Music Theatre International Pegs Moorestown Theater Company for World Premiere Workshop

Music Theatre International has asked the award-winning Moorestown Theater Company to stage the ‘World Premiere Workshop Production’ of a new children’s musical, Magic Tree House: A Ghost Tale For Mr. Dickens, Jr., the company said this week.

Moorestown Theater Company already held two auditions, with two more to come this week.

Auditions for students ages six through high school seniors will be held on Wednesday and Thursday, Nov. 12 and 13 held in the Lower Level Fellowship Hall of First Baptist Church, 19 West Main Street in Moorestown.

Auditions are 3 p.m.-5:30 p.m. each day.

All auditionees must register at www.MoorestownTheaterCompany.org before auditioning.

Performances are scheduled to take place Saturday and Sunday, Dec. 20 and 21 at Westfield Friends School 2201 Riverton Road, Cinnaminson, 2 p.m. Location may change.

Music Theatre International is one of the world’s leading theatrical licensing agencies, granting schools as well as amateur and professional theatres from around the world the rights to perform the largest selection of great musicals from Broadway and beyond, according to the group’s website.

Music Theatre International staff will come from New York to see the world premiere of this musical.

“This is a huge honor for the Moorestown Theater Company” said Moorestown Theater Company Producing Artistic Director Mark Morgan. “Of the thousands of theater companies in the United States that produce theater for children, MTI came to us to give this new script its first-ever staging! We are humbled to be asked and very thankful for the opportunity this workshop presents for our young performers.”

“I wanted to have a theater company that was close to New York City, whose work I was familiar with, and that I trusted to do a great job with new material, and the first one that I thought of was the Moorestown Theater Company,” said Music Theatre International Senior Operations Officer John Prignano.

Prignano said that he plans to travel to New Jersey, not only to see the musical performed, but also to speak with the Moorestown Theater Company staff and cast members to get their thoughts about the show’s script and songs, as well as the workshop process.

This new children’s musical, which is based on one of the stories in the best-selling “Magic Tree House” collection of children’s books by Mary Pope Osborne, tells the story of ‘Jack’ and his younger sister ‘Annie’, who go back in time to 1843 to convince Charles Dickens not to give up on his writing career.

With a little bit of magic that they are allowed to use in the stories via ‘Merlin the Magician’ (from “Camelot”), Jack and Annie show Mr. Dickens what the world would be like without his stories. Their magic brings out the three ‘Ghosts’ (that are so well-known from Dickens’ most famous story), which help to convince Mr. Dickens to continue his writing career in general, and to write A Christmas Carol, specifically.

Other characters that Jack and Annie meet in this musical include ‘Morgan Le Fay’, ‘Oliver Twist’, ‘Nicholas Nickleby’, ‘Pickwick’, ‘Tiny Tim’, ‘Queen Victoria’, and the afore-mentioned three ‘Ghosts’. The book of the musical is by Jenny Laird and Will Osborne, with the lyrics by Randy Courts and Will Osborne, and the music by Randy Courts.

The Workshop Directing Staff for MTC’s Preview Stage ’14 consists of: Director Mark Morgan, Vocal Director Carol Ann Murray, and Choreographer Kaitlin Tumulty (all of whom live in Moorestown). For more information about this ‘World Premiere’ Musical, visit the MTC Website, or call 856-778-8357.