The Great American Mousical is very dear to my mother’s and my hearts. It’s obviously written from a place of great affection for the theatre which is both of our backgrounds are in the theatre. It’s really a valentine and a little bit of a tongue in cheek, affectionate look at what it is to be in the theatre.
What we wanted to do was we wanted to give young readers a sense of all the wonders that theatre provides and also all that goes into creating theatre in a way that felt accessible to them and interesting to them. We came up with a notion of using mice — a troupe of theatre mice who live and perform in a great, venerable Broadway theatre — as the way to tell the story.
Within this troupe of theatre role are all the classic characters of any theatre whether human or mouse, such as the director and the difficult leading lady and the young intern and the weary producer and the slightly hysterical hairdresser and so forth. Some of them are terrible stereotypes and done with great affection and love.
The idea for the book came about because my mother was performing on Broadway at the time, and there was a mouse in her dressing room. She said to her — I think it was her dresser — “Oh, could you make sure that if someone puts down traps or takes the mouse away that they’re the humane kind? Could you see that they go take it out to Brooklyn and release it there?” Why Brooklyn, I don’t know, but somehow the idea was let’s put it somewhere where it will be happier and free and not kill it and not be cruel. think everybody sort of snickered and heaven knows what happened to the mouse.
Everybody was amused by the fact that my mom wanted it to be such a humane experience. What is the truth of theaters is that all theaters are riddled with mice. You know mice are just a part of the theater, and once we realize that and once my mom said, “Of course, I imagine there’s not just one mouse here. There’s probably hundreds, perhaps even thousands of mice under here.”
A light bulb went off and she suddenly thought, “I wonder if they’re putting on their own shows downstairs for their own audience,” and from there, the idea was born. The more we talked about it the more excited we became by the idea because we thought, “Boy, what a wonderful way to bring the magic and the wonder of theater down to a kind of a manageable scale for a young reader.” We could have lots of fun and be very irreverent without being too obvious or on the nose.
We had just such a good time writing it, modeling all of these mouse characters after people we know and love and have worked with in the past and bringing all of our theater experiences and stories and backgrounds to bear in creating this particular story while at the same time hopefully giving kids the not so subtle message that theater matters and is still very important and valuable and to be seen and appreciated and savored and enjoyed.
That’s really the underlying agenda for us was to be able to help kids discover or really understand the wonders of theater. Then we included things like a glossary of theatrical terms to help them understand better some of the expressions and some theater etiquette and a few little bits and pieces to take it even beyond just the story itself. It’s very tongue in cheek. There’s the whole idea is that the theater is being threatened with demolition and is actually gonna be taken over by a television station.
It’s a not so subtle message there.The mice save the day and the theater is saved. I won’t give away how, but the theater is saved from the wrecking ball thanks to the mice which for us was very important in terms of conveying the message that no matter how small one is one can always make a contribution and you never know what you can actually achieve even in spite of your size or your age.
