An announcement is made...

We decided that for the inaugural run of the stage version of "The First Christmas," we would limit the number of available licenses to 12. Eventually, we hope that the production will work into the rotation of other Christmas season productions and become a staple.

In March 2007, we announced in our newsletter, "Lightstone Update," that we were looking for 12 brave church groups to stage the inaugural run. Based on the responses we received from church and other groups, we subsequently broadened our appeal to simply "12 brave groups."

Over the next few weeks, I heard from about 30 brave groups. They come from all over: Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and England. Even within the states, the groups are far flung among Iowa, Indiana, Utah, Virginia, Texas, Georgia, Kentucky, California, and Nevada. And while most of them are church groups, we’ve also heard from a college, a high school, a home school association, a performing arts academy, two community theaters, and even a city.

Each group I heard from, I sent an evaluation copy of the script. We determined to require a $95 license fee that would hopefully be high enough to make sure that there was a measure of commitment from the groups, but not so high that it would be cost prohibitive (we know there are already substantial hurdles to overcome in staging such a production).