High School Musical aside since it’s a Disney movie franchise formost, do modern plays have sequels? Sure, the greeks had some, and I guess Henry V can be said to be a sequel to Henry IV, but how about the last couple hundred years? There’s a new movie coming out that’s supposed to be a sequel to Hamet, which has me wondering this. I can’t think of single modern play that has a sequel. Are there any?
Angels in America.
Nunsense is a musical featuring funny nuns. There are several sequels of various types.
(I’ve seen the original twice, and none of the sequels).
Also:
This is funny because:
Richard II
Henry IV, Part One
Henry IV, Part Two
Henry V
Henry VI, Part One
Henry VI, Part Two
Henry VI, Part Three
Richard III
These are basically The War of the Roses, Parts One through Eight. Each a sequel to the one previous.
August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle is a series of ten plays, written between 1982 and 2005, each set in one decade of the twentieth century, all in a single black neighborhood in Pittsburgh. They’re not exactly sequels, but there are a bunch of overlapping characters and overarching themes.
Yes - a few examples:
“The Talley Trilogy” by Lanford Wilson: Fifth of July, Talley’s Folly and Talley and Son
August Wilson’s “Pittsburgh Cycle” - Ten plays about life in the African-American community - spans 100 years - one play per decade. Includes Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, and The Piano Lesson
“A Texas Trilogy” by Preston Jones - The Oldest Living Graduate, The Last Meeting of the Knights of the White Magnolia, and Lu Ann Hampton Laverty Oberlander.
Alan Aykborn’s The Norman Conquest (Table Manners, Living Together and Round and Round the Garden) are a trio of plays involving the same characters, all at the same dinner party, with each play showing the events in different rooms (Dining Room, Living Room, and garden, respectively). A character is on play will go offstage and you see what happened to him during that time in another play.
The musical Annie had a sequel Annie Warbucks that ran off-Broadway (and flopped) in 1994. There was a previous attempt at an Annie sequel, but Annie 2: Miss Hannagan’s Revenge never made it to New York and was reportedly just plain awful.
Neil Simon’s “Broadway Bound” was a sequel to “Biloxi Blues” which was a sequel to “Brighton Beach Memories.” All three plays revolved around Eugene JErome, a thinly-disguised version of young Neil Simon.
William Finn wrote three Off-Broadway musicals (In Trousers, March of the Falsettos, and Falsettoland) centered around the same group of characters. (The latter two musicals became the Broadway musical Falsettos, but I do not believe that that would count.)
William Gibson wrote a sequel to The Miracle Worker called Morning After The Miracle. It did not fare well, critically or commercially.
If cycle plays count, Robert Schenkkan’s The Kentucky Cycle of nine short plays must be considered.
Lillian Hellman’s Another Part of the Forest is a prequel (if they’re eligible for consideration) to The Little Foxes.
Irishman Hugh Leonard’s “A Life” is a sequel of sorts to the Tony-winningDa’.
Or, at any rate, it told the cotinuing story of a man who’d been an important character in Da’.
… and going by plays with the same characters, but DIFFERENT authors we have:
Hamlet (William Shakespeare)
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (Tom Stoppard) and
Fortinbras (Lee Blessing).
He also wrote a sequel to The Odd Couple. It wasn’t a play, though.
“The Destiny of Me” by Larry Kramer is a sequel to “The Normal Heart.”
And don’t forget the much less popular than its predecessor 13th Night.
“Summer of the Seventeenth Doll” is a very well-known Australian play, which is the third in a trilogy (of which the first two, “Kid Stakes” and “Other Times” are almost completely forgotten)
Another trilogy is “A…My Name is Alice,” “A…My Name Is Still Alice,” and “A…My Name will Always Be Alice.”
Eh. My Shakespeare professor lectured us against considering the histories “true sequels” and it’s stuck.
The musical Funny Girl had a sequel about Bryce’s later marital problems called Funny Lady, but I don’t know if it was ever a play (may have been just a musical).
Bye Bye Birdie had a much later sequel called Bring Back Birdie. It flopped.
Famously not a play, but George Bernard Shaw got so irritated by being asked “what happened next” about Pygmalion that he wrote an afterward of sorts. Liza winds up with Freddie Eynsford Hill, her father becomes one of the richest men in London (and the beloved of the aristocrats), and basically few things end as most would have them do.
The Lion in Winter had two sort-of sequels, but neither were plays. Both were, however, works by James Goldman in which he continued the characterization of the historical figures that he began in Lion. One was the movie Robin & Marian (a retelling of Robin Hood set after the “glory years” and during the transition of power from LiW character Richard to his brother John) and the second was a novel entitled Myself as Witness. The narrator is a Welsh monk chronicling John, now King, is the main character.
Lawler wrote *Summer of the Seventeenth Doll * first though, in the 1950s. It was the work that made his name and was seen as the first really authentic Australian play. The two prequel plays weren’t written until the 1970s, by which time some of the novelty had no doubt worn off.
Harvey Firestein’s “Torch Song Trilogy” is three one act plays…“International Stud”, “Fugue in a Nursery” and “Widows and Children First!”. A lot of times, they get staged as one production, though.