What’s hot at Broadway Licensing Group? Check out the top trending titles of the week from Broadway Licensing, Dramatists Play Service, and Playscripts
LET IT BE by Annerin Productions, Stageworks Productions, David Abbinanti, and Maggie Pitts
THE STORY: Featuring the sensational songs of The Beatles, LET IT BE transports its audience back to the innocence, turbulence, and hopefulness of the 1960s. The lyrics and music take center stage, allowing room for the direction and choreography to help shape the story without the confines of a traditional book musical. The exuberance of teenagers first hearing “I Want To Hold Your Hand”, the sadness of lost love through “Yesterday:, the empathy for those who struggle in the balletic “Blackbird”, and the rebelliousness in “Come Together” prove that these timeless songs are all you need to drive the narrative of the characters and their journey. A great pick for schools and also community and professional theatres.
Alabama Story by Kenneth Jones
THE STORY: As the Civil Rights movement is brewing, a controversial children’s book about a black rabbit marrying a white rabbit stirs the passions of a segregationist State Senator and a no-nonsense State Librarian in 1959 Montgomery, Alabama. A contrasting story of childhood friends—an African American man and a woman of white privilege, reunited in adulthood—provides private counterpoint to the public events swirling in the state capital. Political foes, star-crossed lovers, and one feisty children’s author inhabit the same page in a Deep South of the imagination that brims with humor, heartbreak, and hope. Inspired by true events!
The Play That Goes Wrong (High School Edition) by Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer, and Henry Shields
THE STORY: From Mischief, Broadway masters of comedy, comes the smash hit farce. Welcome to the opening night of the Cornley University Drama Society’s newest production, The Murder at Haversham Manor, where things are quickly going from bad to utterly disastrous. This 1920s whodunit has everything you never wanted in a show—an unconscious leading lady, a corpse that can’t play dead, and actors who trip over everything (including their lines). Nevertheless, the accident-prone thespians battle against all odds to make it through to their final curtain call, with hilarious consequences! Part Monty Python, part Sherlock Holmes, this Olivier Award–winning comedy is a global phenomenon that’s guaranteed to leave you aching with laughter!
The Haunting of Hill House by F. Andrew Leslie, from the novel by Shirley Jackson
THE STORY: Cut off from the outside world by its remote location and shunned by all who know its forbidding and sinister reputation, Hill House has remained empty and silent except for the daily visits of its grumbling caretaker, Mrs. Dudley. Its isolation is broken by the arrival of Dr. Montague, an investigator of supernatural phenomena who has been granted a short lease by the present owner. His mission is to delve into the morbid history of the house and to come to grips with the occult forces that have made it uninhabitable for many years. He is joined by three others, all unacquainted, but all having their particular reasons for accepting Dr. Montague’s invitation to share his Hill House sojourn. Their visit begins with jovial informality, but their sensibilities are soon jolted by strange and eerie occurrences. As they struggle to disguise their mounting fears they are joined by Dr. Montague’s wife and a friend, who have come to Hill House for purposes of their own. They too are absorbed by the supernatural, but their approach is via direct communication with the departed spirits—a type of psychic research which is regarded fearfully by Dr. Montague and which, as subsequent events bear out, brings on a crisis in which the evil forces of Hill House are goaded to a new and, for one of those present, fatal fury.
The Best of Everything adapted by Julie Kramer, based on the book by Rona Jaffe
THE STORY: A new adaptation of Rona Jaffe’s 1958 bestseller about ambitious secretaries in the big city. These girls want thrilling careers and gay adventures—and husbands and children too, in due time. Today we call that “having it all”; these girls call it “the best of everything.” They’re not sure it’s possible either.
Chemical Imbalance: A Jekyll and Hyde Play by Lauren Wilson
THE STORY: A darkly comic adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In Victorian England, repressed impulses burst their corsets as Dr. Jekyll’s experiments in the nature of evil threaten to reveal the bloody hands beneath the gloves of the British Empire. A fast-paced romp about men and women tightrope walking the line between aristocracy and depravity, and between the twin spectres of good and evil.
THE GUYS by Anne Nelson
THE STORY: Less than two weeks after the September 11th attacks, New Yorkers are still in shock. One of them, an editor named Joan, receives an unexpected phone call on behalf of Nick, a fire captain who has lost most of his men in the attack. He’s looking for a writer to help him with the eulogies he must present at their memorial services. Nick and Joan spend a long afternoon together, recalling the fallen men through recounting their virtues and their foibles, and fashioning the stories into memorials of words. In the process, Nick and Joan discover the possibilities of friendship in each other and their shared love for the unconquerable spirit of the city. As they make their way through the emotional landscape of grief, they draw on humor, tango, the appreciation of craft in all its forms—and the enduring bonds of common humanity. THE GUYS is based on a true story.
Last Train to Nibroc by Arlene Hutton
THE STORY: In December 1940, an east-bound cross-country train carries the bodies of the great American writers Nathanael West and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Also on board is May, who shares her seat with a charming young flyer, Raleigh. Religious and bookish, May plans to be a missionary. Raleigh has been given a medical discharge and, inspired by West and Fitzgerald, is heading to New York to be a writer. Raleigh and May discover they are from neighboring Appalachian towns, and he decides to change trains for Kentucky, promising to take May to the next Nibroc Festival. Scene Two finds May and Raleigh at the festival, but a year and half later. Unfit for war, and needing to support his parents, Raleigh has been working in a Detroit factory. May is teaching school and dating an itinerant preacher. When Raleigh confronts her, May admits her prejudices against his family. It is not until the following spring as they sit on May’s front porch, watching a lumberyard fire in the distance, that the two are finally able to resolve their differences and discover the depth of their feelings. May accepts Raleigh’s sudden proposal to elope, as the sky grows red like a sunrise.
Antigone Now by Melissa Cooper
THE STORY: In the midst of a bombed-out city still feeling the aftershocks of war, the rebellious and intense Antigone defies her uncle to bury her disgraced brother. This contemporary response to the myth of Antigone brings powerful, modern prose to an ancient and universal story.
The 9 Worst Breakups of All Time by Ian McWethy
THE STORY: You think your breakup was bad? Eve Tonsil, an employee of the nonprofit company “Relationships for a Better Tomorrow” is here to take you on a tour of the nine worst breakups of all time, from the Cro-Magnon era to the Civil War, to a smattering of modern-day breakups. A comedy that proves that no matter how hard someone has stomped on your heart…it could always be worse.
