Experience Tony Award-winning theatre with your students, right here in Silicon Valley! These low-cost, daytime performances are held specially for school groups, offering youth in our community the chance to engage with the stories we tell onstage, amid an audience of their peers. Before the show, educators receive a Guidebook full of information and activities to connect the art onstage to the work in their classroom. After the show, TheatreWorks hosts a talk-back between the cast and the student audience.
Student matinee tickets will go on sale eight weeks before each performance. If your school would like to attend multiple matinees, please place an order for each show when the ticketrequest window opens. Student tickets are $10 each; chaperones are free. We ask that you have at least one chaperone for every ten students.
Read on to learn about the lineup for the 2023/24 school year!
The 25th annual putnam county spelling bee
Thursday, Dec 7, 2023 @ 11am
Lucie Stern Theatre, Palo Alto
Music and Lyrics by William Finn Book by Rachel Sheinkin Conceived by Rebecca Feldman Additional Material by Jay Reiss Directed by Meredith McDonough Music Direction by William Liberatore Choreography by Lee Ann Payne Creative Producer James Monroe Iglehart
Six talented middle schoolers—played by equally talented adults—go head-to-head in this hilarious and heartwarming musical comedy. The rules are simple: Whoever proves the best speller on stage secures a spot at the national spelling bee. Falter on “crepuscular” or “hasenpfeffer”? Fall to pressure or puberty? Only a consolation juice box awaits. Sign up now for the sassy-sweet concoction that captures all the chaos, heartbreak, and elation of childhood competition.
Recommended for grades 7–12.
$10 tickets are available now! To request tickets, please contact Patron Services Manager Andrea Garcia at agarcia@theatreworks.org.
Ivy-League graduates and squabbling siblings Albert and Jennifer Chen spent their whole childhoods totally crushing it. But adulthood? Epic fail. After he’s passed over for a promotion and her loser boyfriend ghosts her, they do what any self-respecting thirtysomethings would do: Blame their parents and run away to China. Problem solved…right? (Spoiler alert: Wrong. So, so wrong.) From the OC to Shenzen, Mike Lew’s hilarious new satire is a claws-out look at the triumphs and traumas of tiger parenting and what it takes to make it out the other side alive.
Recommended for grades 10–12.
Ticket request for this matinee will be accepted March 4–April 15, 2024.