My father had just retired from the military when I was 15. So we suddenly found ourselves in a fairly small southern town, and we were a little bit fish out of water — the kids in my family. I was having a very hard time at that point trying to fit in with kids who’d known each other all their lives.
I was floundering and I was bored and didn’t know who I was; and then down the road from our house was a little darkened theater. I think of it as dark and musty and then magic would happen. I stumbled into that theater one day and started taking classes; and the next thing I knew I got cast in plays and it was the most magical place I had ever entered.
To this day, I can get this sort of excited feeling thinking about leaving the outside world and stepping in there and the smell of that and the feel of it. That saved my life — the theater. I would work onstage, work backstage, just sit in the audience and absorb all of these dramas.
I loved the Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. It was the late ’60s, so they were replaying all those wonderful ’50s dramas. I thought the actors were fantastic. They were the local banker, the local, you know, newspaper reporter — all the local people who would be in the shows.
But that was probably for me the thing that most influenced my life up to that point besides family which I would say would always be the biggest influence. I had a very tight, wonderful family growing up, but the theater then just saved my life. I think that when kids can have an introduction to the arts when they’re young, especially if they feel a little alien to their high school or junior high culture, they might find themselves in a way that’s a surprise to them and to their families, which is what happened to me.
A wonderful full circle is that my husband wrote a musical of The Magic Tree House with a wonderful composer named Randy Quartz. And we were looking for a place to produce this show and we interviewed with a lot of New York producer types and we kept not really wanting to do it the way people thought we should do it.
One day, my husband’s riding home and he said, “We’ll produce it ourselves.” Then we discovered that in our community — we’d only lived there a few years up in Connecticut; we’d always lived in New York City — but up in Connecticut there is an incredible local theater that does wonderful shows year-round and draws from all the talent in the area.
We went to this theater and we started paying attention and Will started going to all the shows; and we said: we could cast the show locally. So we cast it locally; it was an 1800 seat theater and we filled it every night and put on the show with 50 actors; and it was a triumph.
And now, ten of those local people are changing their lives, giving up their jobs, two are selling their houses and they’re going on a road tour with our show for the next two years. It not only will change our lives — this musical which is going to go all over the country — but it’s changing the lives of everybody who’s going to be in it.
It feels like that’s what happened to me when I was young and now that’ll be happening to both the young adults and middle aged people who have always wanted to be professional performers but had to give in to economics and become real estate executives and other things. They’re going to give up their jobs now and travel with Magic Tree House: The Musical.
So we’re having a ball producing this and putting it out and we just bought a 50-foot trailer that’ll carry the sets around the country. The whole thing is a little bit like: my mom can sew, we have a barn — let’s put on a show. So we’re going to see if we can pull this off and hope that people will come.
My husband Will and I will drop in and visit the show and do publicity whenever it’s necessary. There’s a wonderful website called MTH — for Magic Tree House — MTHmusical.com. It has all kinds of information — videos, songs, photographs — and it’ll have a list of everywhere the show is going to go in the next year and it’ll keep revising the list.
Anybody who’s interested and trying to catch it in their state or their area could look at the website.
