In a small town, a funeral is being held for a woman no one liked, including her daughters, who may or may not stay for the event. The funeral home has just been purchased by a man who knows nothing about being a funeral director. A group of volunteers (The Last Supper Committee) along with a flower delivery girl who will not leave, head toward meal-destroying confrontations around the subject of death. The Celebration of Life is saved. Sort of. You'll have to read it to find out how.

The Mercer family and their extended clan must come to some emotional and political decisions when Newfoundland joins Confederation on April Fool's Day of 1949. As the members of the family stand on the precipice of both a new beginning in Canada and a farewell to Newfoundland culture and independence, humour and pathos illuminate the larger question of what it means to have a country.

Two strangers, a man and a woman (late 40s to middle 50s) board a San Francisco BART train at 4:30 AM. They're alone in the car, each is married, both are doing the New York Times crossword. She's an organized, sensible, psychologist. He's a free spirited, unemployed ad exec. She is a crossword pro, he always quits. When he tosses his puzzle away, she snaps, "Crosswords are a metaphor for life, those who finish, succeed, those who don't, fail." Now he vows to finish. Why? He's a competitor and she happens to be lovely. This starts an 80 minute ride. Two opposites in an enclosed space, attacking each other's values but also being swayed and intrigued by them. They each have serious life problems that the other helps them solve. Their trip is filled with unpredictable but believable surprises, even a passionate kissing embrace or two. As the train ride ends it's obvious each of them has been changed for the better. And we're all dying to know if these two will meet again?

"The 39 Steps" is a melodrama adapted from the 1915 novel by John Buchan and the 1935 film by Alfred Hitchcock. The original concept and production of a four-actor version of the story was by Simon Corble and Nobby Dimon. Patrick Barlow rewrote this adaptation in 2005. The play's concept calls for the entirety of the 1935 adventure film "The 39 Steps" to be performed with a cast of only four. One actor plays the hero, Richard Hannay, an actress (or sometimes actor) plays the three women with whom he has romantic entanglements, and two other actors play every other character in the show: heroes, villains, men, women, children and even the occasional inanimate object. This often requires lightning fast quick-changes and occasionally for them to play multiple characters at once. Thus the film's serious spy story is played mainly for laughs, and the script is full of allusions to (and puns on the titles of) other Alfred Hitchcock films, including "Strangers on a Train", "Rear Window", "Psycho", "Vertigo" and "North by Northwest".

High hopes are riding on director Julian Marsh's new show, Pretty Lady. But Julian has doubts about his star, Dorothy Brock, whose wealthy admirer is also the show’s backer. Events take an unexpected turn, however, when newcomer Peggy Sawyer wins a place in the chorus, and in Julian’s heart.

A man is perched on the ledge of an apartment building, preparing to plunge to his death. All about him, the building's inhabitants pop in and out of their windows, revealing snippets of their own incongruous lives. As he contemplates the meaninglessness of his existence, he is unexpectedly and suddenly set free.

This play is about the twenty-year correspondence between Hanff and Frank Doel, chief buyer of Marks & Co, antiquarian booksellers located at the eponymous address in London, England. Hanff, in search of obscure classics and British literature titles she had been unable to find in New York City, noticed an ad in the Saturday Review of Literature and first contacted the shop in 1949, and it fell to Doel to fulfill her requests. In time, a long-distance friendship evolved, not only between the two, but between Hanff and other staff members as well, with an exchange of Christmas packages, birthday gifts, and food parcels to compensate for post-World War II food shortages in Britain. Their letters included discussions about topics as diverse as the sermons of John Donne, how to make Yorkshire Pudding, the Brooklyn Dodgers, and the coronation of Elizabeth II. Hanff postponed visiting her English friends until too late; Doel died in December 1968 from peritonitis from a burst appendix, and the bookshop eventually closed. Hanff did finally visit Charing Cross Road and the empty but still standing shop in the summer of 1971, a trip recorded in her 1973 book The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street. A circular brass plaque on the building that now stands on the shop's former site acknowledges the story.

Fed up with the pressures and demands of her acting career, the famous Myra Marlowe leases a house in the tiny New England hamlet of Beaver Haven and settles down to write her autobiography. She is successful in turning aside the offers pressed on her by her long-time agent, but dealing with her nosy, omnipresent neighbors is a different matter. In an attempt to shoo them away, and gain some privacy, Myra invents a mad, homicidal sister who is kept locked in an upstairs room, but who occasionally escapes long enough to scare off uninvited visitors. The uproarious doings will keep audiences laughing right up to the final curtain, and then some.

A Chorus Line examines one day in the lives of seventeen dancers, all vying for a spot in the chorus line of a Broadway musical. After the first round of cuts, Zach, the director and choreographer, asks each dancer to speak about themselves. Discomfort opens into revelation, confession leads to redemption, and within the bright, outwardly homogenous chorus, the audience begins to see each dancer's individuality. From Cassie, the star who just needs the music and the mirror and the chance to dance, to Val, a small-town girl with a brand-new big-town body, to Mike, who took his sister’s place in dance class, saying “I can do that.” Based on real Broadway dancers’ stories, as told to fellow dancer and choreographer Michael Bennett, A Chorus Line is funny, heartbreaking, and refreshingly honest.

This A Christmas Carol goes beyond other adaptations with a unique dramatic concept: At the opening curtain, Charles Dickens himself is introduced to the audience, ready to present one of the famed platform readings of his stories that packed auditoriums in Europe and America. Of course, the story chosen is one which he often performed, A Christmas Carol (Dickens' marked-up script still exists!). The story unfolds behind him, and soon Dickens is weaving in and out of the action, observing, performing small roles, interpolating short passages of rich narrative never heard in other versions. He handles props and helps Scrooge and others with costume changes.

When the low-born Monty Navarro finds out that he's eighth in line for an earldom in the lofty D'Ysquith family, he figures his chances of outliving his predecessors are slight and sets off down a far more ghoulish path. Can he knock off his unsuspecting relatives without being caught and become the ninth Earl of Highhurst? And what of love? Because murder isn't the only thing on Monty's mind....

A story about a man who loved hos wife so much, he almost told her. It's Thanksgiving Day and the first family gathering at the Lundeen household since the Patriarch died. At the gathering, Dad comes back as a ghost with a mission; to tell his wife he loved her, something he neglected to tell her while he was alive. After all, they were only married for 41 years. The problem is, she cant hear or see him. the trouble begins when Mon invites a date for dinner.

It is Halloween and six people have secretly gathered for a murder-mystery weekend on a private island in the Cassandra Lakes. As a storm rages outside, they play a game that any Agatha Christie fan would enjoy -- full of spooky delights, mysterious revelations and gory murders -- until suddenly the game takes on an ominous reality. Surprises abound in this hair-raising thriller, culminating in an unexpected twist that even Agatha herself could not forsee.

This farce takes place just outside of Beaverton. Two inept thieves that robbed a jewelry store in Uxbridge end up in a young women’s private finishing school. The police find the get-away car and come to the house. There are several twists in the plot and eventually all the men in the cast end up dressed up as women and all the women are dressed as men. Things get even more complicated, and there is a great surprising happy ending.

The play reveals to the very depths the character of Blanche du Bois, a woman whose life has been undermined by her romantic illusions, which lead her to rejecting, so far as possible, the realities of life with which she is faced and which she consistently ignores. The pressure brought to bear upon her by her sister, with whom she goes to live in New Orleans, intensified by the earthy and extremely "normal" young husband of the latter, leads to a revelation of her tragic self-delusion and, in the end, to madness.

It’s Peter Pan like you’ve never seen it before, told by a mischievous grandpa with a flair for the dramatic. When story time takes "flight", the stage transforms into an adventure bursting with pirates, lost boys, hippies, and plenty of audience fun. From The Big City to Neverland, expect puns, surprises, and a few twists that even Peter himself wouldn’t have seen coming. Get ready to cheer, boo, and giggle your way through this high-energy reimagining of a timeless classic. All it takes is love, trust, and a little pixie dust!

It's a time of passion and confusion. Virtue is barely holding down its petticoats. People are bursting their corsets with unbridled desire. It's 1885, and the typewriter and the suffrage movement are sending things topsy-turvy. In the midst of it all, five ambitious New Women and one Newish Man struggle to find their way. Miss Mary Barfoot runs a school for secretaries with her young lover, Miss Rhoda Nunn. But when the Misses Madden - spinsters Virginia and Alice and beautiful young Monica - arrive, along with the attractive Dr. Everard Barfoot, things can never be the same.

Young Alice, bored of books with no pictures on the river bank, follows a cheeky white rabbit down a rabbit hole and into a place like no place on Earth...Wonderland! But all is not well in this curious place…will Alice be able to save Wonderland? Don’t miss our traditional panto romp. Family fun with lots of laughs and songs from start to finish.

Based on the 1951 Disney film "Alice in Wonderland" and the novels "The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking Glass" by Lewis Carroll. Travel down the rabbit hole and join Alice's madcap adventures in Wonderland as she chases the White Rabbit, races the Dodo Bird, gets tied up with Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum, raps with a bubble-blowing Caterpillar, and beats the Queen of Hearts at her own game! Roles are plentiful, including three Cheshire Cats and dozens of other wonderfully wacky characters, providing plentiful opportunities to showcase students of all different musical skill levels. A chorus of kids playing in the park, rock lobsters, talking fish, royal cardsmen, unbirthday partiers, and more, as well as a group of mean-girl flowers, allows for a highly expandable cast size.

When young Alice finds herself in a strange world where everything seems upside down, she must find her way home…and find herself along the way. As she travels through Wonderland, she encounters all of the iconic characters that audiences have come to love: including the ever-tardy White Rabbit, the grinning Cheshire Cat, a cool Caterpillar, the wacky Mad Hatter, and the hot-tempered Queen of Hearts.

Inspired by and featuring the songs of Elvis Presley. It's 1955, and into a square little town in a square little state rides a guitar-playing roustabout who changes everything and everyone he meets in this hip-swiveling, lip-curling musical fantasy that will have you jumpin' out of your blue suede shoes with such classics as "Heartbreak Hotel," "Jailhouse Rock," and "Don't Be Cruel."

ALL SHOOK UP Young@Part® is the authorized 60 minute edition of the Broadway musical for elementary and middle schools, and youth theatres. Inspired by and featuring the songs of Elvis Presley, this new version of the show is perfect for kids to perform!

The New Ideas Festival is Alumnae’s annual showcase of new and experimental one-act plays with bold premieres from both emerging and established theatre artists.

• 2025
  • “Dirt and Oranges” by Beatriz Yuste
  • "There Were No Birds to Fly” by Elaine Freedman
  • “Lisaveta’s Journey” by Rosalind Goldsmith
  • “Heel” by Paige Prystupa
  • "Hurricane Tales” by Chloë Whitehorn
  • “Lullabies & Nursery Rhymes" by R. J. Downes
  • “Cosmo Girls” by Lawrie Carruthers
  • “Father Comes Home” by Nina Kaye
• 2024
• 2023

The legendary Taj Mahal is the next assignment for Rachel, an American travel writer whose failed romances have led her to ask: Why not have the baby she craves on her own? She finds unexpected answers – and larger questions – among the glittering legacies of India's past. Alive with the sounds and colors of a remarkable country, this bittersweet comedy of mischievous matchmaking raises provocative questions about love, friendship, family, and what it means to be ready to be a parent.

Get your deerstalker cap on – the play’s afoot! From the award-winning mastermind of mayhem, Ken Ludwig (Lend Me a Tenor), comes a fast-paced comedy about everyone’s favorite detective solving his most notorious case. Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson must crack the mystery of "The Hound of the Baskervilles" before a family curse dooms its newest heir.

The classic story tells of Belle, a young woman in a provincial town, and the Beast, who is really a young prince trapped under the spell of an enchantress. If the Beast can learn to love and be loved, the curse will end and he will be transformed into his former self. But time is running out. If the Beast does not learn his lesson soon, he and his household will be doomed for all eternity.