While the phrase “public domain” may hold little meaning for you (or make your eyes glaze over), January 1, 2019 will mark a significant milestone in that seemingly arcane distinction. That’s because at the beginning of the new year, creative works will once again begin to enter the public domain – that is to say that they will no longer be subject to copyright protection or restrictions – for the first time in 20 years.

Why the gap? Because in 1998 Congress enacted an extension on copyright protection (named for entertainer and congressman Sonny Bono, who fought for such legislation). So while works from 1922 have been in the public domain for two decades, it is only now that 1923 works move out of copyright. This means they can be produced, adapted, copied as anyone sees fit. If you’ve always wanted to create a radical modern retelling of Felix Salten’s Bambi, it’s all yours – provided you don’t accidentally incorporate elements which were unique to the Disney animated film, because those bits belong to Disney and they’re likely to vigorously protect their intellectual property.

While there have been various articles and web essays about what enters the public domain imminently, they have tended to concentrate on books, movies and songs – for example, you will no longer have to pay for the rights to “Yes, We Have No Bananas” going forward, should you be inclined to use it. You’ll also be able set Robert Frost’s “Stopping By The Woods On A Snowy Evening” to a hip-hop track and not owe his estate a dime.

Condola Rashad in “Saint Joan” at Manhattan Theatre Club in 2018 (Photo by Joan Marcus)

When it comes to theatre, the most notable work – and it has been noted elsewhere – that will come into the public domain is George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan. That means if Manhattan Theatre Club had just waited a year to produce the play, they would have saved, assuming a 6% author’s royalty, about $125,000 on their production. That said, Shaw’s Saint Joan is just one of many versions of the story, so keep your hands off everything from Jean Anouilh’s The Lark and Jane Anderson’s very recent Mother of the Maid.

This prompts the question: what other theatrical work is about to be up for grabs for all takers?

Certainly nothing as quite as classic as the Shaw work, although Elmer Rice’s The Adding Machine is widely acknowledged as an important work by an important playwright, even if recent outings are few. There was a musical adaptation that found success a decade ago.

A flip through the pages of the venerable Burns Mantle Best Plays books for 1922-23 and 1923-24 is a great survey, and while the synopses that appear for most plays suggest there’s a lot that’s best left in the past, there are some plays that might be worth looking at again, either to produce on a budget (no royalties), or adapt for modern audiences. Mind you, there’s no racial or ethnic diversity to speak of in the mix, unless you count Hungarian, but of course now anyone can set that right. Maybe there are shows out there ripe for musicalization, with no strings attached?

Here’s a cursory sampling, in no particular order:

Will Shakespeare by Clemence Dane, which posited a love triangle in which Shakespeare and Kit Marlowe fight for the affections of one Mary Fitton, lady in waiting. It climaxes with a fight between Will and Kit which climaxes with (spoiler alert) Kit falling on his own knife. One can never have to many plays chronicling a life which went largely unrecorded by history.

Mary the Third was a mid-career work by Rachel Crothers, a highly successful playwright whose greatest success would nonetheless come with her last produced piece, Susan and God in 1937. Mary the Third looked at marriage across three generations of women in the same family.

Humoresque by Fannie Hurst was the story of a an up-from-the-slums violinist, and had already been a silent film based on Hurst’s short story. It was later considerably reworked by Clifford Odets and Zachary Gold into a film released in 1946, with the violinist now caught in a romance with his wealthy patroness, played by Joan Crawford.

My Aunt from Ypsilanti was “adapted from the French” and while the play seemed entirely negligible, you gotta love that title, the only Broadway show to ever use the place name Ypsilanti. Of course, titles can’t be copyrighted, so if no one stole this one by now, it’s unlikely to see a resurgence.

Swashbucklers weren’t reserved for the screen, and 1923 saw the stage debut of Rafael Sabatini’s Scaramouche. One Sheldon Stanwood played the French hero, later embodied in 1952 on the screen by Stewart Granger. No records survive (actually, just didn’t look) as to whether the title character did the fandango.

“Scaramouche”

Frederick Lonsdale was a successful writer of musical librettos, but it’s his plays that have lived on, including The Last of Mrs. Cheney and On Approval,which will come into public domain in 2021 and 2023 respectively. But his Aren’t We All? from 1923 was in fact his last show to be seen on Broadway, in a starry 1985 production led by Claudette Colbert and Rex Harrison.

The sharp-eyed might question the inclusion of Outward Bound by Sutton Vane, but while it premiered on January 7, 1924, the Best Plays book notes that it was copyrighted in 1923. This metaphysical mystery, a thematic precursor to the TV’s Lost (oh, right, spoiler alert), was sufficiently popular to yield two movie versions, first in 1930, with Leslie Howard reprising his stage role, and again with Paul Henreid in the Howard role in a 1943 version called Between Two Worlds (oops, again, spoiler alert).

“Outward Bound”

The same “Say, wasn’t that a 1924 show?” query might be applied to Beggar on Horseback by George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly but once again, while it premiered on February 12, 1924, its copyright was 1923 – the same year as another collaboration by the duo, the musical Helen of Troy, New York, which had songs by the team of Kalmar and Ruby. Somewhat surprisingly, it’s the play which seemed to have legs, as it turns up now and again on various stages, though its last Broadway run was in 1970.

Ferenc Molnar had a solid run of hits between 1902 and 1941, including Liliom (which later became Carousel) and The Play’s The Thing (later adapted by Tom Stoppard as Rough Crossing). His 1923 fantasy of royalty, The Swan, translated by M.P. Baker, would become a film in 1956, starring Grace Kelly and Alec Guinness. It was one of two Molnar plays to debut on Broadway in October of that year, the other being the more tragically-minded Launzi, adapted by Edna St. Vincent Millay, about a young woman, rebuffed in love, who tries suicide, fails, is romantically rebuffed again, then acts as if she were dead, taking to wearing an angel’s wings.

Not to be outdone by Kaufman & Connelly and Molnar, George M. Cohan wrote two shows that premiered in 1923, doing the book, music and lyrics for The Rise of Rosie O’Reilly, which gave Ruby Keeler her Broadway debut, a musical, and The Song and Dance Man, a play. Just to one up the competition, Cohan starred in the latter piece – and the two shows opened in the same week, the former on Christmas and the latter on New Year’s Eve.

Cervantes’s Don Quixote predates concerns like copyright, so the material has actually long been available for free use. But for those who have grown tired of Man of La Mancha, they might want to delve into some archive and find out if there’s anything to be salvaged from Sancho Panza, the 1923 musical by Melchior Lengyel, with a score by Hugo Felix, which seems to have emphasized the wrong character, no doubt contributing to its brief run. Even 95 years ago, marketing mattered.

Years before Hedy Lamarr worked her white-washed wiles on Walter Pidgeon, Annette Margulies embodied the “native girl” Tondeleyo in the potboiler White Cargo, itself adapted from a novel called Hell’s Playground by Ida Vera Simonton. A British film of the play preceded the Lamarr version, and faced censorship for sensual content, even in the pre-Production Code days.

Those with forethought may have already been working on resurrections or revivals of some of these works, but have kept silent until the copyright fully expires at 12:00 am on January 1. But if we’ve had dueling The Wild Partys and both a play and musical called Hamilton, who’s to say there might not be multiple Aunts From Ypsilanti in our future. Dramaturgs and literary managers, playwrights and composers, artistic directors: start your engines. The new year will be here before you can say “Scaramouche”!

Update, December 31, 2018: Subsequent to the publication of this post, I was contacted by Glenn Fleishman, who wrote the excellent Smithsonian piece linked above. According to his research, while Saint Joan debuted in 1923, it was not copyrighted until 1924. So if this Shaw play is on your theatre’s schedule for 2019, you may want to delve deeper into its copyright history before deciding not to pay royalties on it.

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