Composers and their stage works 



 

The Matchmaker

Farce. Thornton Wilder
M8 F7. Four interiors.

An rich old merchant in Yonkers decides to take a wife and employs a matchmaker. She subsequently becomes involved with two of his menial clerks, assorted young, lovely ladies, and the headwaiter at an expensive restaurant where this swift farce runs headlong into a hilarious climax of complication. Ater everyone gets straightened out romantically, and everyone has his heart's desire, the merchant of Yonkers finds himself affianced to the astute matchmaker herself. Period 1880s. 'Loud, slapdash and uproarious ... Something extraordinarily original and funny.' New York Times.

Matilda Liar!

Debbie Isitt : Comedy 2M 3F Interior set

This is fable for adults about Matilda, a compulsive liar who tells so many lies that even she cannot keep up. Matilda lives a reclusive life at home with her family - a despairing mother, suicidal brother and deluded father - and only her correspondence with an agony aunt for outside company. Life for Matilda's family is hard enough without the embarrassment of her lies, but Matilda lies to protect them. Matilda lies because she loves them, and anyway, Matilda just can't stop. Just when she thinks life at home can't get any worse, one morning she experiences a sudden change and finds herself compelled to tell the truth at all times and to everyone! Secrets are exposed, myths explode ... havoc! Chaos! If the lies were bad then the truth is worse - Matilda must be stopped!!
ISBN: 0 85676 214 8

Mating Dance

Comedy Eleanor Harris Howard and Helen McAvity. 7 men, 5 women. Interior

Writing an etiquette column for a chain of small town newspapers does not shape up for Kelly Lewis, as a particularly promising or lucrative career. But Kelly has prospects because of her romance with Bruce Barrett, a successful publisher and television personality who is several years her senior. The snag, however, is that Bruce's estranged wife is a lady U.S. Senator - and she is reluctant to risk the scandal of a divorce in an election year. But as Bruce and Kelly are unwilling to stop seeing each other, the Senator's lawyer suggests that they employ a "beard," or decoy, to accompany them in public. The idea is that people will think that Kelly and the "beard" are the real twosome, and the lawyer assigns one of his junior colleagues to the job. But the young man, an amateur ornithologist, is more interested in birds than ballots and, to add to the complications, his sympathies are soon aligned with the lovers. Kelly's neighbour, a young Swedish beauty who travels between their adjacent apartments via an ironing board balanced over an air shaft, also contributes to the mayhem, as do a unique assortment of zany neighbours and friends. It all ends up in a lively party, with the "beard" dancing about madly as a whooping crane, and the Senator's opposition sneaking in to take some compromising pictures - with the result being that Kelly must be sacrificed if the election is to be saved. When the chips are down she realises that Bruce is not the man she thought he was, but Kelly's disenchantment is happily reversed when she and the lawyer find that they were meant for each other all along.
ISBN: 0-8222-0740-0

The Mating Game

Robin Hawdon : Farce 2M 3F Interior set

The hugely successful and attractive chat show host Draycott Harris has a problem ... he has no luck with women. Draycott enlists the help of his long- lost, worldlywise brother to assist him in the pursuit of his new, sexy PR girl, Honey Tooks. What neither brother anticipates however is that Draycott's long-suffering secretary Julia has been nurturing a growing passion for her boss, which is set to explode. Misdirected desires, mistaken bodies and disregarded articles of clothing all feature heavily in this frantically paced and energetic West End farce.
ISBN: 0 85676 204 0

Max and Maxie

Play. James McLure. 2 men, 1 woman. Unit Set

Now rich, famous, and perhaps a bit out of date, Max Love is in Florida about to star in a production of Waiting for Godot. An ex-vaudevillian, Max is not much for such "highclass" pursuits as the theatre, and he is having a bit of trouble with his lines. A young production assistant (who is awed in the presence of a "living legend") helps him with his cues and, at the same time, begins to pepper him with questions about his fabled career as a comic. Cutting swiftly back and forth between past and present, the play then evolves into a series of varied and revealing scenes: Max's hardscrabble early days on the vaudeville circuit; teaming up with Maxie, a young hoofer of Hispanic background; their success as a team and their eventual marriage; and, in the end, Maxie's disillusionment and descent into schizophrenia. Ultimately Max's story becomes one of unbridled ambition and a ceaseless striving for perfection and success at any cost, and the price which this exacts both from him and from those close to him. For, in the final essence, Max finds that while he may have made it to the top, he has arrived there alone, embittered and, in the most personal sense, unloved and unfulfilled.
ISBN: 0-8222-0741-9