If you wanted to write a Broadway musical in 2010 and you weren’t a celebrity, your fastest route to a producer’s office was a public-domain source novel. The copyright math, then as now, was straightforward: a book published before 1923 paid no royalty, asked no permissions, and let a young writing team get to a workshop on their own schedule.
That math is responsible for more of the modern repertoire than is widely understood.
A short and incomplete list of musicals built on out-of-copyright source material in the last fifteen years:
- A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder (2013) — drawn from Israel Rank: The Autobiography of a Criminal by Roy Horniman, 1907. The novel had been adapted twice before (most famously as the 1949 Ealing film) but had never been a musical. Robert L. Freedman and Steven Lutvak found it on a Wikipedia rabbit hole. The show won the 2014 Tony for Best Musical.
- Anastasia (2017) — drawn from the historical record of the lost Romanov; the underlying memoir is public domain in most jurisdictions.
- Six (2019 transfer) — drawn from the historical record of Henry VIII’s wives; no underlying copyright at all.
- Bedknobs and Broomsticks (2021 UK tour) — Mary Norton’s book is in copyright but the Disney film property required only a separate license track.
- The Wild Party (2024 revival) — Joseph Moncure March’s 1928 poem entered US public domain in 2024, freeing the property for re-staging without the previous tangle of competing musical versions.
The pattern matters because the alternative is brutal. A licensable contemporary novel can charge an option fee, a workshop royalty, an out-of-town royalty, a Broadway royalty, and a back-end on every subsidiary use. A public-domain source charges zero. For a writing team without celebrity to leverage, the difference can be three years on the workshop circuit.
Two things to watch. First, the 1928 cohort just entered public domain in the US in January 2024 — Mickey Mouse made the headlines, but Lady Chatterley’s Lover and The Well of Loneliness and Orlando are now all available to American adapters. Second, the 1929 cohort — including A Farewell to Arms, Look Homeward, Angel, and All Quiet on the Western Front — enters in January 2025.
The musicals being workshopped right now, on the back of those calendar dates, are already in development. The next Gentleman’s Guide is being written somewhere by two people who can’t yet afford an option.