Heidi had always been a fan of Marissa Meyer books. I had never really heard of or read them before. She’d told me about the Lunar Chronicles, so I was at least familiar with the concept. But even though I hadn’t read any of Meyer’s books, I was hooked on the concept of twisted/rewritten fairytales. Finally, summer of 2018, Heidi shoved a copy of Heartless into my hands.

“You have to read it,” she said. And so I did.

“I promise you’ll love it,” she said. And wow, I did.

Shortly after I finished the book, I was at a block party with a friend of my mother’s. The neighborhood wasn’t mine, and I didn’t really know anybody, so I just sort of wandered the street lost in my own thoughts, when I ran into Heidi. Turns out it was her neighborhood, and I did know somebody here. We wandered around the party and started chatting, and soon, we got on the topic of Heartless. We both gushed about how much we loved it.

Heidi said to me, “Don’t you think this book would make such a good musical?”

I EMPHATICALLY agreed. We immediately began discussing every aspect of it. How we would translate different things to stage, what scenes we would want to put songs in, and who of our friends could play different characters well. We both agreed that I would obviously be Hatta, who else would be? We ended up going back to her house and getting a piece of paper to write all our ideas down before we forgot them.

By the time school started, neither of us were really focusing on it. We talked about it, and thought about it, but neither of us took the time to act on it.

Until Ellie and Isabel approached Heidi. They had both just read this awesome book called Heartless, and they had such a great idea:

“Don’t you think this book would make such a good musical?”

In September of 2019, things really took off. Heidi decided it was time, she was really going to write the musical. The next few weeks were spent fervently writing songs any time she had a moment. In between classes, at lunch, and after school. Ivy, Isabel, and Ellie jumped right onto the lyrical composing bandwagon with her. I distinctly remember one lunch when she handed me the lyrics for the first iteration of ‘Mad Yet’ and asked my opinion on them. They had been scribbled in her notebook during her first three periods.

For the next two years, friends would jump on and off the bandwagon, work and not, plan everything from individual moments to lighting for big numbers that would eventually be cut. But through it all, the original conceptors kept the project close to their hearts. Though the work may have lulled, they never abandoned it.

There were read throughs, multiple rounds of auditions, several small rewrites, one full scrap and rewrite, and even a number of studio recording sessions in Ivy’s grandfather’s studio. The whole time we asked ourselves and each other “What do we do when we’re done? How would we actually perform this? Do we record only the songs? How do we share our project?” But the most important question was, “Are we going to be allowed to move forward with this?”

In the beginning of 2021, the script was finally done. Truly, when you’re a creative, a project is never done until you take it away from yourself, but we had reached a point where we felt comfortable doing that. 20 scenes, 15 songs, 22 characters. The thing we’d always been thinking of doing was looming in front of them as the next step: Emailing the script to Marissa Meyer herself. After a couple group read throughs and an editing session in the park, we sent in the script and held our breath.

“She’s a busy woman. We probably won’t hear anything for like six months,” I reminded Heidi, “don’t get your hopes up.”

But three months later, the email came in, and it was from Marissa Meyer herself. She was ecstatic. She said she loved the script, the heart of the story was captured perfectly, and if we ever got a chance to perform it, we had to inform her.

It was the email we never thought we would receive! And in it contained the thing we had wanted the most, permission to perform the show for an audience.

The beginning of our Junior year of high school. Having survived a global pandemic and school in online learning, we were all happy to be back. And back to school meant back to something big for a lot of us, theatre.

Isabel had a brilliant idea: pitch the show to the theater department. Isabel and Heidi approached the heads of the theater department right away, script in hand. We had the script, the crew, and the student interest. “Could we use the theater to show case our work?” We were told, maybe the end of April there might be room. Perhaps we could perform alongside the yearly straight play. So we all waited. Tweaked the script. Waited some more.

Out of nowhere, at the very beginning of November, a show date. First week of February. Black box show. That’s what you get.

Of course, we swooped at the opportunity. It was finally real. It was finally happening. The show we’d spent the last three years pouring our hearts and souls into, writing and rewriting and casting and recasting, plotting and planning and day-dreaming, the day was here. We only had one more thing to do, and it was to contact Marissa again. It was necessary to confirm that we were allowed to sell tickets to the show. We didn’t want to get in any legal trouble, but we weren’t sure the head of the theater department would let us perform without selling tickets.

Heidi sent off another email. I gave her the same warning once again.

“She’s a busy woman. We probably won’t hear anything for at least a month,” I reminded Heidi, “we may have to move forward without selling tickets.”

The next day Marissa emailed back. She was absolutely thrilled about the production, we were absolutely allowed to sell tickets, and she wants to try and come see the show live.

Immediately formal auditions were held. The cast was built, the production team decided, and the production process began. Our show, three years in the making and fully produced by us and us alone, moved into full swing.

We dove into rehearsals for the show, bringing together our cast to learn songs, block scenes, and choreograph numbers. However, we ran into trouble with our theatre department, and began to look for other venues.

We happened upon a theatre in Centerville, Utah, where we would have a day in April to fit in as many performances as we could.

Since that point, the production team has been working around the clock, budgeting, preparing props and sets, fitting costumes, and working to make this show run as smoothly as possible.

We had an interview with a Centerville reporter, and continue to receive sponsorships and set up fundraisers. Excitement built among the cast as the show came together and we got closer to our performance date.

The three days of performance were honestly a blur. 12 hour sessions of finishing the set, doing our one tech rehearsal (which took us only 10 hours, a feat for any theater group!) and opening the next day. The theater was packed. People came from all over the nation to see our show! We had people hailing from Arizona, Maryland, Colorado, California, and beyond. Marissa lost her voice cheering at the show the night before, so at the book signing she between the shows, she had to have a sign up apologizing cause she couldn’t speak.