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[0:01] Mo Brady: You're listening to The Ensemblist, the only podcast that shows you Broadway from the inside out. Welcome, I'm Mo Brady.

[0:22] Mo Brady: In my conversations with the original creative team of The Addams Family, I was learning how the show was refined and restructured to become a success on tour and around the world. But this wasn't bridging the gap between these professional productions and the success the show has seen in schools and non-professional settings. So I reached out to the folks who were in charge of sharing The Addams Family with legions of schools across North America, Theatrical Rights Worldwide. With a mission to cultivate and extend the production life of musicals to all theatrical marketplaces, TRW is responsible for licensing amateur productions of theatrical properties to student and amateur producers across the country and, in fact, as their name suggests, the world.

I spoke to Jim Hoare, their Executive Vice President of Education and Community Initiatives, about how the show became a part of the TRW catalog. A former high school theater teacher himself, he has directed over 100 shows and musicals, including the first high school production of Once on this Island and the world's first production of Les Miserables School Edition. Over the phone, Jim shared expert knowledge of what has made The Addams Family such a popular choice for amateur licensing. Here's our conversation.

[1:37] Jim Hoare: Hi, I'm Jim Hoare. I'm the Executive Vice President at TRW Theatrical Rights Worldwide. We're located in Times Square and I'm actually calling in now from my home out of Long Island.

[2:06] Mo Brady: And what is Theatrical Rights Worldwide? I guess in terms of what is a licensing house and then how is TRW, I guess, specific?

[2:15] Jim Hoare: Licensing companies control the live stage performance rights for all of the shows in our catalog. And basically our main responsibilities are, number one, I think most importantly, to protect the integrity of our authors' works, making sure people do the show as written, prepare and make available all of the rehearsal materials, the scripts and scores and any ancillary materials that might go along with that. And then to collect the performance royalties from the performing groups and to pay those royalties to the authors. Some of the musicals that drive the engine at TRW are The Addams Family, Bright Star, Spamalot, Big Fish, Memphis Ghost, Color Purple, We Will Rock You, and then hopefully when the world reopens, The Prom.

[3:57] Mo Brady: How long have you been in this field?

[4:00] Jim Hoare: I was a high school theater teacher and director for 31 years. I was also an adjunct at Long Island University. And when Steve Spiegel was starting TRW in 2005, he was laying the groundwork. He said, would I come on board and help him start? Wanted to have someone in the educational field in the company so we could address the concerns and needs of the educational community as well. So that sort of became my job. That's my world is working with mostly schools and amateur theaters.

[5:20] Mo Brady: So you've been working with TRW since 2006. When did The Addams Family come across your plate as a potential show to join your catalog?

[5:26] Jim Hoare: I remember going to see the show in 2010. I think it was the spring of 2010. Every time I see a show, I watch it from the perspective of a high school director. At one point, I'll watch a show and I'll say, well, all right, we can't do that one. Or I'll say, all right, this has got, it's checking off the right boxes. And I was, as I was watching The Addams Family, it did check off most of the boxes that I would want to check off in a great piece for high schools and for amateur community theaters. And a large cast with quite a few ensemble opportunities. And any amateur director will tell you that they learn over time that the busier the cast is on stage, the less drama there is off stage. The more chorus numbers, the better for a school show.

It had strong characters with numerous opportunities for girls because every school program has more female actors than male. But most musicals are written with more male leads than females. So when you see a solid group of female leads, that's a big plus. And in this one, having Morticia, Wednesday, Mrs. Beinecke, Grandma, as a smaller featured character were great because they were all strong leads with solos. I thought it had a good score and jokes that landed and music that young actors would enjoy singing. And then the most important thing for me when I'm scouting a show is I want to see a show with a heart. You know, there's no malice in The Addams Family whatsoever. They're a loving family with an unusual worldview about life and death. You know, so for all of those reasons, I said I was very much in favor of trying to acquire The Addams Family for our catalog.

[6:20] Mo Brady: What does that involve? So you're very much interested in acquiring it. What's the next step?

[6:26] Jim Hoare: There's no one way that that happens. It's a matter of meeting with authors, explaining your visions for the show, your hopes for the show. Basically, the authors are the ones, it's their property. So they're the final decision makers as to where the show will live. And we were thrilled that they selected TRW.

[6:46] Mo Brady: What other shows were part of the TRW catalog at that time?

[6:51] Jim Hoare: Spamalot, Jersey Boys had just been acquired. All Shook Up was huge.

[6:57] Mo Brady: I guess I asked the question because I'm sort of wondering what your expectations were for the show.

[7:00] Jim Hoare: I was hoping that it would have a robust life in school theater, but never thought that it would have as big a life as it actually has had. There are about a thousand productions a year. So when did TRW start licensing the show to schools and amateur productions?

[7:16] Jim Hoare: And I thought that TRW was originally going to go out for a year, but it became so popular that I think it stayed out for almost three years. The way the licensing works is when the national tour is out, the show is still restricted just as it is when it's on Broadway. And then as the tour decides that it is winding down, as it leaves a certain geographic area, they'll say, okay, you can start licensing to amateurs. So it's a rollout basically. And I remember the first high school that I dealt with for The Addams Family was a teacher in Denison, Texas, Amy Jordan. She's a wonderful director with a great program. Amy called me and said, is there any possibility of spring of 2014? And I looked and I saw that the last stop for the tour was in Texarkana, which was about a hundred miles from where she lived.

But I said, yes, you can do the show in 2014 because they're vacating Texas and now it's available. And Amy took her entire cast by bus for two hours to Texarkana, which turned out to be a great experience because I have pictures from when our kids, they met the people in the tour who were playing the roles they were going to be playing. And the cast of the tour was great, just very welcoming to them all, which was great.

[7:33] Mo Brady: Was the show successful right off the bat in terms of getting lots of amateur productions or was it a slow roll once the rights were becoming available?

[7:42] Jim Hoare: Here's what happened actually, because we always create a notification list when a show is not available. I'll say to people, let us know and we'll put you on the list. And as soon as it is available and we separate that list geographically as a tour rolls out. So we have to wait until the tour company says, you know, this is our last time in Texas or Washington state or whatever. But I would always know exactly where the tour was because I would come into the office on a Monday morning and have all of these emails from the same state. And there were emails from people saying, I want to be on the notification list. So by the time the tour ended, I had a thousand schools and community theaters on a notification list that all wanted to produce The Addams Family.

So that's an immediate success because they just all started doing it. The biggest problem in some towns were two schools within a mile of each other wanted to do it on the same weekends, which is their problem, not ours. One was I called first, don't let them do it.

[8:50] Mo Brady: Had you experienced this kind of that list and that kind of, I don't know, bidding or competition with other shows?

[8:57] Jim Hoare: No, other shows, as strong as schools would show, a lot of schools would follow suit. With the case of The Addams Family, it didn't have to trickle down. Everybody just wanted to do it. And I had not experienced that before. So it was really fun. In the very beginning, when people weren't sure what it was, or people heard about the tour, but didn't get to see the tour, I would say it's, I would just say, it was The Addams Family, you all know, except Wednesday is now grown up and she's fallen in love with a normal boy from Ohio and take it from there. And then when people ask for more information, I think one of the things I first said after I saw the tour was it reminded me a little bit of it can't take, you can't take it with you, meets La Cage. A normal family and a more unusual family, but the unusual family is actually more normal than the normal family, which is unusual, meets Daddy, I'm bringing a boy home tonight, please be normal.

[9:46] Jim Hoare: One of the things that Rick Ellis told me when we talked about the student productions and why it might be so successful with schools is it is about this teenage girl, you do have these, this teenager at the middle of the action of this story. And that is a very relatable plot point for kids doing it.

[10:07] Jim Hoare: Absolutely. In fact, Grandma's line, define normal, that has been used on buttons and t-shirts by schools quite a bit. That's the nice thing about this show is I've seen, I've at least seen 20 or more high school productions. They all have their own take on it. Some are cast better than others. Some have more opportunities to do high tech and others don't, but it always works because of that. Everyone can relate to family. Everyone can relate to tensions between teenagers and parents. But this takes it in a really sweet and humorous kind of a way. And then a moment that everybody seems to love is when Gomez sings happy sad, because it's about growing up. In fact, one of the I met a teacher once who said that when he directed The Addams Family in the spring a couple of years back, and the following summer, his daughter was getting married and they used happy sad as the father-daughter dance.

[11:16] Mo Brady: We should say that this level of success is not just happening in high schools in the United States. You're also talking about amateur productions in the States. And you're also talking about worldwide productions, right? Theatrical Rights Worldwide. Where have you seen the success of The Addams Family?

[11:21] Jim Hoare: In Czechoslovakia, it's been in Spain, it's been in South Africa, it's been Australia, New Zealand, and in the UK, it was actually released to amateurs first, and then they became a groundswell of interest.

[11:37] Jim Hoare: Teachers tell me they love the show for all of the reasons I mentioned before. It's good opportunities for girls, large chorus. Parts are fun for the kids. You know, like they can relate, they can relate to the characters. The music is challenging for student pits, but not too challenging. So that the musical directors have said the score is really fun to play and to teach their students to play, which I love. My favorite thing of seeing the show is after the show. When I meet a very happy cast of kids, after seeing a very pleased audience, there's a lot of room for play. One school, I heard this huge laugh. I was watching the production when the ancestors were coming out. And I said afterwards, what was the laugh with that ancestor?

There was a woman like with a high bouffant kind of hairdo. And they said, well, in this district, there was a woman who's a secretary in the school, high school office, who has been doing the morning announcements for 50 years. And she had this every Friday had a permanent, you know, her hair was done, and she passed away. So one of the early ancestors was her.

[13:10] Mo Brady: That's great. It feels like it's in the world of the show. And yet it was obviously specifically for the community. They really responded to that. That's fantastic.