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.

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.

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.