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Coterie Theatre
The Coterie is a non-profit, professional Equity theatre company housed on level one of the Hallmark Crown Center Shops in Kansas City, Missouri. It seeks to redefine children’s theatre to include families and diverse audiences. The main-stage season provides classic and contemporary theatre as well as educational, dramatic outreach programs for junior high and high school students as well as younger audiences and families. The main-stage season also includes the Young Playwrights' Festival, which features the works of teen playwrights fostered through the Coterie’s Young Playwrights' Roundtable. According to Richard Zoglin of Time Magazine, the Coterie is among the top five theatres serving families and young audiences in the United States.

History
Judith Yeckel and Vicky Lee, two graduate students in theatre from the University of Missouri - Kansas City UMKC Theatre founded the Coterie in 1979. Following Yeckel and Lee’s tenure, Kansas City actor/director Jim Tibbs became Artistic Director through 1988. After his death, Pam Sterling served as Artistic Director for the next two years. Jeff Church joined the Coterie as Producing Artistic Director in 1990. He came to the company from the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., where he served as a director and a playwright-in-residence. Joette Pelster, former manager of Kansas City Friends of Alvin Ailey joined the Coterie in 1993 as Executive Director. In the late 1980's and 1990's, the Coterie featured many world premieres: Sheldon Harnick's Dragons, Edward Mast's Wolf Child: The Correction of Joseph as well as The Very First Family, Across the Plains, Nate the Great, Gatherings in Graveyards, Oz and numerous premieres from the Little House series. Further, the Coterie mounted the professional American premiere of Lord of the Flies and the first staging of the opera Green Eggs and Ham, after its concert premiere. Regional premieres have included Athol Fugard's ''My Children! My Africa! and Valley Song''. The Coterie world premiere commission of The Wrestling Season by Laurie Brooks in 1999, transferred to the Kennedy Center for New Visions 2000: One Theatre World. The play was featured as the published play in American Theatre Magazine in November, 2000. Jeff Church began the Coterie Lab for New Family Musicals in 2004. He worked with Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty to create a Theatre for Young Audiences version of "Seussical" adapted from Broadway. Other works by Ahrens and Flaherty (Twice Upon a Time and a TYA version of Once On This Island) have also premiered at the Coterie. Since 2004, the Lab for New Family Musicals has hosted new work by musical theatre artists Stephen Schwartz (Geppetto & Son), Willie and Rob Reale (The Dinosaur Musical), Harry Connick Jr. (The Happy Elf), and Pulitzer Prize winner David Lindsay-Abaire’s new version of Shrek the Musical.