2022 EdTA Licensing Guide

April 2022

Teaching Theatre 2022 Licensing Guide Musical Theatre History Revived Onstage Add These Scripts to Your Canon 2021 Annual Play Survey

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Musical Theatre History Revived Onstage (a modified version of this article on Dramatics.org.)

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roadway has a long and storied history that goes much deeper than the popularity of newer shows like Hamilton and Waitress would have students believe. Producing a classic musical with students can serve as a valuable theatre history lesson as well as shed light on newer issues relevant to the world we live in today.

Here are some all-time favorite musicals, and our case for why ever theatre lover should be familiar with them.

We’ve also included notes about where you can stream filmed adaptations of each show. Streaming services often change their offerings, so we’ve linked to JustWatch, a platform that aims to give users up-to-date information about where they can view movies. And of course, all the shows listed have cast recordings that you can listen to on streaming services like Apple Music and Spotify.

#1 – OKLAHOMA! Music and lyrics by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, book by Oscar Hammerstein II, based on the play Green Grow the Lilacs by Lynn Riggs. Premiered on Broadway in 1943.

This classic show follows a cast of quirky characters in turn-of-the-20th-century, pre-statehood Oklahoma—where, 2022 Licensing Guide

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as the title song says, the “wind comes sweeping down the plain.” Though its plot is somewhat meandering by today’s standards, Oklahoma! (one of the first “book musicals”) is widely credited with pioneering the modern Broadway musical. It combined show-stopping numbers with serious drama, staging songs that were catchy but also tightly woven into the show’s plot and character development. Choreographer Agnes de Mille was lauded for using dance to further the plot of the musical. Famous numbers include “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’,”“Surrey with the Fringe on Top,” “People Will Say We’re in Love,” and (of course) “Oklahoma.”

A 2019 revival threw an updated spin on the classic tale, reimagining it for the 21st century. This was an Oklahoma! that looked and sounded like America today that was funny, provocative, and probing. Without changing a word of the original text, this bold new interpretation let audiences experience the overarching cultural truths of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s greatness through a new lens. This show has the potential to move audiences to this day.

Where to Watch Two versions are available: the 1955 film adaptation of (dir. Fred Zinnemann) and the 1999 London production.

The 2019 revival is now touring across the United States.

#2 – WEST SIDE STORY Music by Leonard Bernstein, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, book by Arthur Laurents, based on the play Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare. Premiered on Broadway in 1957.

An epic retelling of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet,West Side Story follows two teenagers falling in love amidst a turf war between rival street gangs. Its tragic ending is punctuated by soaring love ballads, exciting ensemble numbers, and vibrant costumes. Dancers will love this choreographic tour de force, in particular—the show revolutionized how emotions and action could be portrayed through movement.

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2022 Licensing Guide

Like Oklahoma!, West Side Story was the brainchild of a Broadway great: Stephen Sondheim, who passed away in November 2021. You’re bound to have heard some of this show’s songs: “Tonight,” “Maria,” “I Feel Pretty,” “Somewhere,” and even “Gee, Officer Krupke.”

Today, West Side Story might not be a good fit for every stage due to the large number of Puerto Rican characters in the cast (If you do consider the show, take care to represent authentic groups of people on stage with respect). But timely conversations are ongoing surrounding the key elements of the story that are still very much at the forefront of America’s consciousness.

Where to Watch Two film versions of the musical are available for viewing: The iconic Academy Award-winning 1961 film adaptation (dir. Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins) and the 2021 film adaptation (dir. Steven Spielberg).

#3 – THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA Music by Andrew Lloyd Webber, lyrics by Charles Hart, additional lyrics by Richard Stilgoe, book by Richard Stilgoe and Andrew Lloyd Webber, based on the novel by Gaston Leroux. Premiered on Broadway in 1988.

You’ve seen it, your mom has seen it, your neighbor has seen it—it’s hard to escape this blockbuster musical. Phantom has run for a record-shattering 13,500+ shows on Broadway, plus productions that have circled the globe in the 35 years since the show first premiered. The show was a crossover hit that drew new audiences to musical theatre. And, along with Les Misérables (which premiered on Broadway a year earlier), Phantom set the stage for other megahits to follow, including The Lion King, Wicked, The Book of Mormon, and Hamilton.

Phantom lives up to the hype, with an iconic operatic soundtrack (famous songs include “Think of Me,” “Angel of Music,”“The Music of the Night,” and the titular theme “The Phantom of the Opera”), dazzling costumes, and juicy melodrama. The musical is a technical marvel, too, complete with a chandelier that hangs over (and seemingly drops onto) the audience.

Presently, The Phantom of the Opera is licensed only to high schools, youth groups, and colleges because the show is still running on Broadway and around the globe. But for a school looking to capitalize on the mega-popularity of the show, it offers your audiences a thrilling night of story and spectacle.

Where to Watch Two versions are available: The 2004 film adaptation (dir. Joel Schumacher) or the 2011 concert at Royal Albert Hall (dir. Nick Morris and Laurence Connor).

#4 – FIDDLER ON THE ROOF Book by Joseph Stein, music by Jerry Bock, lyrics by Sheldon Harnick, based on Sholem Aleichem’s stories by special permission of Arnold Perl. Premiered on Broadway in 1964.

Winner of nine Tony Awards when it debuted in 1964, Fiddler on the Roof is the brainchild of the creative team above and Broadway legends Jerome Robbins and Harold Prince. Touching audiences worldwide with its humor, warmth and honesty, this universal show is a staple of the musical theatre canon.

Set in the little village of Anatevka, the story centers on Tevye, a poor milkman, and his five daughters. With the help of a colorful and tight-knit Jewish community, Tevye tries to protect his daughters and instill them with traditional values in the face of changing social mores and the growing anti-Semitism of Czarist Russia. Rich in 2022 Licensing Guide

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historical and ethnic detail, Fiddler on the Roof’s universal theme of tradition cuts across barriers of race, class, nationality and religion, leaving audiences crying tears of laughter, joy and sadness.

The show features a star turn in Tevye, among the most memorable roles in musical theatre. MTI’s comprehensive choreographic guide allows productions to retain original director/choreographer Jerome Robbins’ classic staging. With iconic and beloved songs such as “Sunrise, Sunset,” “If I Were a Rich Man” and “Matchmaker, Matchmaker,” Fiddler on the Roof is the perfect mix of audiencepleasing humor and heart.

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2022 Licensing Guide

Add These Scripts to Your Canon Twenty more plays to read before college

by Elizabeth Wong and Michael Bigelow Dixon

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amiliarity with a variety of plays is important for the success of drama teacher wanting to represent a diverse offering in their school’s season. But with so many choices, where do you start? Below is a must-read list of plays to know. Taken together, these plays help build a solid foundation and an open mind about what’s possible in the 21st century.

More than half of these plays are written by playwrights of color, which reflects an important trend in American theatre.Their stories cut across social, cultural, and geographical boundaries. All are by groundbreaking playwrights who redefined the rules for the well-told tale, whose distinctive voices have influenced many other artists, and who have added something new to the American theatrical canon, exploring subjects onstage that deepen, challenge, rage against, or embrace what it means to be human.

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NOTE: Some of these plays contain adult language and other mature content themes.

20TH CENTURY PLAYS A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White by Adrienne Kennedy As a black writer explores her memories, white movie stars — Bette Davis, Shelley Winters, and Marlon Brando, among them — portray scenes from her life. The play conveys how a black woman exists in a white society. for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf by Ntozake Shange Poetic monologues, dance, and music in this choreopoem weave stories of love, empowerment, and loss for seven African-American women. In 1976, this play became Broadway’s second work by a black female playwright.

Inherit the Wind by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee This courtroom drama fictionalizes the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial, in which a man was tried for teaching Darwin’s theory of evolution. “It’s not about science versus religion,” explained Lawrence. “It’s about the right to think.”

Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett A pair of bedraggled companions await Godot, who never arrives. This tragicomedy was voted the most significant English language play of the 20th century in a poll of theatre professionals conducted by the National Theatre in 1998.

Fefu and Her Friends by María Irene Fornés Themes of isolation, entrapment, and gender are explored with an all-female cast in this drama that revolutionized environmental staging to create an immersive audience experience.

The Birthday Party by Harold Pinter This masterpiece of absurdist theatre, described by theatre critic Irving Wardle as a “comedy of menace,” portrays a party gone horribly wrong, when two thuggish representatives of state conformism victimize the birthday boy until they cart him away.

True West by Sam Shepard

Two brothers vie for control of a Hollywood screenplay, as Shepard’s signature mix of violence and comedy leads to absolute mayhem and prefigures the collapse of the American family.

Yankee Dawg You Die by Philip Kan Gotanda

This play addresses the hot-button issue of Asian-American representation in media with equal parts careful analysis and intentional provocation. Arguments are grounded in flesh-and-blood characters, whose big struggles and small triumphs are deeply moving.

Children of a Lesser God by Mark Medoff Set in a school for the deaf, this play challenges long-held misconceptions about deaf culture, questioning whether a passionate love can transcend deep divisions between hearing and non-hearing worlds.

TURN OF THE 21ST CENTURY The Vagina Monologues by Eve Ensler

“Probably the most important piece of political theater of the last decade” proclaimed the New York Times in 2006. This collection of monologues deals with aspects of the female experience, including consensual and nonconsensual sex, reproductive issues, and sexual violence.

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2022 Licensing Guide

Marisol by José Rivera Caught in a celestial uprising to save the universe, what can Marisol do to save herself? This apocalyptic drama was intended as metaphor, but its depictions of urban violence, environmental devastation, and armies of displaced persons make it incredibly timely.

A Language of Their Own by Chay Yew

Told with wit and insight, this AIDS drama untangles mysteries of the fragile yet resilient heart through a breakup between two men and the new relationships they navigate. The intimate play’s choral structure makes it highly theatrical.

Metamorphoses by Mary Zimmerman

Adapted from Ovid’s tales of transformation, this lyrical drama bridges myth and modernism, offering timeless themes through a theatrical mix of storytelling and visual imagery.

Yellowman by Dael Orlandersmith

This award-winning tragedy follows a fair-skinned black man and a dark-skinned black woman from childhood to adulthood and from friendship to love. The promise of marriage and their future family is destroyed by prejudice and violence.

Harvest by Manjula Padmanabhan This sci-fi critique of globalization imagines a world where impoverished characters in developing nations sell body parts to wealthy Westerners to survive. Winner of the 1997 Onassis Prize as best new international play, the story doesn’t seem so futuristic anymore.

THE PAST DECADE Hamilton by Lin-Manuel Miranda

Hip-hop and history combine in this astonishing mashup of rap, rhythm and blues, soul, and traditional musical theatre to explore the life of a Founding Father and political mastermind.

Water by the Spoonful by Quiara Alegría Hudes

With redemption just around the corner, this Pulitzer Prize-winning meditation portrays characters confronting and coming to terms with demons of war and drugs thanks to the help of others. It is the second segment of a trilogy following one soldier’s journey after returning home from war.

Good Kids by Naomi Iizuka

Written for teenage students to perform, this drama is guaranteed to provoke important conversations in its exploration of what happens to a community when sexual assault goes public on Facebook and Twitter.

The Flick by Annie Baker

This comedy of the mundane features three 20-something underachievers trying to connect while sweeping and mopping a rundown movie theatre. Humor, heartbreak, and nuanced dialogue won this play a Pulitzer Prize in 2014.

Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo by Rajiv Joseph

Set during the early days of the Gulf War, this haunting and funny play interweaves stories of American soldiers with the ghost of a tiger they shot, as they all seek forgiveness, redemption, and the meaning of life and the afterlife.

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2021 Annual Play Survey The Most Popular High School Plays Revealed

by Patty Craft

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ccording to Educational Theatre Association’s (EdTA) annual high school play survey, The Addams Family, Clue, and Check Please received top billing for the most-produced musical, full-length play, and short play, respectively, during the 2020-2021 school year.

Conducted every year since 1938, EdTA’s annual survey of the plays and musicals most frequently produced in America’s high schools shows what resonates with teens, their teachers, families, and communities. And in the 2020-2021 school year, COVID-19 and related public health protocols clearly influenced which works were staged.

“This year’s play survey reflects the challenges teachers faced early during the pandemic and the varied ways they were able to produce theatre, which largely changed district-to-district,” said Matt Curtis, EdTA’s content and marketing director. “While some shows popular in recent pre-COVID years still appeared among the top 10 spots, we’re seeing small-cast musicals and titles that are easily adaptable for virtual and streaming formats rise in popularity.”

In EdTA’s recent COVID-19 survey, 53% of member teachers reported that student participation in productions fell by half or more during the 2020-2021 school year. “That’s likely a reason for the shift toward smaller productions,” Curtis said.

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2022 Licensing Guide

The Addams Family retained its number-one slot for most-produced musical, followed this year by You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown. Charlie and the gang knocked Mamma Mia! out of its last-year-debut spot all the way out of the top 10.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which has placed in the top 10 for 31 years, appeared again at number 4 in the mostproduced plays category. While Our Town, which remains a perennial favorite since the dawn of this survey, came in at number 10 in the full-length play category, tying with 5 other titles including Peter and the Starcatcher and Puffs.

Playwrights Don Zolidis and Jonathan Rand continue to dominate the top 10 short plays. Rand’s Check Please consistently tops the list and ranked number one again with this survey.

Here are the complete top 10 results for each category surveyed:

MOST-PRODUCED MUSICALS 2020-2021

1 The Addams Family 2

– book by Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice, music and lyrics by Andrew Lippa (TRW)

You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown – based on the comic strip Peanuts by Charles M. Schulz; book, music, and lyrics by Clark Gesner; additional dialogue by Michael Mayer; additional music and lyrics by Andrew Lippa (Concord Theatricals)

3 The Theory of Relativity 4 The 25thAnnual Putnam County Spelling Bee 5 Little Women

– music and lyrics by Neil Bartram, book by Brian Hill (MTI)

– conceived by Rebecca Feldman, additional material by Jay Reiss, music and lyrics by William Finn, book by Rachel Sheinkin (MTI) – music by Jason Howland, lyrics by Mindi Dickstein, book by Allan Knee, based on the novel by Louisa May Alcott (MTI)

6 Godspell 7 Disney’s High School Musical

– book by John Michael Tebelak, music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz, conceived and originally directed by John Michael Tebelak, based on The Gospel According to St. Matthew (MTI) (tie) – book by David Simpatico; songs by Bryan Louiselle, Faye Greenberg, David N. Lawrence, Greg Cham, Matthew Gerrard, Robbie Nevil, Ray Cham, Andrew Seeley, Randy Petersen, Kevin Quinn, Adam Watts, Jamie Houston, and Andy Dodd; music adapted, arranged, and produced by Bryan Louiselle; based on a Disney Channel Original Movie written by Peter Barsocchini (MTI)

(tie) Little Shop of Horrors – book by Howard Ashman, music by Alan Menken, lyrics by Howard Ashman, based on the film by Roger Corman, screenplay by Charles Griffith (MTI)

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(tie) Bright Star – music, book, and story by Steve Martin; music, lyrics, and story by Edie Brickell (TRW) (tie) Into the Woods – book by James Lapine, music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim (MTI) (tie) Disney’s The Little Mermaid – music by Alan Menken, lyrics by Howard Ashman and Glenn Slater, book

by Doug Wright, based on the Hans Christian Andersen story and the Disney film produced by Howard Ashman and John Musker and written and directed by John Musker and Ron Clements (MTI)

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MOST-PRODUCED PLAYS 2020-2021

MOST-PRODUCED SHORT PLAYS 2020-2021

1 Clue

– adapted from the screenplay by Jonathan Lynn, written by Sandy Rustin, additional material by Hunter Foster and Eric Price, based on the Paramount Pictures motion picture based on the Hasbro board game Clue (Broadway Licensing)

2 Almost, Maine 3

– by John Cariani (DPS)

(Playscripts)

by Philip Van Doren Stern, adapted by Joe Landry (Playscripts)

(tie)

(tie) The Internet is Distract—Oh Look a Kitten! – by Ian McWethy

– by Qui Nguyen

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Kaufman and the members of Tectonic Theater Project (DPS)

–

– various authors (various licensing agencies) – by Thornton Wilder (tie) (Concord Theatricals)

(tie) Peter and the Starcatcher – a play

by Rick Elice, music by Wayne Barker, based on the novel by Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson (MTI) (tie) Puffs – by Matt Cox (ConcordTheatricals)

(tie) Radium Girls – by W. Gregory (Dramatic Publishing) (tie) Twelfth Night – by William Shakespeare (public domain) (tie) Vintage Hitchcock: A Live Radio Play– by Joe Landry (Playscripts) 2022 Licensing Guide

– by Ian

– by Don Zolidis

(tie) Game of Tiaras (One-Act) – by Don Zolidis (Playscripts) (tie) Our Place – by Terry Wayne Gabbard (Dramatic Publishing)

The Laramie Project – by Moises

by Don Zolidis (Playscripts)

5 Bad Auditions by Bad Actors The Brothers Grimm Spectacula6 thon (One-Act) (Playscripts)

– various authors (various licensing agencies)

7 8 The Brothers Grimm Spectaculathon 9 Alice in Wonderland 10 Our Town

(Playscripts)

McWethy (Playscripts)

by William Shakespeare (public domain) (Concord Theatricals)

–

by Don Zolidis (Playscripts)

It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play – based on the story The Greatest Gift

4 5 She Kills Monsters 6 A Christmas Carol

– by Jonathan Rand

– by Don Zolidis (Playscripts)

A Midsummer Night’s Dream –

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1 Check Please 2 Help Desk: A Stay-at-Home Play 10 Ways to Survive Life in a 3 Quarantine (One-Act): A Stay-atHome Play

(tie) Scenes from a Quarantine – by Lindsay Price (Theatrefolk) (tie) The Audition – by Don Zolidis (Playscripts) (tie) This Is a Test – by Stephen Gregg (Dramatic Publishing)

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