What’s hot at Broadway Licensing Global? Check out the top trending plays and musicals from Broadway Licensing, Dramatists Play Service, and Playscripts.
Top 5 Trending Plays & Musicals
Summer: The Donna Summer Musical Book by Colman Domingo, Robert Cary, & Des McAnuff, Songs by Donna Summer, Giorgio Moroder, and Paul Jabara
She was a girl from Boston with a voice from heaven, who shot through the stars from gospel choir to dance floor diva. But what the world didn’t know was how Donna Summer risked it all to break through barriers, becoming the icon of an era and the inspiration for every music diva who followed. Spend the night with Donna in her electrifying universe.
Every Christmas Story Ever Told (And Then Some!) by Michael Carleton, James Fitzgerald, & John K. Alvarez
Instead of performing Charles Dickens’ beloved holiday classic for the umpteenth time, three actors decide to perform every Christmas story ever told — plus Christmas traditions from around the world, seasonal icons from ancient times to topical pop-culture, and every carol ever sung. A madcap romp through the holiday season!
Empowered: How One Girl Scout Nearly Destroyed the World’s Economy by Don Zolidis
Amaryllis is determined to win her Girl Scout troop’s cookie-selling contest, but she’ll need more than charm to win first prize (a unicorn!) and avoid last place (which means getting kicked out of the troop!). So when sales droop, she naturally turns to the financial sector for advice. Soon she’s faking a terminal illness, franchising her methods, and contracting with a payday lender to offer 30-year loans for cookies. A hysterical homage to Glengarry Glen Ross and send-up of the wild excesses of the financial crisis.
Mrs. Bob Cratchit’s Wild Christmas Binge by Christopher Durang
In this departure from Dickens, young Scrooge’s exclamations of “Bah, humbug!” are an undiagnosed “kind of seasonal Tourette’s Syndrome,” and The Ghost of Christmas Past is played by a sassy African-American woman with enough attitude to portray all three spirits (which she does). She tries to show Scrooge his past, present and future in order to change him, but her magic keeps malfunctioning in Durang’s version of the beloved holiday classic, and they consistently find themselves transported to the wrong time and place. She tries to take Scrooge back to see his old employers, the Fezziwigs— “always an audience favorite” —but instead she and Scrooge keep appearing in the present at the Cratchit’s pathetic home. Mrs. Bob Cratchit, a minor character in the Dickens, takes center stage here. No longer loving and long suffering, Mrs. Bob is in a rage: She’s sick of Tiny Tim (the goody-goody crippled child), she hates her twenty other children (most of them confined to the root cellar), including oversized Little Nell, and she wants to get drunk and jump off London Bridge. As the Ghost loses more control, the plot morphs into parodies of Oliver Twist, “The Gift of the Magi” and It’s a Wonderful Life. And to make matters worse, Scrooge and Mrs. Bob seem to be kindred souls falling in love. With a dénouement that is two parts Touched by an Angel and one part The Queen of Mean, Scrooge’s tale of redemption and gentle grace is placed squarely on its head.
The Con by Tracy Wells
In this hilarious heist whodunit, a rare first-issue comic is up for grabs. Set at a Comic Con, this play consists of a series of vignettes, each with their own stand-alone story that also furthers the underlying plot of a con in progress. There’s a bat-tastic hero clowning around with his foe in “The LARP Knight Rises,” a video game menace who loses it in more ways than one in “A Plumber Cracks,” a D&D newbie who wants to let her inner gnome shine in “The Ballad of Lena Moonfallen,” some costumed competitors who will stop at nothing to complete their quartet in “Cosplaying with Fire,” and much more. Keep your audience laughing and guessing with this clever Comic Con caper!
