Our annual Top 10/Top 20 lists offer invaluable snapshots of the American theatre’s evolving tastes, but programming choices aren’t made in a vacuum, of course. Which shows get lots of productions has a lot to do with not only which are most popular or zeitgeisty, or just won a Tony or a Pulitzer or had a major New York production, but also, crucially, their licensing status.

So it is that this year’s clear favorite, the little-musical-that-could Come From Away, which played on Broadway between March 2017 and October 2022 (and recouped in eight months), winning a Best Direction Tony for Christopher Ashley along the way, has shot to the top of our Top 10 Most-Produced Plays list in its first appearance on any of our tallies. That’s at least partly because, as co-authors Irene Sankoff and David Hein wrote me a few weeks ago, while the show has “always been with MTI, there’s been a rollout process as rights transition from our lead Broadway producers to MTI in each territory. This is the first time that theatres, beyond those that hosted our tours, can bring their own productions of Come From Away to life. We can’t wait to see this incredible story in new and inspiring ways!”

That would explain its high-profile debut at St. Louis’s influential The Muny over the summer, for one, and its proliferation across every corner of the U.S. in the coming season. Its 23 productions include stagings in 17 states, red and blue alike, with three in California, three in South Carolina, two in Florida, two in Michigan, and one each in Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey, Ohio, Tennessee, Washington, Wisconsin, Utah, Vermont, and Virginia. This proliferation speaks not so much to pent-up audience demand for the show—it has toured widely and hit most of these states before—as to its enduring appeal in a time of sharp division. 

Two other musicals licensed through MTI make their debut on our Top 10 list this year: Dear Evan Hansen, which beat Come From Away for the Best Musical Tony in 2017, and the stage version of the Disney phenomenon Frozen, which had a less than charmed life on Broadway but is finding audiences across the U.S. this season. Making its first appearance on our list in more than 20 years is another popular musical whose license has been available for far longer: Ain’t Misbehavin’, Richard Maltby Jr. and Murray Horwitz’s  Fats Waller musical, which began its life as a Manhattan Theatre Club cabaret in 1978 and won the Best Musical Tony that same year.

Though they made a stronger-than-usual showing this time out, it’s not all musicals all the time, of course. We were particularly happy to see Eboni Booth’s heartful, Pulitzer-winning drama Primary Trust and Jonathan Spector’s scathingly funny Eureka Day near the top of the list, as we recently published them (in our Spring 2024 and Winter 2025 issues, respectively). Meanwhile, James Ijames’s festive Fat Ham is making its third consecutive appearance on this list, while Lloyd Suh’s intimate The Heart Sellers shows up for the second year in a row. Jen Silverman’s engaging two-hander The Roommate, though written in 2015 and a popular stage staple ever since, makes it first appearance on the list (probably due to its starry Broadway premiere last fall).

The other new title on the list is, technically speaking, not one script but many: We noted no fewer than seven stagings of plays or musicals based on Louisa May Alcott’s classic Little Women, including a new one from the ubiquitous Lauren Gunderson (once again this year’s most-produced playwright), as well as the 2018 adaptation by Kate Hamill, the 2022 reimagining by Heather Chrisler, and the 2005 Broadway musical version by Allan Knee (with lyrics by Mindi Dickstein and music by Jason Howland).

To paraphrase Jo March: We like good strong shows that mean something.