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Product Description Master storyteller and bestselling author Jodi Picoult teams up with Jake van Leer and Ellen Wilber to bring you an original musical, sure to breathe life into any middle-school and high school drama curriculum. Part Shakespearean comedy and part Fractured Fairy Tales, Over the Moon is all fun. Narrated by a cross-dressing Hairy Godmother (no, that’s not a typo), the story begins when Luna (the moon) descends to a small town on earth disguised as a boy, and sets out to help humans find love. But Luna herself falls in love with Prince Jack... who’s in love with Felicity... who has fallen for Luna. On the way to happily ever after are a steady stream of clever puns and topical jokes about American Idol, universal health care, Bernie Madoff, and just about every fairy tale creature you’ve ever heard of! With nineteen original hum-worthy songs and plenty of spots to tailor the play to any city or town, Over the Moon is the perfect choice for every school looking to perform an energetic show that’s fresh, funny, and timeless. Review Begin with Cinderella, Pinocchio, Humpty Dumpty and myriad other fairy-tale and nursery-rhyme figures. Add an athletic princess pretending to be dainty, a moon hiding her light and dressed as a boy, a shy prince and a scary, lonely giant who all have crushes on the obviously wrong match. There’s also an evil queen and a “hairy godmother.” Place them in odd variations on typical fairy-tale plots and mix with music and a moral. Designed specifically to be performed by a large cast of middle- and high-school students, the authors (the novelist and her teenage son) pepper the script with snappy one-liners, local and pop-culture references, as well as social and political issues, some left of center (the narrator/hairy godmother is a cross-dressing male; there is a gay-marriage reference in a faux news report).... The play is fast paced and full of fun, with the overlying theme of staying true to oneself handled with a light touch. Sheet music for all the songs is provided. Applause, applause. About the Author Jodi Picoult received an AB in creative writing from Princeton and a master’s degree in education from Harvard. The recipient of the 2003 New England Book Award for her entire body of work, she is the author of twenty-seven novels, including the #1 New York Times bestsellers House Rules, Handle With Care, Change of Heart, and My Sister’s Keeper, for which she received the American Library Association’s Margaret Alexander Edwards Award. She lives in New Hampshire with her husband and three children. Visit her website at JodiPicoult.com. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. AUTHOR’S NOTE I am fourteen years old and the boy sitting opposite me is feeding me marbles. “The rain in Spain,” I say, in a thick Cockney accent, “stays mainly in the plain.” I am Eliza Doolittle for the next two hours, and a few scenes later when I reappear, elegant, wearing a bottle-green velvet gown, I hear the collective gasp of the audience. When I was growing up, theater was a big part of my life. It gave me a chance to be someone I wasn’t; it taught me how to succeed at public speaking; it gave me an instant group of friends. My very first kiss, in fact, came from a boy playing the Artful Dodger in a production of Oliver! So perhaps it isn’t surprising that when my own kids were in middle school, I wanted them to have the same experience I did onstage. The only problem? The theater program in their school didn’t offer many opportunities. My solution? To create my own theater program instead. I wrote a short play that was fun and funny and age-appropriate—and that play, unlike most of my novels, actually had a happy ending. My children were too young at the time to read my books, and this was a way to share my writing with them. The Trumbull Hall Troupe was born with ten kids on a tiny stage in a community hall attached to a local church. A friend, Marjorie Rose, was ou