Discover the latest theatrical gems at Broadway Licensing Group. This month, our new titles include Don Zolidis’ Long Live Love, Return of the Script, and Lord of the Choir, Lindsay Joelle’s The Garbologist and TRAYF, Kyle Nesbit’s The Gift List, and more! Scroll down to learn more.
• New Titles from Playscripts
Long Live Love by Don Zolidis
The Story: It’s opening night for Long Live Love, a drawing room comedy about a marriage squabble where everything turns out happy in the end. But hours before the curtain is set to go up, George Harold, one of the show’s two playwrights, rushes in with a new, much more cynical version of the script he wrote in an angry, drunken haze. As the actors scramble to add a tragic ending to their romantic farce, Marjorie Bright, the other playwright—and George’s wife—arrives with a new new ending for the show. Now the actors are stuck in an impossible situation, trying to piece together a working script from the remains of the playwrights’ marriage. Long-lost children, mistaken identities, and sword fights abound in Long Live Love—and that’s just behind the scenes.
Where the Sky Meets the Sea by Mandy Conner
The Story: Five Greek children find themselves abandoned on an island until an oracle sends then on a mystical quest to seek their release–at the cost of a sacrifice.
The Con by Tracy Wells
The Story: 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 under-lying 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!
Return of the Script by Don Zolidis
The Story: Miss Walters’s life is upended after she does the unthinkable and forgets to return a perusal script. Now, she’s on the run from international conglomerate Musical Theater Global, trying to dodge the two agents they sent after her. (Which is especially hard since one of them can talk to birds.) If Miss Walters wants to live one day more, she must find and return the perusal before MTG finds her. Return of the Script is a madcap chase by plane, train, and automobile that teaches an important lesson: Always read the terms and conditions.
The Gift List by Kyle Nesbit
The Story: Santa isn’t the only one who has to check his Christmas list twice. After siblings Keith and Caroline ask for an unwieldy seventy-nine presents from Saint Nick, two elves arrive to tell the kids they can’t have everything they want. Luckily, Keith and Caroline—and their parents—are prepared to negotiate. Funny and charming, THE GIFT LIST is a one-act play about dreaming big and making holiday wishes come true.
Lord of the Choir by Don Zolidis
The Story: A choir, a limited supply of marshmallows, and a broken-down bus: What’s the worst that could happen? Definitely not anything that could’ve happened in Lord of the Flies. Between prideful sopranos and wannabe basses, who will come out on top? Or will no chorister be left standing?
Whooo Are Youuu? by Michael Bigelow Dixon, Jon Jory
The Story: It’s Sweeps Week for the game show Whooo Are Youuu? and the host, Buck Lucket, has a new assistant, Ronny Lonny, who has booked America’s biggest pop star, Baylor Twift. But the singer’s limo gets stuck in traffic, so Ronny Lonny’s roommate—Saylor Bift, who looks exactly like Baylor Twift—is forced to take her place. When Saylor is scurried off to hair and makeup, the real Baylor arrives thanks to a motorcyclist named Skull Duggery. As showtime approaches, the confusion spins into chaos and the fun keeps going to an ending that surprises everyone!
• New Titles from Dramatists Play Service
The Story: In 1920, the Russian writer Isaac Babel is a war correspondent with the Red Cavalry. Seventy years later, a mysterious Stasi agent spies on a woman in Dresden and falls in love. In 2010, an aircraft carrying most of the Polish government crashes in the Russian city of Smolensk. Set in Russia and East Germany over the course of ninety years, this thrilling and epic play traces the stories of seven people connected by history, myth, and conspiracy theories.
The Story: Danny’s a white, blue-collar, New York City sanitation worker. Marlowe’s the Black, Ivy-educated newbie who just joined his route. Thrown together in the cab of a nineteen-ton garbage truck, they spend their first shifts sparring, one-upping each other, and practicing the secret art of mongo: hunting for discarded treasure. But as their lives become increasingly intertwined, these two essential workers from different worlds discover there’s more that binds them than picking up the trash.
A Normal Kid by
The Story: Perry, an aspiring artist, learns that he’s been hired to illustrate a children’s book while feeding the squirrels in Madison Square Park. This dream come true via text message prompts him to put the pieces of his life together—how did he get here from there? He remembers the day his abusive father went too far, causing him to run away from home. He remembers the help he received as a runaway, specifically from TJ, the young hustler who saved him from that life. He remembers Davey and Joyce, the people who took him in and helped him. And he remembers the night he saw his picture on the side of a milk carton, forcing him to go home, where his mother had finally started getting herself together—all of which shaped him and put him on the path to the successful life he now leads.
Poor Clare by
The Story: It’s 1211 in Assisi, Italy, and Clare’s got beauty, wealth, and a rich suitor who showers her with expensive presents. So why is she so drawn to this guy Francis who gave up all his possessions just because poor people are suffering? Everyone in town says he’s crazy. And yet…she starts seeing everything in her life differently. This hilarious, anachronistic telling of the real story of St. Clare considers the cost of doing good—and how little has changed for the haves and the have-nots in almost a millennium.
Pouf! by Lou Clyde
The Story: What happens when you mix hair spray, head lice, and a little dab of Elvis? Hairlarity. The year is 1958 and Betty finds herself unfulfilled as a housewife. She and her husband have been unsuccessful in starting a family and her husband will not “permit” her to get a job. With the encouragement of her sister, Betty secretly sets up an in-home salon, leveraging her prowess with hair spray and bobby pins. Betty begins to change the lives of neighborhood women by “poufing” their hair. POUF! is an “uplifting” comedy with big hair and even bigger laughs.
Hotel Buzz by David Goldsmith
The Story: Set in a fictional, uber-chic bungalow hotel on the shores of Malibu in the time just before Facebook and the iPhone, this bedroom farce concerns the Hollywood agent-sharks Andrea and Adrian, who plot to poach Zeke Tadlow, the biggest movie star in the world, from the head of their agency and boss, Walter, to form an agency of their own, all while having a scandalous affair with each other.
American Guernica, or The Twilight Of Democracy by David Goldsmith
The Story: In this fractured historical fiction in two acts set in the months before the 2012 presidential election, when Democracy was strong, facts were facts, and a single surreptitious video could determine the course of history, a Black Republican political operative and his (male) GOP donor lover; a blue-collar bartender in his 60s and his liberal wife; a left-wing middle-aged painter, his twenty-year-old activist daughter, the conservative housewife with whom he’s having an affair, and her Jesus-loving daughter; and James Earl Carter IV, grandson of the 39th president of the United States, all find themselves connected to political events swirling around them, and to each other, in ways they never could have imagined.
TRAYF by
The Story: Zalmy lives a double life. By day, he drives a Chabad “Mitzvah Tank” through 1990s New York City, performing good deeds with his best friend Shmuel. By night, he sneaks out of his orthodox community to roller-skate and listen to rock and roll. But when a curious outsider offers him unfettered access to the secular world, is it worth jeopardizing everything he’s ever known? This road-trip bromance is a funny and heartwarming ode to the turbulence of youth, the universal suspicion that we don’t quite fit in, and the faith and friends that see us through.
Ebenezer Scrooge’s Big [Your Town Here] Christmas Show! by
The Story: One of the holiday season’s favorite tales has been transformed into a gut-busting, fun, and family-friendly theatrical experience that incorporates the details of your own theatre into the script. Take a spin with Ebenezer, all three Ghosts, Tiny Tim, and more in this music-filled show.
