The play survey

Our musicals are getting younger, and our straight plays are getting older. A lot older.

The average age of the five highest-ranked musical titles on this year’s International Thespian Society high school production survey is just a little under ten years. The average age of the top five non-musical plays—all of which are comedies, incidentally—is 138.

The presence of two estimable classics—the 407-year-old Midsummer Night’s Dream and Oscar Wilde’s Importance of Being Earnest, which was first produced in 1895—skews the numbers a bit for the straight plays. But even discounting those two, the youngest of the other three titles in the top five is The Odd Couple, which premiered on Broadway forty years ago. Arsenic and Old Lace dates to 1944 and You Can’t Take It with You met its first audience in 1938.

The most venerable of the top five musicals, by contrast, is Little Shop of Horrors, which was first produced twenty-four years ago. None of the other four highest-ranked musicals is even old enough for driver ed.

One reason for the disparity is the simple fact that the musical form, as practiced on Broadway and the stages of American high schools, is much newer. It dates only to the mid-1940s, while directors can reach back to the ancient Greeks for producible classic plays. Another has to do with the subject matter and language boundaries that most high school theatre programs cannot cross. Much new work has been on the other side of that fence for the past forty years, and it is arguable that the treatment of mature subject matter in straight plays is starker, more graphic, and more profane than it is in most mainstream musicals. Or maybe it’s just that those who select titles for the educational theatre repertory, and those who watch over their work, find contemporary sensibilities more agreeable when they’re dressed up in song and dance.

Significantly, all five of the top musicals are represented by Music Theatre International, which has worked very hard to build its share of the school theatre market in recent years, introducing “School Edition” versions of several titles and arranging for showcase productions at the annual Thespian Festival.

Also notable in this year’s survey is the epidemic of Jonathan Rand scripts on the short plays list. Rand cofounded Playscripts, Inc. ten years ago partly to distribute his Thespian Playworks script Hard Candy. Now Playscripts is a thriving publishing house and Hard Candy is one of four Rand plays among the top ten one-acts.

The survey of most popular plays and musicals has been conducted every year since 1937 by the International Thespian Society, which has members in about 3,800 affiliated high schools, mostly in North America. About 925 schools participated in this year’s survey. They reported productions of 151 different musical titles, 535 different non-musical full-length titles, and 634 one-act titles—a total of 1,320 different works.

In addition, 267 schools reported that they had produced student-written plays, and 127 schools reported that they had produced other unpublished scripts.

Here are the top ten titles in each category.

The top ten musicals
1. Little Shop of Horrors, by Howard Ashman and Alan Menken (MTI)
2. Seussical, the Musical, by Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty (MTI)
3. Thoroughly Modern Millie, by Richard Morris, Dick Scanlan, and Jeanine Tesori (MTI)
4. Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, by Alan Menken, Howard Ashman, Tim Rice, and Linda Woolverton (MTI)
5. High School Musical, by David Simpatico and others (MTI)
6. Grease, by Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey (Samuel French)
7. Fiddler on the Roof, by Joseph Stein, Jerry Bock, and Sheldon Harnick (MTI)
8. (tie) Bye Bye Birdie, by Michael Stewart, Lee Adams, and Charles Strouse (Tams-Witmark)
8. (tie) Oklahoma!, by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II (Rodgers and Hammerstein)
10. (tie) Anything Goes, by Cole Porter, Guy Bolton, P.G. Wodehouse, Howard Lindsay, and Russel Crouse (Tams-Witmark)
10. (tie) Guys and Dolls, by Frank Loesser, Abe Burrows, and Jo Swerling (MTI)

The top ten full-length plays
1. (tie) Arsenic and Old Lace, by Joseph Kesselring (Dramatists Play Service)
1. (tie) A Midsummer Night’s Dream, by William Shakespeare (PD)
3. (tie) The Importance of Being Earnest, by Oscar Wilde (PD)
3. (tie) The Odd Couple, by Neil Simon (both male and female versions) (Samuel French)
5. You Can’t Take It with You, by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart (Dramatists Play Service)
6. (tie) The Diary of Anne Frank, by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett (Dramatists Play Service)
6. (tie) Our Town, by Thornton Wilder (Samuel French)
8. The Curious Savage, by John Patrick (Dramatists Play Service)
9. Noises Off, by Michael Frayn (Samuel French)
10. Fools, by Neil Simon (Samuel French)

The top ten short plays
1. Check, Please, by Jonathan Rand (Playscripts, Inc.)
2. Check, Please: Take 2, by Jonathan Rand (Playscripts, Inc.)
3. The Actor’s Nightmare, by Christopher Durang (Dramatists Play Service)
4. Sure Thing, by David Ives (Dramatists Play Service)
5. This Is a Test, by Stephen Gregg (Dramatic Publishing)
6. (tie) 15 Reasons Not to Be in a Play, by Alan Haehnel (Playscripts, Inc.)
6. (tie) Hard Candy, by Jonathan Rand (Playscripts, Inc.)
8. (tie) Cut, by Ed Monk (Playscripts, Inc.)
8. (tie) The Least Offensive Play in the Whole Darn World, by Jonathan Rand (Playscripts, Inc.)
10. (tie) Bang, Bang, You’re Dead, by William Mastrosimone (bangbangyouredead.com)
10. (tie) I Never Saw Another Butterfly, by Celeste Raspanti (Dramatic Publishing)

Compiled by Jhon Marshall and Don Corathers