NEW YORK: Broadway Licensing has acquired Dramatists Play Service (DPS), as announced last month. DPS will continue to serve plays and playwrights and Broadway Licensing will become the new home for DPS’s slate of musicals.

“Dramatists Play Service is, by any measure, one of the jewels in the theatrical licensing and publishing crown,” Sean Cercone, president and CEO of Broadway Licensing, said in a statement. “I couldn’t be prouder to welcome DPS into the Broadway Licensing family, and I’m excited for what the future holds and the tremendous impact our collective team will bring to the industry.”

The first acquisition in this new venture is Keenan Scott II’s Thoughts of a Colored Man, the first production announced for the post-shutdown Broadway season.

To ensure that the DPS banner remains a vital brand in the industry, Broadway Licensing has established a $2.5 million New Works fund to acquire rights and commission and develop new works. Broadway Licensing has also created Stageworks Productions, an internal content development division designed to work with interested authors and underlying rights holders to create new copyrights of authors’s work.

Finally, Broadway Licensing has agreed to form a three-person advisory committee to consult on opportunities for new writers and underlying rights holders. The inaugural committee members are playwrights Lynn Nottage and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and librettist and lyricist Michael Korie.

Founded in 1936 by a number of prominent playwrights and theatre agents, Dramatists Play Service, Inc., was created to foster national opportunities for playwrights by publishing affordable editions of their plays and handling the performance rights to these works. Broadway Licensing is a full-service theatrical licensing partner specializing in the development, production, and worldwide distribution of new and established theatrical properties, partnering with authors, agents, and producers at the intersection of art and commerce.