3,335 articles
Summer of the Seventeenth Doll
Summer of the Seventeenth Doll is a 1955 play by Australian playwright Ray Lawler about two cane cutters whose annual lay-off ritual with their sweethearts collapses.
Summerfolk
Summerfolk (Дачники, Dachniki) is a four-act play by Maxim Gorky about newly prosperous Russians spending a summer at their dachas, completed in 1904 and first staged in St Petersburg that November.
Sun Weishi
Sun Weishi (孙维世, 1921–1968), adopted daughter of Zhou Enlai, was China's first female stage director and the leading Chinese exponent of the Stanislavski system, directing Paul Korchagin, The Government Inspector, and Uncle Vanya before dying in detention during the Cultural Revolution.
Sunset Boulevard (musical)
Sunset Boulevard is an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical with book and lyrics by Don Black and Christopher Hampton, based on Billy Wilder's 1950 film. Premiered London 1993 with Patti LuPone, Broadway 1994 with Glenn Close; Jamie Lloyd's 2024 revival with Nicole Scherzinger won the Tony for Best Revival.
Surreal humour
Surreal humour, also called surreal comedy, is a comedy style using bizarre juxtapositions, non-sequiturs, and nonsense, rooted in Dada and Surrealism and exemplified by Monty Python and Eric André.
Susan Calman
Susan Calman (born 1974, Glasgow) is a Scottish stand-up comedian, writer and broadcaster, ex-corporate lawyer, Scottish Bafta winner for Blowout, Strictly 2017 contestant, host of Grand Day Out and Cruising With Susan Calman.
Susan Stroman
Susan Stroman (born 1954, Wilmington, Delaware) is an American Broadway director and choreographer, five-time Tony winner, known for Crazy for You, Contact, The Producers (record 12 Tonys), and The Scottsboro Boys.
Susie Essman
Susie Essman (born 1955) is an American stand-up comedian and actress, Susie Greene in all 12 seasons of HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm (2000–2024), cast after a Jerry Stiller roast; also Bolt's Mittens, Broad City, Hacks, and a 2009 memoir.
Suspension of disbelief
Suspension of disbelief, or willing suspension of disbelief, is the audience's bounded, cooperative withholding of disbelief toward fiction, coined by Coleridge in Biographia Literaria (1817) as poetic faith, distinct from literal belief and broken by internal inconsistency.
Sutton Foster
Sutton Foster (Sutton Lenore Foster, born 1975), American Broadway actress, singer, and dancer; two-time Tony winner for Thoroughly Modern Millie (2002) and Anything Goes (2011), star of TV Land's Younger and the 2022 Music Man revival.
Suzan-Lori Parks
Suzan-Lori Parks (born 1963, Fort Knox, Kentucky) is an American playwright and screenwriter, first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama (2002, Topdog/Underdog), also a MacArthur Fellow, Obie and Tony winner, known for Rep and Rev.
Suzanne Farrington
Suzanne Farrington (Suzanne Mary Holman, 1933–2015), only daughter of actress Vivien Leigh and Herbert Leigh Holman and ex-stepdaughter of Laurence Olivier; lived privately in England, married Robin Farrington in 1957, and died in Wiltshire in 2015.
Suzi Ruffell
Suzi Ruffell (born 1986, Portsmouth) is an English stand-up comedian, writer and presenter, host of Out with Suzi Ruffell, co-host of Like Minded Friends and Big Kick Energy, author of the 2025 Sunday Times bestseller Am I Having Fun Now?
Suzie Toot
Suzie Toot, stage name of Benjamin Shaevitz (born 2000), is an American drag performer and tap dancer from Fort Lauderdale who placed fifth on RuPaul's Drag Race season 17, won its Lip Sync LaLaPaRuZa Smackdown, and now tours the cabaret shows If You Knew Suzie and Suzie with a Z.
Swan Lake (Bourne)
Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake, the all-male Swan Lake, is the 1995 New Adventures reimagining of Tchaikovsky's ballet with a male swan corps, premiered at Sadler's Wells, a West End and Broadway hit, and Olivier and three-Tony winner.
Swan Lake (Лебединое озеро)
Swan Lake (Лебединое озеро), Tchaikovsky's Op. 20 ballet, premiered at Moscow's Bolshoi in 1877 with Reisinger's choreography and failed; the famous 1895 Petipa-Ivanov Mariinsky revival with Drigo's revised score became the basis of most stagings.
Swang
Swang is a form of folk theatre from North India in which a performer impersonates a mythological, historical, or social character through song, dance, and dialogue.
Sweeney Todd
Sweeney Todd, the "Demon Barber of Fleet Street," is a fictional London barber and murderer first appearing in an 1846 penny dreadful, best known today through Stephen Sondheim's 1979 musical.
Sweet Charity
Sweet Charity: 1966 Broadway musical, book Neil Simon, music Cy Coleman, lyrics Dorothy Fields, based on Fellini's Nights of Cabiria; Fosse staged Gwen Verdon; 608 performances; 1969 Shirley MacLaine film.
Swept Away (musical)
Swept Away is a jukebox musical with music and lyrics by the Avett Brothers and book by John Logan, based on their 2004 album Mignonette and an 1884 shipwreck; it premiered at Berkeley Rep in 2022, played Arena Stage 2023, and ran on Broadway at the Longacre Theatre in 2024.
Swing (dance)
Swing dance is an umbrella term for American partner dances from 1920s–40s jazz and big band music, including Lindy Hop, Balboa, Charleston, East Coast Swing, and West Coast Swing.
Sybil Christopher
Sybil Christopher (born Sybil Williams, 1929–2013), Welsh actress, first wife of Richard Burton, founder of the New York disco Arthur and co-founder and artistic director of Bay Street Theatre, Sag Harbor.
Sydney James Harcourt
Sydney James Harcourt (born 1979, Detroit) is an American Broadway actor, singer, and dancer, an original Hamilton cast member and first replacement Aaron Burr (700+ performances), 2016 Grammy winner, and originator of Rum Tum Tugger in Cats: The Jellicle Ball.
Sydney Theatre Company
Sydney Theatre Company is a not-for-profit theater company founded in 1978, based at The Wharf on Sydney Harbour and resident at the Sydney Opera House Drama Theatre.
Symbolism (arts)
Symbolism (arts): late nineteenth-century French literary and artistic movement founded around Jean Moréas's 1886 manifesto, using suggestive symbols over realist description; influenced Gauguin, Munch, Klimt, theater, and Expressionism.
Symbolist theatre
Symbolist theatre is a late 19th-century French movement that rejected realistic staging in favor of suggestion, poetic language, and inner realities, with Maurice Maeterlinck as its emblematic playwright.
Symphonic Variations (ballet)
Symphonic Variations is Frederick Ashton's one-act abstract ballet for six dancers to César Franck's Variations symphoniques, premiered 24 April 1946 by the Sadler's Wells Ballet at Covent Garden, a signature work of The Royal Ballet.
Syrian dramatic literature
Syrian dramatic literature is the body of playwriting produced in Syria or by Syrian writers, beginning in the nineteenth century with figures like Abu Khalil al-Qabbani and Sadallah Wannous.
Ta'ziyeh
Ta'ziyeh, also transliterated taʿzia, is the Shi'ite ritual passion play of Iran, a sung drama commemorating Husayn's martyrdom at the Battle of Karbala in 680.
Tableau vivant
A tableau vivant, French for living picture, is a performance in which costumed people hold silent, motionless poses to reproduce a painting, sculpture, print, or literary scene.