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The Most Popular High School Plays And Musicals

The Wizard of Oz is in and Mary Poppins is out, that's according to Dramatics magazine's high school theater rankings for 2016-2017. The magazine has been publishing its list since 1938.
The NPR Ed team analyzed more than 100 pages of data from old issues of <em>Dramatics </em>magazine.

NPR Ed published the first-ever database of the most popular high school plays and musicals in the U.S. in July 2015. Today, the 2017 numbers are out, so we've updated our original story.

The brilliant script, the "really fun" music and the exciting tech and staging feats were just a few of the reasons John Minigan decided to have his students perform The Addams Family.

"A lot of the students didn't know The Addams Family TV show at all," says Minigan, the drama teacher at Weston High School, just outside Boston. The nostalgia may be more for the adults in the audience, but the show, he says, still asks an increasingly relevant question for students: "What is the American family?"

Weston High was not the only one making this selection. For the third year in a row, was the most.

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