Jonathan Blocksom's Weblog

About a month ago I took my kids to the Busytown play up at Imagination Stage in Bethesda, MD. It's based on the Richard Scary Busytown books, which are very popular with my kids. The play was great (here's a review) and my wife even took the kids back a second time.

The play was commissioned for a theater in Seattle a few years ago, and the songs were a lot of fun. I would love to have a recording of the songs, I'm sure we'd be singing them at bedtime now if I could remember anything other than the chorus to the Pickle Car song. And those three lines are beginning to grate on me.

The problem is that Imagination Stage doesn't have the rights to make their own soundtrack CD, or even just a recording of the play, available for sale. It seems to me that playwrights are missing a big opportunity here and need to more aggressively license these rights. CD and DVD production is so cheap these days that putting together a good soundtrack or DVD of the play shouldn't be too hard or too expensive, and it's a great way to get some more revenue from the people who attended. We paid about $60 to attend the play and paying $25 for a soundtrack afterwords would probably have been a no-brainer.

At this point I'm hoping to catch one the actors and ask if there's a bootleg making the rounds, or maybe order a copy of the script and music and learn to play the songs on the piano. But there's a market out there for the forward thinking children's playwright.