The most popular high school plays and musicals

Rebecca Skrypeck

For the third year in a row, The Addams Family was the most popular high school musical in the United States, according to the annual survey from Dramatics magazine.

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Springfield High School drama students from the 2016-2017 school year

The Most Popular High School Plays And Musicals September 15, 20178:30 AM ET Elissa Nadworny square ELISSA NADWORNY Students perform in The Little Mermaid, the sixth-most popular musical in the 2016-2017 school year. R. Bruhn /Courtesy of Educational Theatre Association 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 2017 numbers are out, so we've updated our original story. The brilliant script, the "really fun" music and the exciting tech and staging feats were just a few of the reasons John Minigan decided to have his students perform The Addams Family. "A lot of the students didn't know The Addams Family TV show at all," says Minigan, the drama teacher at Weston High School, just outside Boston. The nostalgia may be more for the adults in the audience, but the show, he says, still asks an increasingly relevant question for students: "What is the American family?" Weston High was not the only one making this selection. For the third year in a row, The Addams Family was the most popular high school musical in the United States, according to the annual survey from Dramatics magazine. The new numbers just out also show that Mary Poppins stint on the list was short lived: it was replaced this year by The Wizard of Oz. The most-produced shows (both plays and musicals) remained the same as last year: 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. 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. Article continues after sponsorship While they musicals stayed mostly the same, there were some newcomers on the plays list. That includes Peter and the Starcatcher, which tells the backstory for the characters of Peter Pan, adapted from a children's book by the same name. Two familiar plays returned to this year's list: You Can't Take It with You and Our Town. The new data didn't have a big impact on our decade leaders, but for plays, 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 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."