Cast members of Notre Dame Academy's Godspell perform during the fifth annual Minty Awards for high school theater at the St. George Theatre on Staten Island, N.Y.

Kathryn Carse/Landov

True, I never basked in the glow of the high school stage. But I have fond memories of working behind the scenes, as stage crew. Dressed in black, I rushed the bed onstage for Tevye's dream sequence in Fiddler on the Roof.

I've also spoken with many people who weren't involved in theater at all but can still — for some reason — remember the shows their schools performed.

There's just something about the high school stage.

Recently, my mom told me that she and her best friend, Chris, had been reminiscing about McDowell High School's performance of South Pacific in 1965. She wasn't in the show but can still name friends and classmates who were.

All of this got me wondering: Were other high schools performing the same shows that year?

As it turns out, the answer is in Dramatics — a monthly magazine for theater students and teachers. It's been publishing an annual ranking of the most popular high school plays and musicals since 1938.

Until now, no one has ever compiled the data. It wasn't even digitized. Six months ago, Don Corathers, the magazine's editor, began digging through the archives for hard copies of each original issue — nearly 100 pages in all.

The NPR Ed team analyzed more than 100 pages of data from old issues of Dramatics magazine.

LA Johnson/NPR

Last winter, he wrote to explain a delay: "What's taking so long, other than the distraction of publishing a magazine, is that we have to locate the articles in bound copies in order to scan them."

Eventually, he found them all, made copies — a huge stack — and mailed them to the NPR Ed team here in Washington, D.C.

The Plays

Over the past 76 years, the most popular plays have consistently been Our Town and You Can't Take It With You, according to our analysis.

Click here to see the full analysis.