What’s hot at Broadway Licensing Global? Check out the top trending titles of the week from Broadway Licensing, Dramatists Play Service, and Playscripts.
Proof by David Auburn
Winner of the 2001 Tony Award® for Best Play and Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
On the eve of her twenty-fifth birthday, Catherine, a troubled young woman, has spent years caring for her brilliant but unstable father, a famous mathematician. Now, following his death, she must deal with her own volatile emotions; the arrival of her estranged sister, Claire; and the attentions of Hal, a former student of her father’s who hopes to find valuable work in the 103 notebooks that her father left behind. Over the long weekend that follows, a burgeoning romance and the discovery of a mysterious notebook draw Catherine into the most difficult problem of all: How much of her father’s madness—or genius—will she inherit?
Ebenezer Scrooge’s Big [Your Town Here] Christmas Show! By Gordon Greenberg & Steve Rosen
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.
The Wind in the Willows by Zoey Zimmerman
Badger, Ratty, Mole, and the rest of their animal cohorts are on a mission to save their beloved riverbank home, now gravely ill from the effects of global warming. Their plan is to enter the Wide World and teach it to rethink its fundamental notions of design, but first, they must overcome a group of criminal weasels and a very stubborn Toad. Influenced by William McDonough and Michael Braungart’s environmental text Cradle to Cradle, this version of The Wind in the Willows is a modern, comedic adaptation of Kenneth Graham’s classic novel.
The Corn is Green by Emlyn Williams
Miss Moffat settles in a Welsh mining village where she starts a school for the boys of the neighborhood. Morgan Evans shows promise, and Miss Moffat determines to do everything possible for him. Against the prejudice of local folk and the wealthy squire, she manages to make good, and in Morgan she finds a young man who will go far. She at last persuades the squire to lend his support, and she prepares the boy to apply for a scholarship to Oxford. Morgan, however, rebels against help from a woman and temporarily succumbs to the charm of a flashy girl. His mistaken sense of obligation nearly ruins his chances of success, and Miss Moffat realizes that her interest in him has become too absorbing. However, her affection for him, her courage and wisdom in the end, bring her victory. Morgan wins the scholarship, and Miss Moffat’s work comes to a happy conclusion.
Stop Kiss by Diana Son
“A poignant and funny play about the ways, both sudden and slow, that lives can change irrevocably,” says Variety. After Callie meets Sara, the two unexpectedly fall in love. Their first kiss provokes a violent attack that transforms their lives in a way they could never anticipate.
The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
Amanda Wingfield is a faded remnant of Southern gentility who now lives in a dingy St. Louis apartment with her son, Tom, and her daughter, Laura, who has a physical handicap and debilitating shyness. The father has left home; Tom supports his mother and sister with a shoe-factory job he finds unbearable. When Amanda convinces Tom to bring home from his workplace a “gentleman caller” for Laura, the illusions that Tom, Amanda, and Laura have each created in order to make life bearable collapse about them.
Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
The New York World-Telegram describes: “GODOT cannot be compared to any other theater work, because its purpose is so different. Two dilapidated bums fill their days as painlessly as they can. They wait for Godot, a personage who will explain their interminable insignificance, or put an end to it. They are resourceful, with quarrels and their dependence on each other, as children are. They pass the time ‘which would have passed anyway.’ A brutal man of means comes by, leading a weakling slave who does his bidding like a mechanical doll. Later on he comes back, blind, and his slave is mute, but the relationship is unchanged. Every day a child comes from the unknown Godot, and evasively puts the big arrival off until tomorrow…It is a tragic view. Yet, in performance, most of it is brilliant, bitter comedy…It is a portrait of the dogged resilience of a man’s spirit in the face of little hope.”
Lafayette No. 1 by Mandy Conner
As the yellow fever epidemic ravages the streets of 1816 New Orleans, no one thinks of the orphans known as the Forgotten–except for Lizzie Landry. Lizzie brings bread from her mother’s kind employer to the band of homeless youths she’s befriended, even though local police and politicians consider them nothing but a nuisance. But when the epidemic entangles Lizzie’s fate with those of the Forgotten, they all must band together to hold the city accountable for their most vulnerable citizens. A haunting and immediate historical drama.
Hedwig and the Angry Inch by John Cameron Mitchel and music & lyrics by Stephen Trask
This groundbreaking Obie-winning Off-Broadway smash that took Broadway by storm in its Tony Award®–winning 2014 revival also won multiple awards for its hit film adaptation. It tells the story of “internationally ignored song stylist” Hedwig Schmidt, a fourth-wall smashing East German rock ‘n’ roll goddess who also happens to be the victim of a botched sex-change operation, which has left her with just “an angry inch.” This outrageous and unexpectedly hilarious story is dazzlingly performed by Hedwig (née Hansel) in the form of a rock gig/stand-up comedy routine backed by the hard-rocking band “The Angry Inch.” Using songs and monologues, Hedwig tells her story, which began in the former East Berlin where as Hansel he meets Luther, an American GI who promises to take the young man to the States on the condition that he switch his sex. After the bungled operation, Luther abandons newly named Hedwig in a Kansas trailer park, where she turns to music and meets geeky Tommy Speck, whom she takes under her wing and soon falls for. Tommy steals her songs, achieves rock star fame, and Hedwig is once again cast aside. She decides to demand redress and stalks Tommy’s world tour, performing in the T.G.I. Fridays that are situated next door to his stadiums. Hedwig describes her life’s search for “The Origin of Love” and her other half. It’s a rocking ride, funny, touching, and ultimately inspiring to anyone who has felt life gave them an inch when they deserved a mile.
The Half-Life of Marie Curie by Lauren Gunderson
In 1911, Marie Curie won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her discovery of the elements radium and polonium. By 1912, she was the object of ruthless gossip over an alleged affair with the married Frenchman Paul Langevin, all but erasing her achievements from public memory. Weakened and demoralized by the press lambasting her as a “foreign” Jewish temptress and a homewrecking traitor, Marie agrees to join her friend and colleague Hertha Ayrton, an electromechanical engineer and suffragette, at her summer home in England. THE HALF-LIFE OF MARIE CURIE revels in the power of female friendship as it explores the relationship between these two brilliant women, both of whom are mothers, widows, and fearless champions of scientific inquiry.
