Everybody Comes to Rick’s, by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison
A reading of the play that the movie Casablanca was based on.
Casablanca, the most familiar movie in the world and one of the best-loved, started with a stage play called Everybody Comes to Rick’s by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison.
After 83 years, the story is still fresh. It combines wit and romanticism with anti-fascism.
Refugees during World War II wait, and wait, at Rick’s American Café, with a remarkable collection of scoundrels, innocents, and cynics..…all stranded in unoccupied France—colonial Morocco—hemmed in by its complex protocols of safety and risk.
Everything is negotiable in Casablanca, where idealism and larceny cohabit. We want the world to be like this—fast, morally compromised, but noble at the same time. Every night, Rick puts on a white dinner jacket and presides over the chaos.
The people at Rick’s are all desperate for work, desperate to find a home, yet happy to be alive and stuck in a sunshiny place in a naïvely optimistic country.
Kenneth Tynan called the story “a masterpiece of light entertainment”.
— condensed from a review by David Denby, in the New Yorker
About The Next Stage Theatre Company
Independent since it was founded in 1996, The Next Stage produces three plays a year, focusing on non-musical plays by major and upcoming playwrights – work you might see Off-Broadway. The Next Stage offers inventive, streamlined productions in a 50-seat wraparound space, as well as readers’ theater and adult acting classes.
