Why this is here
Public-domain plays are free — every school can stage Shakespeare. But musicals almost never are, because the music stays locked under copyright. Royalties run into the hundreds or thousands, materials are rental-only, and the popular titles get restricted out of reach. If you've ever run a drama program on a shoestring, you've hit that wall.
So here's a whole two-part musical with the wall taken down. The Odyssey as a High School Musical — the Trojan War as a Friday-night football game, the Cyclops as a one-eyed barista, a hero named "Nobody" and a pun that runs the whole show. It's yours to use, and more than that, it's yours to change.
What you get
- The book. The full script — scenes, staging, structure, the whole two-part shape.
- The lyrics. Every song, all the words, ready to set to music.
- Demo recordings. Rough reference tracks so you can hear how one person imagined each number sounding. (More on these below — they're a starting point, not a finished cast album.)
What's yours to do with it
This is a skeleton, not a straitjacket. Take it apart. Specifically, you are free to:
- Write your own music. Hand the lyrics to your music students, your pit band, your choir director. Score it however you hear it. This is the best part — and a whole composition unit if you want one.
- Cut it, grow it, reshape it. Trim it to a twenty-minute one-act. Add songs. Drop songs. Reorder the whole thing.
- Change everything else. The setting, the names, the jokes, the football team, the coffee shop. Make Nobody a soccer player, a robotics kid, whatever fits your stage and your students.
- Recast anything. Any role, any voice, any number of players. Split parts, combine parts, build a chorus out of whoever shows up.
- Perform it — including for a paying audience. Charge admission for your fundraiser. That's fine. It's yours.
The only rule
It's shared under a Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 license, which means two simple things:
1. Credit the source. Keep the line below somewhere in your program or materials, and note if you changed things.
2. Pass it on the same way. Whatever you build on top of it stays free for the next school under these same terms — so the next program gets the same head start you did.
That's it. No royalty, no rental, no permission letter, no gatekeeper. Read the full license ▸
About those demo tracks
The reference recordings were made with an AI music tool (Suno) — they exist so you can hear a version, not so you can perform to them. Treat them like a songwriter's rough demo: a sketch of the mood, the tempo, the shape. The real invitation is to make your own music from the lyrics. That's not a missing piece — that's the point, and it's where the show becomes truly yours.
The credit line to keep
Direction, ideas & lines by Bill Berger · Book & lyrics by Claude (Anthropic) · Demo music generated with Suno.
Original at youplusplus.xyz/nobody/ · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Adapted and performed by [your program].
One last thing
The "Nobody" joke is about three thousand years old. It survived that long for one reason: nobody owned it, so every generation got to retell it their own way. The retelling was the survival.
Now it's your turn to retell it. Change what you want, keep what works, put your students' names in the program. If it makes one rehearsal room a little more fun, it did its whole job.