Mirette Goodspeed Musicals, located in Chester, Connecticut, presented in August the world premiere of Mirette, a new musical based on the award-winning children's book Mirette on the High Wire, by Emily Arnold McCully, at Goodspeed-at-Chester/The Norma Terris Theatre, August 1 - 25. According to a source who spoke to Harvey Schmidt at one of the performances, they are looking to bring the show to New York, and are searching for the right, intimate venue.

Click image to view Goodspeed's press release regarding Mirette.

Thirty years after the opening of their last Broadway hit, I Do! I Do!, Jones and Schmidt are again crossing their fingers, holding their hearts, and doing rewrites for a new musical.

This one is one based on Emily Arnold McCully's Caldecott Award-winning 1992 children's book Mirette on the High Wire. The story introduces Mirette, a strong-minded young girl who helps her mother run a boarding house for actors in Paris at the turn of the century. Mirette becomes fascinated with the tragic figure of one of the boarders, Bellini, a former tightrope-walking star who has lost his nerve. Watching his attempts to regain his air lets, she discovers her own latent talent to balance on the high wire. She Bellini resists the girl's interest at first, then decides he cannot let her down. He arranges for a big comeback by walking a tightrope stretched across a plaza in the city. But when the big moment comes, he freezes, and it's up to Mirette to leap into the sky and give him back his courage.

The Goodspeed workshop stars Kelly Maby as Mirette, Steve Barton as Bellini and Jerry Vichi as Max.

For the first time since 110 in the Shade Jones has written lyrics only. The book is by Elizabeth Diggs, roommate of author McCully. Diggs went to school with Jones' wife Janet, who is choreographing the show, and lived for time in the same New York apartment building as the Joneses. Diggs initiated the project in the spring 1993 asking Jones to recommend songwriters for a prospective musical based on Mirette on the High Wire. Jones, who was familiar with McCully's work, talked to Schmidt, and suggested that maybe they themselves should be the ones to do it.

A series of meetings followed, afternoons at the Sullivan Street Playhouse in Greenwich Village, where The Fantasticks continued its record-breaking run each evening. McCully's book has very little text, but is richly illustrated. The three collaborators pored over the pictures as so many children have done, trying to read between the few lines and intuit further details.

"I liked the simplicity of the story," Schmidt said. "It's very bare-bones. I like taking something simple and developing it, because you can bring more to it. It seemed like something I could do naturally and easily."

Jones said, "We all worked together to try to imagine more about that story. Take for example the fact that no father is mentioned in the story. We imagined the mother had been married to an actor who had run off and deserted her an her daughter, and the mother had a great distrust of theatrical things, and suspicion of theatrical people, and an absolute determination that her daughter would not become involved in that world."

From that was born the mother's song "Keep Your Feet Upon the Ground," which is intended as a figurative warning from mother to daughter. "The mother doesn't know, when she sings that song, that her daughter is already beginning to practice NOT keeping her feet upon the ground," Jones said.

"We also decided Bellini would be almost like a Heathcliffe: dark and brooding and rude, and almost cruel to the girl at first. He doesn't want to be bothered. He once danced with the gods, but now is nothing. Fear is the one thing he can't admit to. Walking on a tightrope is a very arrogant thing to do. It's really tempting the gods. Also, one could assume by implication that it's something you accomplish totally on your own, no team work. Because of the danger and dedication, Bellini cut off all else in his life. His fixation is in being able to do this thing. When that's taken away, he has nothing, and that produces great anger. For the little girl, he becomes like a missing father. For him, reluctantly beginning to open up to her, he becomes impressed with her determination and talent."

Schmidt said he and Jones like to sit and talk a long time about a story before they begin to write. Once they do, they follow no fixed collaboration pattern: sometimes Jones brings a lyric that Schmidt sets to music; sometimes Schmidt produces a melody and Jones fits it with words.

"I don't do a lot of official research," Schmidt said. "Often I just put her [McCully's] book on the piano and just look at the pictures, I find that stimulating in terms of trying to write music. I'm very visually oriented. I look at the picture of Mirette up on the high wire at night, and I get a sense of what that music should be. I find it frees me."

Schmidt said he's always been fascinated with Paris at the turn of the century -- an interest reflected in his Colette score. And flashes of Satie, Debussy and Ravel can be heard throughout Mirette. But he said, "I'm not really trying to be authentic. Mostly it's just me."

The majority of work on a first draft of what was becoming a 90-minute one-act musical was completed by the end of fall 1993, and a workshop reading at the 1994 Sundance Festival in Utah was arranged for the following summer. A rare second Sundance workshop, this one semi-staged for an audience, followed in 1995, which led to a July 1996 production at Sundance's children's theatre, along with the August 1996 production at Goodspeed. All the productions have been staged by Drew Scott Harris, who did Opal and Johnny Pye and the Fool Killer at the Lambs Theatre in New York.

One of the early determinations was that there would be no actual tightrope walking. Just as the Mute in The Fantasticks suggests a wall by holding out a stick, Mirette has employed benches, raised platforms, or sometimes simply a line drawn on the stage, to suggest the high wire. "It's hard enough to find people who can sing, dance and act -- let alone walk on a wire while doing it, Jones said. "Give me a break! -- But not a leg break."