each character an individual musical style, trips over this trope but hard. The protagonists, needing to be straightforward and often innocent, get generic folky pop (Horton, Gertrude, Jo-Jo) or old-time vaudeville stuff (Cat in the Hat). The antagonists are a little more cartoony and therefore get more distinctive music... Latin for Mayzie the lazy bird who abandons her egg to go party, 70's funk for the threatening Wickersham Brothers (and they're literally monkeys. Whoo boy), and the sour kangaroo is specifically modeled after Aretha Franklin. Yikes.
- Seussical also runs into trouble through the fact that many of Seuss's stories, along with their morals, are now displayed without context. For example, the army from "The Butter Battle Book" is displayed, a book Seuss wrote as his criticism of the Cold War. However, the play lacks that context, making it feel as though it's condemning every war as frivolous, when in fact, Seuss, a former political cartoonist, could be VERY pro-war depending on the issue.
Little Shop of Horrors does similarly, although sadly the only academic paper on Little Shop of Horrors focuses entirely on this and ignores its more important and intentional themes.
The Las Vegas Sun's review of Criss Angel Believe points out that in the original (subsequently retooled) story "[T]here's a continual struggle over [Criss's] usually shirtless bod between his stage assistants, Kayala, an angelic ever-receding woman in white and Crimson, a devouring, demonic black woman. (Not even going there.)"
The Paper Mill Playhouse production of Stephen Schwartz's musical Children of Eden cast Adam as white and Eve as black, apparently also allowing them to have children of different skintones. On the one hand, the colour-blind casting played nicely to the show's theme of unconditional love and community; on the other hand, there were possible Unfortunate Implications in that both Eve and Cain (one traditionally held responsible for mankind's expulsion from paradise, the other the first ever murderer) were portrayed by black performers. Of course, both Eve and Cain are portrayed as sympathetic protagonists compared to Father's (God) possessive behaviour and Adam and Abel's strict, unthinking adherence to the rules. Still, when a black Eve sings of her black son Cain "Was it just a defect in me, / A flaw in my nature, / And now look what I've done, / I've passed it to my son, / This wild inclination ...", and given how much the story goes on about "the blood of Cain" tainting the human race, it's hard not to feel a little uncomfortable.
- Also a problem is the fact that God/Father basically saying he wants to get rid of the entire race of Cain, to the point where he'll destroy the ark because Yonah's aboard it. Apart from Cain himself, the only member of this race we see is Yonah, who is pretty unambiguously good as far as the show goes. (She offers to drown herself if it'll save the others.) It is incredibly easy to play Father as a possessive, Omnicidal Maniac who'll kill the last, devout people on the planet because he didn't get what he wanted. Add in lyrics like "Noah had a servant girl, Yonah was her name / He treated her with kindness though she bore the mark of shame" and "Shed no tears for me... This won't be the first time I've stayed behind to face / the bitter consequences of an ancient fall from grace", and things feel a little... awkward.
Probably invoked another Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, Jesus Christ Superstar. Judas' Motive Rant/Villain Song contains the following lines:

Listen, Jesus, don't you care for your race?
Can't you see that we must keep in our place?
We are occupied; have you forgotten how put down we are?

- Nominally, he's talking about the Jews, but consider that Judas is traditionally played by a black actor. This was not Rice and Lloyd-Webber's intent, since Murray Head, a white actor, created the role for both the original British concept album and the subsequent stage production; it was a politically-conscious American director who deliberately cast a black actor for the imported Broadway production and began the tradition.
The song "Little Red Hat" from 110 in the Shade sounds more like it concerns a rape than an engagement.
Supposing one Alternate Character Interpretation of The Taming of the Shrew is right, it has some massive Unfortunate Implications anyway. (Of course, it's not a bad chance those were intentional.)
Concerning the song "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria" in The Sound of Music: Cute enough song, harmless on its own. Concerning the reprise of "How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria" at Maria's wedding: Surely Rodgers and Hammerstein must have recognized the suggestion about what other problem of Maria's getting married might have solved, didn't they?
In Stephen Sondheim's Into the Woods, the lyrics to "Hello, Little Girl" and "I Know Things Now" can be interpreted... in different ways.
- "Look at that flesh, pink and plump... hello, little girl..."
- "And he showed me things, many beautiful things, that I hadn't thought to explore!" "And he made me feel excited - well, excited and scared..."
  - Totally intentional. The anatomically correct wolf costume (changed after the preview run), the pelvis-forward posture of the wolf as he approaches, the dual meaning of "carnality" - sexual predation and loss of innocence are exactly what Sondheim was aiming for.
  - At least in the 2003 revival. Local productions tend to (naturally) play this down.
A 2011 production of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Sorceror altered the production in several ways, notably by having the titular sorceror be a woman instead of a man, and part of the Love Potion induced humor is that characters wind up with people they are not suited for, including several same-sex couples. Though that was handled pretty sensitively, at the end when everything is "fixed" the affected characters go to their "suitable" partners... who are all of the opposite sex. Considering that they already altered the production so much would it have been so hard to include one same-sex couple at the end? Because otherwise the implication is "heterosexual couples = normal, same-sex couples = an accident and meant to be laughed at." Given the notoriously liberal area that the production was performed in this was most likely an oversight, but a hell of an unfortunate one.
A 2011 Pantomime production of Cinderella had a scene where a group of characters were lost in the woods and were singing to themselves because they were scared. As they sang a ghost came behind them (and the audience would scream "there's a ghost behind you") and slowly the group would be kidnapped one-by-one by the ghost. The ghost itself looked exactly like a KKK member and it was around this point that the lack of non-white characters became an awkward decision.

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