Once upon a matress

Once Upon a Mattress takes place in a fictional medieval kingdom ruled by the devious Queen Aggravaine and the mute King Sextimus the Silent. King Sextimus suffers from a curse that can only be reversed "when the mouse devours the hawk." As the show opens, the populace of the castle complains about an unjust law levied by Queen Aggravaine. She is testing Princess #12; to the queen's delight, the princess misses the last question ("What was the middle name of the daughter-in-law of the best friend of the blacksmith who forged the sword that killed the beast [the dragon killed by St. George]?") and is given a dead bird. The law states that no one may wed until the Prince, Dauntless the Drab, first marries ("throughout the land no one may wed, 'till Dauntless shares his marriage bed") . However, every petitioning princess is sent away after failing an unfair test devised by the Queen. It seems that no one is good enough to marry Prince Dauntless.
The crisis escalates when the leading knight of the realm, Sir Harry, discovers that his girlfriend, Lady Larken, is pregnant. Facing great embarrassment and loss of his station, Sir Harry embarks on a quest to find the last princess in the realm. He soon returns with Princess Winnifred the Woebegone, a brash, unrefined, and muscular princess from the marshlands. She immediately charms Dauntless and most of the townspeople. However, she also succeeds in offending the Queen, who vows to find a way to stop her.
The Queen, assisted by her Wizard sidekick, quickly designs Winnifred's secret "test." They will place a tiny pea beneath twenty thick downy mattresses. If Winnifred is unable to sleep due to the pea, then she will be sensitive enough to marry Dauntless.
As the day of the test approaches, Dauntless and Winnifred fall in love, Harry and Larken break up (only to be later united by Winnifred), and the King, Jester and Minstrel trick the Wizard into telling them of the test. When she finally takes the test, Winnifred cannot fall asleep. She drowsily confronts the Queen the next morning, but Aggravaine insists that the test was rigged. Dauntless tells Aggravaine to "shut up," and the curse on King Sextimus is lifted (the "mouse," or Dauntless, thus devours the "hawk," or Aggravaine). Aggravaine discovers that she cannot talk, and Dauntless and Winnifred are free to be married. The Wizard falls for the King's charm and wit, and leaves the poor Queen hopelessly hopping and skipping on stage.
In the final seconds of the play, the real reason why Winnifred passed the test is revealed. After learning about the test, the King, Minstrel, and Jester stuffed the mattresses full of weapons, jousting equipment, and other sharp items. All the items are removed by the Jester in the Finale. After the items are removed Winnifred still has trouble sleeping until Dauntless takes the pea out from under the mattress, when she then falls asleep almost immediately.
And everyone classically lives happily ever after.

seussical

Seussical is based on the works of the beloved children's author Theodore Geisel, known to the world as Dr. Seuss.
One would think it an impossible task to condense the major characters and stories of Seuss into a cohesive evening, but Stephen and Lynn have managed to incorporate bits and pieces of at least 14 Seuss classics, including Horton Hears a Who, Horton Hatches the Egg, Gertrude McFuzz, The Butter Battle Book, If I Ran the Circus, McElligott's Pool, I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew and of course,The Cat in the Hat!! The main story involves Horton the Elephant's efforts to save his friend Jojo and the other inhabitants on Who, even though everyone else in the Jungle of Nool thinks Horton is the "Biggest Blame Fool" for believing in people who live on a small speck of dust. But Horton is a determined, loyal and faithful friend who fights for what he knows to be true. In the end, Seussical is really about believing in yourself, keeping promises and the rewards of being an independent "thinker." The Seussical score is a wonderfully eclectic mix of everything from traditional ballads like "Alone in the Universe" and "Solla Sollew" to the funkier sound of "Monkey Around" and the Sousa-inspired sound of "The Military." Of course, Ahrens and Flaherty have a reputation for writing fantastic opening numbers, and "Oh, the Thinks You Can Think" is certainly no exception.
The show had its first 2 week reading in New York from May 3-May 14, 1999, and a month long workshop was mounted in Toronto from July 26- August 21, 1999.The first public performances were held in Boston from August 27- Sept 21, 2000. It opened on Broadway on November 30, 2000 and ran until May 20, 2001.
The first national tour of SEUSSICAL played the U.S. in 2002. A second national tour lasted through March of 2004. The rights for the show were recently released, and Seussical has become one of the hottest properties on the regional /amateur circuit. In a survey conducted by the National Thespian Society, the show was the most licensed property in high schools across America last year!! Also, Seussical now ranks in the top three of all the shows licensed by MTI. There were 650(!!!!!) productions in 2005, and there are already almost 200 productions slated for 2006! Ohh! What a trip!

Rent

Rent is an American Tony Award- and Pulitzer Prize-winning rock musical, with music and lyrics by Jonathan Larson.[1] After previews that began on January 26, 1996, it opened in New York City on February 13, 1996, at the New York Theatre Workshop before moving to Broadway, opening at the Nederlander Theatre on April 29, 1996.[2] Based on Giacomo Puccini's opera La bohème, the musical centers on a group of impoverished young artists and musicians struggling to survive and create in New York's Alphabet City in the early 1990s, under the shadow of AIDS.
Rent was one of the first Broadway musicals to clearly feature gay, bisexual, lesbian, and transgender characters. It is also noted for its ethnically diverse cast, which includes many racial minorities in its ensemble and leading roles. Rent is considered revolutionary for bringing controversial topics and counterculture to a traditionally conservative medium, and is credited with increasing the popularity of musical theater in the younger generation.[3] Many critics have also mentioned how the show speaks to Generation X the same way that the musical Hair spoke to those who grew up in the 1960s, calling it "a rock opera for our time, a Hair for the 90s."[4]
The cast album from the show was the most successful recording of an American musical in almost 30 years,[citation needed] featuring both a double-disc "complete recording" collection with a remixed version of the song "Seasons of Love" featuring Stevie Wonder[5] and a single-disc "best of" highlights.[6]
Rent has been enormously successful on Broadway, enjoying both critical acclaim and word-of-mouth popularity. The Original Broadway Cast reunited at the Nederlander Theatre on April 24, 2006, to stage a performance for the rock opera's tenth anniversary.[7] With more than 4,000 performances and still running, it is the seventh-longest-running Broadway show.[8] With no end currently in sight, it is set to become the second-longest-running musical currently on Broadway when Beauty and the Beast ends its run on July 29, 2007. It is still eight years behind The Phantom of the Opera, the longest-running musical in Broadway history, which is still running.
In 2005, the rock opera was also adapted into a full-length motion picture, which features most of the original cast members. Certain plot elements were changed slightly. More noticeably, many of the fan-favorite songs were changed to spoken dialogue, so the movie version is more of a musical film than rock opera.

The Pajama Game

The story deals with labor troubles in a pajama factory, where worker demands for a seven and a half cent raise are going unheeded. In the midst of this ordeal, love blossoms between Babe, the complaint committee head, and Sid, the new factory superintendent in from Chicago.A strike is imminent at the Sleep-Tite Pajama Factory. The union is seeking a wage raise of seven and a half cents an hour. Sid and Babe are in opposite camps yet a romance is born between them. At first Babe rejects Sid and he is forced to confide his feelings to a dictaphone. During the picnic for the factory workers, he makes better progress, but their estrangement is reinforced when they return to the factory. A slow-down is staged by the union, strongly supported by Babe. Sid, as factory superintendent, demands an "honest day's work" and threatens to fire slackers. Babe is enraged by his attitude and kicks her foot into the machinery, causes a general breakdown and is immediately fired by Sid.
Hines, the popular efficiency expert, is in love with Gladys, the company president's secretary. Periodically, he brings a more optimistic outlook to the life of the factory. Becoming convinced that Babe's championship of the union is justified, Sid simulates an interest in Gladys by taking her out for the evening to the night club, Hernando's Hideaway. Through her help, he is eventually able to gain access to the firm's books and discovers that the boss Hasler has already given the raise, but is keeping all of the money for himself.
Sid then brings about Hasler's consent to a pay raise and is able to bring peace to the factory and to his love life. Everyone goes out to celebrate—at Hernando's Hideaway.

My Fair lady

Henry Higgins, an arrogant, irascible professor of phonetics who boasts to fellow linguist Colonel Pickering that he can train any woman to speak so properly that he could pass her off as a duchess, including Eliza Doolittle, a poor girl with a strong Cockney accent whom he encountered selling flowers in Covent Garden. Pickering is intrigued by Higgins's boast and wagers that he cannot make good on his claim. Higgins takes on the challenge and begins an intensive make-over of Eliza's speech, manners and dress in preparation for her appearance at the Embassy Ball.
Complicating matters is Eliza's father, Alfred P. Doolittle (Stanley Holloway), a cheerfully amoral and drink-loving dustman, who shows up to extract money from Higgins for compromising Eliza's virtue. Higgins is impressed by the man's natural gift for language and his brazen lack of moral values ("Can't afford 'em!") and flippantly recommends Doolittle to an American millionaire who is seeking a lecturer on moral values. In the end, Doolittle gets a surprise bequest of four thousand pounds a year from the millionaire, raising him uncomfortably into middle-class respectability.
Meanwhile, Eliza endures speech therapy, endlessly repeating phrases such as "In Hertford, Hereford and Hampshire, hurricanes hardly ever happen” (to demonstrate that "h"s must be aspirated) and "The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain" (to emphasize the "a"). Just as things seem hopeless, she suddenly "gets it" after Higgins eloquently speaks of the glory of the English language, and thereafter her speech is transformed into an impeccable upper class English accent. For her first public tryout, Higgins takes her to Ascot Racecourse, where she makes a good impression with her polite manners but shocks everyone by her vulgar Cockney attitudes and slang (thus establishing one of the show's themes, that good elocution is only "skin deep.") However, she still captures the heart of an eager young man named Freddy Eynsford-Hill.
The final test hinges on Eliza's passing as a lady at the Embassy Ball, which she does successfully despite the presence of a Hungarian phonetics expert, who seeks to unmask her identity. After the ball, Higgins's ungrateful boasting of his triumph and his pleasure that the experiment is now over leaves Eliza feeling used and abandoned. She walks out on him, leaving the seemingly clueless Higgins mystified by her ingratitude. But Higgins soon realizes that he has "grown accustomed to her face". Eliza eventually tentatively returns to him, and the musical ends on an ambiguous moment of possible reconciliation between teacher and pupil.

man of la mancha

After tax collector, soldier, and author Miguel de Cervantes and his assistant, Sancho, foreclose on a church that failed to pay its taxes, the two men are thrown into prison by the Spanish Inquisition. Soon the other prisoners steal Cervantes's possessions, but he convinces them to allow him to win back a package of papers that would not be of value to other people. Pleading his case, Cervantes gives a dramatic defense by reenacting the story of Don Quixote of La Mancha: the passionate and poignant tale of a noble knight who lives in a world of madness and cannnot see that chivalry has died. His holy quest is a mission of salvation to find compassion not for himself but for others. Don Quixote falls in love with the fair maiden, Aldonza(Dulcina), and convinces her to live a moral life. When Quixote is being knighted, the muleteers brutally assault Aldonza. Quixote and Sancho quickly come to Aldonza's rescue but in the end, Quixote only preaches forgiveness. Next, Quixote fights off his darkest foe, the Enchanter. Moved by the story, the prisoners return Quixote's manuscript just before he is called before the Inquisition