The Most Popular High School Plays And Musicals - NPR

The Most Popular High School Plays And Musicals - NPR
New Documentary Focuses on Ursula K. Le Guin - The Wall Street Journal
Slow Growth is Underrated, and Here’s Why You Shouldn’t Worry About Falling Behind - Thrive Global

Posted: 31 Jul 2019 05:30 AM PDT

NPR Ed published the first-ever database of the most popular high school plays and musicals in the U.S. in July 2015. Today, the 2019 numbers are out, so we've updated our original story.

LA Johnson/NPR

Annie is out and Mamma Mia! is in, according to the new high school theater rankings from the Educational Theatre Association. The top spot for musicals went to The Addams Family, a show that's been hanging around the top 10 list for the last decade. Mamma Mia! was the second most-popular, making its first appearance on the list (the rights for schools recently became available). Newsies is also new to the top 10 list — making its debut at number 6.

For full-length plays, Almost, Maine, again, topped the list. That's not a surprise: The collection of two-person scenes by John Cariani has been the most popular production for high schools this decade. This year is the play's fifth year in the No. 1 spot.

It's appealing to high schools because it's adaptable, says Rebecca Skrypeck, the theater director who oversaw a production of the play at Springfield High School in Springfield, Vt.

The new data didn't have a big impact on our decade leaders, but the order of popularity shifted slightly.

The back story

Even though I myself did not bask in the glow of the high school stage, I do have fond memories of working behind the scenes, as stage crew. Dressed in black, I rushed the bed onstage for Tevye's dream sequence in Fiddler on the Roof.

I've also spoken with many people who weren't involved in theater at all but can still — for some reason — remember the shows their schools performed.

There's just something about the high school stage.

All of this got me wondering: What are the most popular high school plays and musicals?

As it turns out, the answer is in Dramatics — the monthly magazine for theater students and teachers. It's been publishing an annual ranking of the most popular high school plays and musicals since 1938.

No one had ever compiled the data. The information wasn't even digitized. So in the winter of 2014, Don Corathers, the magazine's editor, began digging through the archives for hard copies of each original issue — nearly 100 pages in all.

During the process, he wrote to explain a delay: "What's taking so long, other than the distraction of publishing a magazine, is that we have to locate the articles in bound copies in order to scan them."

Eventually, he found them all, made copies — a huge stack — and mailed them to the NPR Ed team here in Washington, D.C. And last year, NPR Ed compiled the data. Today, we've updated the collection.

The NPR Ed team analyzed more than 100 pages of data from old issues of Dramatics magazine. LA Johnson/NPR hide caption

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LA Johnson/NPR

The NPR Ed team analyzed more than 100 pages of data from old issues of Dramatics magazine.

LA Johnson/NPR

The plays

Over the past 78 years, the most popular plays have consistently been Our Town and You Can't Take It with You, according to our analysis.

Why, you ask?

"Most high school teachers need a big cast, lots of female roles, and something that won't scare your grandma," says Corathers, who has been with Dramatics since 1979.

For both plays: check, check and check.

You Can't Take It with You has been performed so often that it led to this cheeky 2008 photo caption: "You Can't Take It with You — but evidently you can perform it forever."

Indeed. Even into the 1980s it was the most-produced high school play in America, topping the list every year that decade but one, 1982, when it fell just short of Our Town.

Oldies but goodies

One thing is obvious: These plays are old.

"The consciousness of school theater seems to be stuck in about 1954" — so says a 1992 issue of Dramatics. And in 2007: "Our straight plays are getting older. A lot older."

"In the '60s the language and subject matter changed," explains Corathers. "It was also excruciatingly expensive to put on a play, so new plays had small casts. People were just not writing plays that could be produced in high schools."

In 1976 — noticing that schools were eschewing new for old — the magazine's editors wrote an op-ed. They urged schools to produce more contemporary works.

"Only four plays are fresh to the list this year," editor Thomas Barker bemoaned. "Four of sixty-eight."

Barker's argument: Theater should reflect society, and society had changed.

A year later — with little movement in the rankings — the editors backed down:

"No more going out on limbs, no more coaxing, no more labored analysis," they wrote. "We will let the charts speak for themselves."

And Corathers believes that, even today, those old staples of the stage are still relevant. Good theater is good theater, he says, no matter when it was written.

Looking at the nearly 80 years of data, another trend stands out: More often than not, popular plays stayed popular over time.

Corathers offers this explanation: School theater directors and educators use the magazine's survey to find ideas for next year. The rankings make it easy for a theater director to sell the school's principal on a safe slate.

In short, says Corathers: "The list becomes self-perpetuating."

Oh, the musicals!

Musicals didn't really make waves in rankings until 1960. But Bye Bye Birdie and Oklahoma! have been the most popular titles ever since.

In recent years, musical tastes appear to have shifted, with more contemporary titles moving up the list.

Disney Theatrical plays a substantial role. "Live theater is adapting animated films," says Corathers, pointing to Beauty and the Beast. "They are instantly family-friendly. They are familiar stories with great songs and lovely music."

In 2009, Dramatics noted that Memorial High School in Houston was on trend as it performed Disney's Beauty and the Beast — the top-ranked musical of the current decade.

But don't retire the standards just yet. During the 1963-64 school year, the magazine highlighted a performance by Preston High School in Preston, Idaho, of Bye Bye Birdie — the fourth most popular musical of the 1960s. It then cracked the top five in the '70s, '80s, '90s and 2000s.

The rights to perform

One last tidbit. The popularity of many productions (especially musicals) seems to depend almost entirely on licensing. High schools can't produce a show until it has run its course on Broadway and in regional theaters.

In 1975, the amateur performance rights for Godspell became available, and it's rumored that the licensing agency's telephone switchboards were jammed for days after. That year, Godspell was the top high school musical.

Same's true for Les Miserables. The school version was released in 2002. And by 2003, it had cracked the top of the list.

A caveat

For many of these years, the Dramatics data set for high school productions served as more of an index than a comprehensive ranking. Our own Bob Mondello (movie critic, yes, but also a theater aficionado) reminds us that "the Educational Theater Association is only polling its member schools in the lists it prints in Dramatics. The organization had 500 members in 1938; it has close to 5,000 today."

Corathers estimates about 12,000 high schools in the U.S. have drama programs.

For 2017, the survey's reach widened, with more than 3,000 schools responding. For the first time, the survey asked how many people came to see them. The answer? Nearly 50 million.

How We Did This

In a spreadsheet, we compiled separate lists of the plays and musicals listed in Dramatics' annual survey. Because of inconsistencies in the lists over time (some years included the number of schools while others listed only a rank), we scored shows according to their rank in a given year: 15 points to the No. 1 show, 14 points to the second, and so on. Any show that ranked below 14 was awarded 1 point. For more information on this project, email npred@npr.org.

New Documentary Focuses on Ursula K. Le Guin - The Wall Street Journal

Posted: 31 Jul 2019 06:50 AM PDT

Ursula K. Le Guin, seen in 1972, invented fantastical worlds in her fiction. Photo: The Oregonian/Associated Press

Don Steinberg

July 31, 2019 9:50 am ET

"Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin" is the first documentary about the pioneering science-fiction writer—and pretty much the first film of any kind to showcase her work. Although Ms. Le Guin was writing about dragons and wizard schools back in 1968 for her Earthsea series, there have been no high-profile movies based on her 20 novels or more than 100 short stories.

"I don't think Harry Potter would have existed without Earthsea existing," author Neil Gaiman says in the documentary, which premieres Friday on PBS. Ms. Le Guin's Earthsea cycle, a young-adult series about a sprawling archipelago of island kingdoms, included five novels and many stories written between 1968 and 2001.

Other writers who discuss Ms. Le Guin's work and influence in the film include Margaret Atwood ("The Handmaid's Tale"), David Mitchell ("Cloud Atlas") and Michael Chabon ("The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay").

"I think she's one of the greatest writers that the 20th-century American literary scene produced," Mr. Chabon says.

Ms. LeGuin, who died in 2018 at age 88, was born in Berkeley, Calif., the daughter of anthropologist Alfred Louis Kroeber. (That's where her "K." comes from).

"I never wanted to be a writer—I just wrote," she says in the film. Believing science fiction should be less about predicting the future than observing the present, she invented fantastical worlds that were their own kind of anthropology, exploring how societies work.

In her 1969 novel "The Left Hand of Darkness," she introduces a genderless race of beings who are sexually active once a month, either as a man or woman—but don't know which it will be. Her 1973 short story, "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas," introduces a utopian city where everyone is happy. But readers learn that this blissful world is entirely dependent on one child being imprisoned in a basement and mistreated. The joy of all the people hinges on the child being forced to suffer, and everyone knows it. The author had been horrified to learn through her father's research about the slaughter of native tribes that made modern California possible.

Arwen Curry, left, with Ursula K. Le Guin in Cannon Beach, Ore., spent 10 years... — Arwen Curry, left, with Ursula K. Le Guin in Cannon Beach, Ore., spent 10 years on her documentary about the author. Photo: Arwen Curry

"She wanted people to think pretty deeply about the foundations of their society—what's holding up the way they live," says Arwen Curry, who spent 10 years making the documentary. It includes a gallery of rejection letters Ms. Le Guin received from publishers in the 1950s, early in her career. Editors thought she wrote well but didn't get what she was trying to do and didn't think readers would be interested. In 1962 a pulp sci-fi magazine accepted one of her stories for $30, and things got rolling.

As a female sci-fi writer, "my species was once believed to be mythological, like the tribble and the unicorn," Ms. Le Guin said in an address before the 1975 Worldcon science-fiction convention in Melbourne, Australia. Her work was called feminist sci-fi, but she grew into that label awkwardly. "There was a considerable feeling that we needed to cut loose from marriage, from men, and from motherhood. And there was no way I was gonna do that," she said. "Of course I can write novels with one hand and bring up three kids with the other. Yeah, sure. Watch me."

Share Your Thoughts

What works of Ursula K. Le Guin are your favorites? Join the conversation below.

She took it to heart when critics said her work had a male perspective. Her genderless characters were "he" by default. In "Earthsea," Ms. Atwood comments, "just about everything in it, including the dragons, is male." Ms. Le Guin, who smoked a pipe, realized she was writing as "a woman pretending to think like a man."

"The Earthsea books as feminist literature are a total and complete bust," Ms. Le Guin said at the 1975 Worldcon. "From my own cultural upbringing, I couldn't go down deep and come up with a woman wizard. Maybe I'll learn to eventually." She began to create more powerful female characters.

"In a way, she'd always been a feminist, if you think of feminism as believing that women are equal to men," Ms. Curry says. "But she didn't really embrace the cultural movement right away. She did have to step into that, and that took a lot of self-examination."

Ms. Curry, a former editor of Maximum Rocknroll, a punk-rock magazine, overcame the author's initial reluctance and interviewed Ms. Le Guin many times for the documentary. A 2016 Kickstarter campaign that raised $234,202 from more than 3,100 backers helped Ms. Curry secure a National Endowment for the Humanities grant to finish the film.

At the 2014 National Book Awards, Ms. Le Guin was recognized for her life's work with the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. In her acceptance speech, before a room of publishing executives, she created a stir by excoriating "profiteers…who sell us like deodorant and tell us what to write." She said she wanted to share the medal with other fantasy and sci-fi writers "who were excluded from literature for so long" while glittering honors had gone to "the so-called realists."

Write to Don Steinberg at don.steinberg@wsj.com

Slow Growth is Underrated, and Here’s Why You Shouldn’t Worry About Falling Behind - Thrive Global

Posted: 31 Jul 2019 11:31 AM PDT

At only 19 years of age, S.E. Hinton wrote her first novel, The Outsiders. It was an instant success.

Hinton began writing the story in high school. Her story was based off two rival gangs at school: the Greasers and the Socs. Hinton sought to understand "the other side" by portraying life from the Greasers' working-class perspective.

Her novel was published in 1967. At the time, she was a freshman attending university in her hometown, Tulsa, Oklahoma. Before she left her teenage years, Hinton became a household name.

Since then, the book has sold tens of millions of copies. It has become required reading in many high schools. Of all the novels that Hinton has written, The Outsiders remains the most popular.

But today is not about S.E. Hinton.

Today is about slow success.

Countless Poems, Stories and Essays

At age 16, Margaret Atwood knew that she wanted to become a writer. Her parents were horrified. At the time, there were no writers in Canada — at least none that made a living off of it.

Against her parents' wishes, she chose to pursue a BA in English at the University of Toronto. Atwood submitted poems and articles to the literary journal at school. Outside of class, she wrote "compulsively, badly, hopefully", and read her poems to the bohemian crowds in a small coffee shop.

After graduating in 1961, she moved south to attend graduate studies at Harvard. During this time, she continued writing and publishing poems. Atwood completed her masters, but dropped out before obtaining her PhD.

For the rest of the 1960s, she was consumed in her writing. At one point, she became fatigued and developed spinal neuritis, an inflammation of the spinal nerves. Still, she kept at her day job while writing in the evenings.

In 1969, she released her first novel, The Edible Woman. But it wasn't until her sixth novel — and countless poems, short stories, and literary essays later — that she established her place as a prominent writer of the 20th century.

In 1985, Margaret Atwood released her most notable piece of work: The Handmaid's Tale.

At the time, women were losing ground on social, economic, and political issues. The dystopian novel, centered on a woman living in a totalitarian society, shook readers to the core. The book was translated into 25 languages and stayed on the bestseller lists for 23 weeks.

The Concept of "Paying Your Dues"

The concept of "paying your dues" has been around for a long time. It denotes that you have to work diligently for a long time before there's any semblance of success. Since this phrase feeds into the concept of fairness, we often accept it as a given.

That is, until we're proven wrong.

Maybe you've been pursuing a project for years. Then suddenly, out of nowhere, someone else shoots right by and gets a lot of recognition for their work.

Imagine the turmoil that causes. Slaving away until the candle burns out, developing spinal neuritis, only for someone who just arrived to snatch it all away.

S.E. Hinton is nine years younger than Margaret Atwood. At the time Hinton's novel The Outsiders was released, Atwood was still in the process of writing her first novel.

Hinton marked her place as a notable author when she was 19. At that age, Atwood was still writing "compulsively, badly, hopefully" and reading poems in the local coffee shop. If she compared her progress with Hinton, it would be tempting for Atwood to say "Forget it!" and toss her papers in the trash.

But if she did that, we would never have The Handmaid's Tale. We would never have The Blind Assassin, Alias Grace, or Oryx and Cake.

The Secret to Creating Great Work

Even though we openly talk about the need to pay our dues, the truth is that people don't want to go down that route.

We want to take the "one-shot-and-done" approach. We want to create one piece of work that's so popular that we'll never have to toil in obscurity again. We want to find one quick way to earn a nice living so that we'll never have to lift a finger again.

If this is you, I don't blame you. But in the vast majority of cases, that doesn't happen.

The most surefire way to create something great is to create great amounts of something.

For example, the dystopian novelist George Orwell produced 647 works in his lifetime, including 556 articles, 18 poems, 6 novels, 3 non-fiction books, and numerous journalistic pieces. Yet, he is most known for the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, which was published one year before his death at age 46.

Orwell didn't know which of his works would have lasting significance. He simply kept creating, over and over again. And so should you.

A good question to ask yourself is, "Am I creating something valuable today?"

Instead of praying, hoping, striving for that one single piece of work to become a hit, focus on doing your best work consistently. Focus on it every day.

The end result — whether it's prestige, money, or personal satisfaction — is not your goal. It's only a consequence of your goal. You don't control the effect of your work over yourself or others.

The real goal lies in the actions you take, whether it involves practicing or learning. That is the only thing you have control over.

Slow Growth is Underrated

In a world full of instant, on-demand, and at-your-fingertips, anything slow is frowned upon.

I say: Embrace it.

Slow growth is underrated. Although people praise overnight sensations, early success is not an indicator of lasting success. Sometimes, the slowest successes have the greatest impact.

So regardless of where you are and where you want to be, keep going.

Keep growing.

This piece originally appeared on Medium.com

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