What’s hot at Broadway Licensing Global? Check out the top trending titles of the week from Broadway Licensing, Dramatists Play Service, and Playscripts.
The Play That Goes Wrong by Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer & Henry Shields
From Mischief, Broadway masters of comedy, comes the smash hit farce. Welcome to 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!
Bethel Park Falls by Jason Pizzarello
The residents of the small town of Bethel are facing a crisis: Their beloved park has been sold out from under them and it’s sending their lives into a tailspin. In nine interconnected vignettes, sixteen locals grapple with the loss of jobs, homes, and spouses, but find love, courage, and forgiveness as the park magically transforms through four seasons of the year in a single day. From a tired security guard trying get home to her kids, to a young mayor in over his head, to a nostalgic fisherman who can’t seem to catch anything, everyone takes a fall… and picks themselves up again. Bethel Park Falls draws a group of complex, fascinating, funny people together into one poignant story about the spaces where communities connect.
Scrooge in Rouge, book and lyrics by Ricky Graham, additional material by Jeffery Roberson, other interesting bits by Yvette Hargis, original music composed by Jefferson Turner
This quick-change version of the Charles Dickens classic is set in a Victorian music hall. The Royal Music Hall Twenty-Member Variety Players are beset with a widespread case of food poisoning. This leaves only three surviving members to soldier on through a performance of A Christmas Carol. The undaunted trio gamely face missed cues, ill-fitting costumes, and solving the problem of having no one to play Tiny Tim. Done in the style of British Music Hall, Scrooge In Rouge abounds in bad puns, bawdy malapropisms, naughty double-entendres, and witty songs. A raucous holiday treat!
An Iliad by Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare
Winner of the 2012 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Solo Show
An Iliad is a modern-day retelling of Homer’s classic. Poetry and humor, the ancient tale of the Trojan War and the modern world collide in this captivating theatrical experience. The setting is simple: the empty theater. The time is now: the present moment. The lone figure onstage is a storyteller—possibly Homer, possibly one of the many bards who followed in his footsteps. He is fated to tell this story throughout history.
Dry Land by
Ester is a swimmer trying to stay afloat. Amy is curled up on the locker room floor. Dry Land is a play about abortion, female friendship, and resiliency, and what happens in one high school locker room after everybody’s left.
Included in Broadway Book Club’s Banned Books Specialty Collection
Dusk Rings a Bell by
Molly and Ray unexpectedly meet 25 years after a one-afternoon adolescent fling. She has a successful media career; he owns a small landscaping business. Both begin to romanticize their chance reunion, but a renewed connection is disrupted when Ray reveals the sordid details of a crime that left him incarcerated for ten years. Their encounter reveals two vastly different paths taken and two lonely souls attempting to reclaim a moment of possibility, when they were young and perhaps at their very best.
The Wisdom of Eve by
Adapted from the story by Mary Orr, on which the film All About Eve and the hit musical Applause were based. An engrossing and revealing “inside” story of life in New York’s theatre world, told in terms of an unscrupulous ingenue’s rise to Broadway stardom. When we first meet Eve Harrington, she is standing in the rain by the stage door of the theatre in which the renowned Margo Crane is starring in her latest long-run hit. Waiting for a glimpse of her professed idol, she accosts Karen Roberts, Margo’s good friend and the wife of the playwright, Lloyd Roberts, and inveigles an invitation to meet the great actress herself. The meeting leads to unexpected opportunity as Margo, struck with Eve’s “sincerity,” takes her on as a personal secretary. Before long Eve has done such a fine job of straightening out the clutter of Margo’s personal affairs that Margo, while she had always jealously resisted the engagement of an understudy for her own role, allows Eve to have the assignment. Then Eve begins to move ahead in earnest, her true character emerging as she lies, cheats and blackmails her way to Broadway stardom—and then a Hollywood career—leaving the wreckage of her friends’ trust behind her. As the play ends there are rumors that Eve has found a new “friend,” this time a movie tycoon, so it appears that perhaps we have not, for the moment, heard all there is to tell about Eve.
The Father: A Tragic Farce by Florian Zeller, translated by Christopher Hampton
Now 80 years old, André was once a tap dancer. He lives with his daughter, Anne, and her husband, Antoine. Or was André an engineer, whose daughter Anne lives in London with her new lover, Pierre? The thing is, he is still wearing his pyjamas, and he can’t find his watch. He is starting to wonder if he’s losing control.
The Candidate by Brent Holland
Four people wake up in a room with no memory of who they are or how they got there—and no way out. As they’re put through a series of increasingly dangerous trials, they start to realize they’re actually part of a secret interview process.
Peter Pan and Wendy adapted by Doug Rand
Rediscover the loopy fun and the darker corners of J.M. Barrie’s original novel with this faithful, fast-moving, and easy-to-stage adaptation. When the carefree and careless Peter Pan flies into the nursery of the Darling home, Wendy follows her instincts for maternity and adventure, bringing her little brothers along to the magical Neverland to take care of the motherless Lost Boys. Soon the Darling children are swept into Peter’s deadly battle with Captain Hook and his mostly-fearsome pirate crew. With so much excitement, why ever go home again…?
