The saga continues from my previous post.

In the weekly ACLCL newsletter that I get, there was an interesting note from Mel Atkey, author of Broadway North, about the latest TheatreworksUSA production of ANNE OF GREEN GABLES by Gretchen Cryer and Nancy Ford that is currently playing at the Lucille Lortel Theatre in New York:

MEL ATKEY (melatkey@hotmail.com)

This time it is I who have something to rant about.

I've you've read my book Broadway North, you will know how strongly I feel about Canadians telling their own stories and about not having our culture raped from outside. Well, recently a musical of Anne of Green Gables opened at the Lucille Lortel Theatre in New York (the same place that, many years earlier, played home to Billy Bishop Goes to War). But this was not the Anne we know and love -- it was by American writers Gretchen Cryer and Nancy Ford, who created "I'm Getting My Act Together and Taking it on the Road".

How could this happen, I wondered? It is not yet 70 years since L.M. Montgomery's death, and Campbell and Harron hold the exclusive rights to adapt that story for the musical stage. The answer is that, while the United States has, in theory, subscribed to the Universal Copyright Convention, they do not recognize any claims to a copyright on work published before 1923. (Even if the author is still alive!) So while Anne is protected virtually everywhere else in the world, in the U.S. it is fair game. What is the point of a copyright convention if it doesn't protect our copyrights universally? Of course, they may not get away with it: the Anne of Green Gables Licensing Authority also protects Anne as a registered trademark, and it would appear that Cryer and Ford have not applied for a license. I've also discovered that there are at least a half a dozen other Anne musicals, all written by Americans, including one that even has a song called "Kindred Spirits". I wonder how they would feel if I wrote a musical based on Romeo and Juliet and called it "West Side Story".

I see nothing in their copyright law that could prevent it. I have admired Cryer and Ford's previous work, but surely this is morally wrong if not illegal. It may not be "piracy" but it is at least "privateering".

Hmmm, interesting! But lets put all the legal, and copyright issues aside for a moment. I guess the issue for me still remains...have we really run out of new material? Are there absolutely no new inventive stories that can be made into musicals? Are there absolutely no original musicals with new stories being written anywhere? Of course there are.

TheatreworksUSA has a history of only making musicals out of well-known books, which appears to be a successful strategy because the material is proven and audience appeal is already there. Consequently, I imagine you can save on marketing dollars, which could definitely help the bottom line. But do we now have to resort to writing musical versions of famous books that have already been made into successful musicals in order to gain audience recognition?

And it's not like the book had great personal meaning for these writers. They state very clearly in their Broadwayworld.com interview that they hadn't even read the book when TheatreworksUSA commissioned them to turn it into a musical. As Nancy Ford states in that interview, "Well TheatreWorks drew us to it because I think Gretchen Cryer who wrote the book and I may be the only 2 women in the world who never read this book when we were growing up."

Hey, work's work.

Well, it's something to think about anyways. And I think I'm going to have some ice cream.

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