Welcome to the Astrolabe
The Astrolabe Theater Company develops original stories across live performance and media. From theater, opera, and dance to novels, audio, screen, and interactive entertainment, Astrolabe brings imagination, emotional depth, and a commitment to artistic excellence to projects designed to engage audiences across forms.
Commissioned writing services are also available by inquiry.
Our inaugural theatrical project, In the Tent of Stars, recently received a costumed staged reading in Kansas City, Missouri, and is preparing for its next stage of development in London.
Set in a traveling tent theater in 1918, this original musical follows Lincoln, a would-be theater kid caught between his estranged parents: a mother determined to protect him from show business and an emotionally abusive father who offers him a place in the Follies—despite the prohibition on child performers.
As Lincoln and his new friend Alex find their place among the performers, they discover that the tent has been traveling for 800 years—and that the shadow within it has a purpose of its own for collecting the lost and lonely.
Book & Lyrics:
John Goldsberry
Music:
Jay Gaumer
Directed and developed by
Miss Hazel Jade
Stories move civilizations. Music moves emotion. Ideas move souls. An Astrolabe can show you where you are, and where you can go next, but you have to be the one that decides to move.
John Corbin Goldsberry
Astrolabe Founder
Early investors have gotten us this far...
Ground floor development investment opportunities for the upcoming London workshop are currently open to accredited co-producers and theatrical investors. Inquire for more information.
Upcoming projects in the wings
An original musical comedy.
Logline: In 1912, a failed Broadway hopeful with a padded résumé takes a drama teaching job in Peculiar, Missouri, and brings Bert Williams to a town that prizes being normal.
Blurb: Greta Jacobs gave Broadway three years and got a waitress’s apron. To escape, she bluffs her way into a drama teaching job in the real Missouri town of Peculiar and sets her students to staging Maeterlinck’s The Blue Bird. To make it worth seeing, she recruits her old New York friends, including the great Bert Williams, and fights to put Ambrose, a gifted Black teenager the town would rather keep off the stage, in the cast. When her secret surfaces at the town gala and she’s fired on the spot, it’s up to her students to finish the show without her. A warm, funny musical about vaudeville, small-town respectability, and the people who change the world by refusing to be normal.
Cast line: 16 principal roles with a flexible ensemble. 130 min.
An Upcycled Farce with Music!
Logline: A broke husband poses as his wife’s 14-year-old son at a performing arts school so she can inherit it, and the only way out is through the school musical.
Blurb: When a widow is offered a fortune on one condition — that she never remarry, she and her very-much-grown new husband come up with the only solution they can think of: he enrolls as her teenage son. Now, Alfred must survive the Dr. Preston Sweet School of the Arts, where the students are overeager, the staff is grandiose, the family is scheming, and the winter production is Death of a Salesman Jr.: The Musical. A modern retelling of Arthur Law’s forgotten, and possibly never revived, 1894 farce.
Cast line: 7 principal roles. 90 min.
Logline: Two ageless children and a grieving chronicler race to complete a fractured medieval spell to keep a living, pagan-rooted British sanctuary from slipping out of the world.
Blurb: Withe & Stone is a mythic folk drama and musical cycle exploring memory, community ritual, and the ancient longing for home. In a pre-industrial Britain where the old faiths never faded, the secluded village of Withe and Stone radiates from three sacred oaks that sustain an ageless sanctuary. But the world is faltering. To heal a temporal tear and free a grieving chronicler living inside his wife’s memory, an enigmatic child healer must complete a centuries-old medieval spell before their haven dissolves into our own.
Inspired by Gerald of Wales’ 12th-century legend of Elidore and the Golden Ball, the production is offered under a Folk-Origin, Community-Adaptable License (FOCAL). Designed with minimal scenography, flexible casting, and adaptable folk instrumentation, the work pairs a protected narrative core with an agile licensing model—making it an adaptable theatrical property built to take root in professional regional houses, festival circuits, and community stages alike.
“We can’t be something we are not, but we can be who we would be.”
Cast line: 12 principal roles with a flexible ensemble.
An intense two-hander.
Logline: Inside an Allied POW camp in war-torn France, an American sergeant faces his most volatile charge: a captured 12-year-old Hitler Youth squad leader weaponized by an empire that no longer exists.
Blurb: Inspired by the Allied Kinderlager at Attichy, France, The Baby Cage is a tense moral chamber play about children left in the wreckage of war.
In 1945, Sergeant Troy Bennent is assigned to question and “denazify” captured German boys trained to fight, obey, and hate before they were old enough to understand the world that shaped them. His most difficult charge is Siegfried Muller, a young squad leader still loyal to the dead Reich. Through confrontations, lessons, and painful reckonings, the play asks whether compassion can survive after atrocity—and whether a child weaponized by history can still be reached before the barbed wire comes down.
2 principal roles and one canvas tent set. 90 min.
An original moral comedy
Logline: A parliamentary watchdog who preaches public virtue sees his own household dragged into the ethics hearing he meant to control.
Blurb: Arthur Posket guards procedure and public morals with zeal. Then his wife’s old secret surfaces, his nineteen-year-old son turns out to be officially fourteen, and a mysterious street artist called Wren may be the only person who can expose the truth or save them from it. An original comedy drawing on Pinero’s The Magistrate and Molière’s Tartuffe, blending political satire, family farce, and the subversive logic of art, about what happens when righteousness bends and love becomes the only angle from which the picture makes sense.
5 principal roles and one impressionistic set. 90 min.