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All That Jazz …
Let’s say that a couple of neighborhood grammar kids get together and decide to start a Lemon-Aid stand. They hit their parents up for a few dollars for sugar and lemons, spend three days building the perfect lemon-aid stand, buy yellow aprons as uniforms, fashion a beautiful sign replete with a backwards “S,” and offer up their wares for a nickel a pop. And these kids are excited! Really excited. Cause they’re going to spend their summer selling delicious lemon-aid to raise money so that they can buy themselves a Red Rider BB gun.
And then let’s imagine that Wal-Mart, terrified that the two 11-year-old kids are gonna chase them out of the Lemon-Aid business, finds a legal loophole of some sorts, and fires off a cease-and-desist letter to the children, threatening to sue them for $250,000 unless they pack up their stand and get the hell off the curb.
Pretty harsh, huh?
Well, that’s just about the equivalent of what happened this week when the Broadway production of the hit musical, Chicago, hit a Bronx high-school with a severe cease-and-desist letter, ordering them to shut down their amateur production of the Bob Fosse play days before the show was set to open … at $7 a ticket … in a high school … performed by teenage drama mods … who had spent three months preparing.
Harsh.
Indeed, the high school was slammed with a “cease and desist” order from Samuel French Inc., representing the authors of the play, citing copyright law and licensing agreements and threatening the school with a $250,000 fine. As it turns out, the school failed to get permission to perform the play; but even if it had tried to get such permission, the school wouldn’t have been allowed to move forward, because the producers of Chicago won’t allow production of the play within 75 miles of the Ambassador Theater, where the Broadway production is performed.
On the plus side, however, about 75 testosterone-fueled Bronx fathers were relieved to hear the news, meaning that they wouldn’t have to don a fake smile after each production and pretend their teenage son was straight after he refused to take off the three-inch pancake makeup before going over to Timmy’s house to listen to some Andrew Lloyd Webber records.
