What’s hot at Broadway Licensing Global? Check out the top trending titles of the week from Broadway Licensing, Dramatists Play Service, and Playscripts.
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (High School Edition) by Jack Thorne, based on an original story by J. K. Rowling, John Tiffany & Jack Thorne
Nineteen years after Harry, Ron, and Hermione saved the wizarding world, they’re back on a most extraordinary new adventure–this time, joined by a brave new generation that has only just arrived at the legendary Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. When Harry Potter’s head-strong son Albus befriends the son of his fiercest rival, Draco Malfoy, it sparks an unbelievable new journey for them all—with the power to change the past and future forever. Prepare for spectacular spells, a mind-blowing race through time, and an epic battle to stop mysterious forces, all while the future hangs in the balance. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (High School Edition) is a special adaptation of the beloved worldwide hit. Tailored for high school theatre productions, it provides young actors the opportunity to play Harry, Hermione, Ron, and all of their favorite characters on their very own stage and bring the wizarding world to life for their communities. Your students will be empowered to conjure the magic through their own creativity, making it a truly exciting and engaging experience for students and audiences alike.
I am a Camera by John Van Druten
In the words of the New York Herald-Tribune, the play “looks at life in a tawdry Berlin rooming house of 1930 with a stringently photographic eye. For the most part, it concerns itself with the mercurial and irresponsible moods of a girl called Sally Bowles. When we first meet her, she is a creature of extravagant attitudes, given to parading her vices, enormously confident that she is going to take life in her stride. She is fond of describing herself as an ‘extraordinary interesting person,’ and she is vaguely disturbing. As we get to know her, as we watch her make frightened arrangements for an illegal operation, seize at the tinseled escape offered by a rich and worthless American playboy, attempt to rehabilitate herself and fail ludicrously, we are more and more moved, more and more caught up in the complete and almost unbearable reality of this girl. [The author has] placed a character named Mr. Isherwood on the stage…He serves both as narrator and as principal confidant to Sally Bowles. He is the camera eye of the title, attracted to Sally, yet dispassionate about her.” Though Sally is the chief point of interest, the plight of the Jew in Germany in the early thirties is brought within focus in a few touching scenes.
Bedtime Stories (As Told by Our Dad) (Who Messed Them Up) by Ed Monk
It’s Dad’s turn to tell his three rambunctious kids their bedtime stories, but when he gets fuzzy on the details, the classics get creative: a prince with a snoring problem spices up The Princess and The Pea, The Boy Who Cried Wolf cries dinosaur instead, and Rumpelstiltskin helps turn all that pesky gold into straw. You may think you know your fairy tales, but not the way Dad tells them.
Dancing at Lughnasa by Brian Friel
This extraordinary play is the story of five unmarried sisters eking out their lives in a small village in Ireland in 1936. We meet them at the time of the festival of Lughnasa, which celebrates the pagan god of the harvest with drunken revelry and dancing. Their spare existence is interrupted by brief, colorful bursts of music from the radio, their only link to the romance and hope of the world at large. The action of the play is told through the memory of the illegitimate son of one of the sisters as he remembers the five women who raised him: his mother and four maiden aunts. He is only seven in 1936, the year his elderly uncle, a priest, returns after serving for twenty-five years as a missionary in a Ugandan leper colony. For the young boy, two other disturbances occur that summer. The sisters acquire their first radio, whose music transforms them from correct Catholic women to shrieking, stomping banshees in their own kitchen. And he meets his father for the first time, a charming Welsh drifter who strolls up the lane and sweeps his mother away in an elegant dance across the fields. From these small events spring the cracks that destroy the foundation of the family forever. Widely regarded as Brian Friel’s masterpiece, this haunting play is Friel’s tribute to the spirit and valor of the past.
Letters to Sala by Arlene Hutton
Adapted from the book Sala’s Gift by Ann Kirschner and based on a true account, Letters to Sala is a remarkable story of a young girl’s survival during wartime Germany. Five years. Seven Nazi labor camps. Over 350 hidden letters. Sala Garncarz Kirschner kept her secret for over fifty years, concealing her incredibly painful history in a Spill and Spell box. Everything changes when Sala reveals the cache to her grown daughter, Ann. Letters to Sala draws from the emotional journeys that begin for both Ann and Sala when the letters resurface. Through scholarly research, Ann discovers that her mother has made a historically significant impact on Holocaust documentation. As Ann processes her own reaction to her mother’s story, her daughters, Caroline and Elisabeth, also realize for the first time the weight of their Jewish heritage. Simultaneously, Ann’s study of the letters throws Sala into the past again. She relives her youth, recalling her naïve desire for adventure, the disillusionment of her life in the work camps, and her loss of communication with the outside world as the war progressed around her. Playwright Arlene Hutton drives the two stories to a single question: What is to be done with these letters? If Sala risked her life to hold onto them as a young woman imprisoned in a work camp, are they merely the emotionally rich relics of her past life? Or are they worthy and important historical documents that demand to be shared with the public? Three generations of Kirschner women must work together to sift through the past and come to terms with the true gravity of Sala’s letters.
Murderers by Jeffrey Hatcher
The Man Who Married His Mother-in-Law is Gerald Halverson’s confession of an elicit love and a plan to shelter five million dollars from the IRS. When Gerald’s mother-in-law, Spiffy, finds out she hasn’t long to live, Gerald concocts a plan to keep her estate “in the family.” But when they move down to Florida to wait out Spiffy’s death sentence at Riddle Key, old friends and new faces threaten to spoil the scheme, and a surprise twist throws a wrench into Gerald’s plans unless he can pull off the perfect murder.
Margaret Faydle Comes to Town is about Lucy Stickler, the long-suffering wife of Bob, a septuagenarian who used to have a roving eye. Bob’s been on his best behavior for the past twenty years, but when Margaret Faydle, the still-glamorous femme fatale who stole him from Lucy when they were young, takes up residence at Riddle Key, Bob goes back into action. So Lucy constructs a diabolical plan to get rid of her cheating spouse and his AARP inamorata once and for all.
Match Wits with Minka Lupino stars Minka Lupino, Riddle Key’s ever-sunny, ever-helpful receptionist. Minka is a fan of crime novels who becomes an avenging angel on a mission to rid the retirement community of its predators: the conniving heirs, the sticky-fingered health-care workers, the salesmen and contractors and Bible thumpers who prey upon helpless senior citizens. But when Minka comes face to face with her idol, a famous mystery novelist who has retired to Riddle Key, she knows she’s met her match. In the end, only one of them will survive.
Adaptation by Elaine May
This is a contest, played like Parcheesi, in which the contestant advances or is sent back through the seven ages of man. The Author has written a parody of life with such incisiveness that it becomes like Swift in its barbs. The play creates a picture of man from birth until death, with all its madness, with all its familiarity and with all its nonsense. What’s more, a quartet consisting of the games master, the male players and the female players assist the incomparable contestant from “mewling infant” to “second childishness and mere oblivion.” Incident after incident makes you laugh and suddenly makes you stop and think that maybe you’re laughing at yourself.
Wild with Happy by Colman Domingo
From the mind of Colman Domingo (a Tony Award® nominee for The Scottsboro Boys and an Obie Award winner for Passing Strange) comes a deeply imaginative and utterly outrageous new work that explores the bizarre comedy that lies within death and healing. Gil, an actor who’s struggling to carve out his own new life, finds his worlds colliding when his mother dies and he decides to have her cremated. But where should he scatter the ashes? And can he make a fairytale ending for her in the one place that made her Wild with Happy?
The Rehearsal by Don Zolidis
A young teacher tries to pull off a production of Guys and Dolls, but putting a musical together is never easy, especially with a megalomaniacal stage manager, a lead who’s convinced that Wicked is a much better show, and a girl who is clinically incapable of following directions (she has a doctor’s note to prove it). And to make matters worse, there aren’t nearly enough guys to be the Guys. A hilarious and poignant look behind the scenes of a drama club production filled with—what else?—lots of drama.
All I Really Need to Know I Learned From Being a Zombie by Jason Pizzarello
In today’s chaotic, challenging world, we often don’t know where to turn for help. Little did we know that life’s most valuable lessons lie within the undead. Finally, zombies engage us with musings on life, death, and everything in between. They show us that brains aren’t everything…you are what you eat…and what doesn’t kill you makes you…more alive.
