First Performance

As part of FronteraFest, a yearly festival of new plays in Austin, Texas, Heidi was presented in a series of enhanced staged readings in February 2018. For potential producers or directors, a video of the production is available:

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Features

Roles

Heidi
Grandfather
Klara
Peter
aunt
housekeeper
Peter’s grandmother
Klara’s grandmother
pastor
tutor
butler
Smaller roles: Peter’s mother
Klara’s father, aunt’s friend,
doctor, maid, villagers

Songs

“Gossip”
“The Meeting”
“I Am a Boy of Switzerland”
“Is It All a Dream?”
“Isn’t It Time?”
“Consonants”
“I Must Be Quiet”
“There Is Someone Else”
“The Angry Son”
“Could It Be So?”
“Sunday Morning”
“Wilkommen”
and more…

Orchestration

Flute
Oboe
Clarinet
2 French horns
Trumpet
Bass trombone
Percussion
Strings

Heidi Trailer

Heidi Songs Preview

More Songs

Reviews

  • “I sat spellbound during the whole production.”

    “The whole experience was exceptional!… It’s a radiant musical.”

    “Most impressive in every category!”

    Audience Members, Heidi First Production
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About the Play

  • Significance

    The novel Heidi was written as a book “for children and those who love children,” as quoted from the subtitle. According to Wikipedia, it is one of the best-selling books ever written and is among the best-known works of Swiss literature. It was one of my favorite childhood books, and many people of my generation and earlier


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  • The Novelist

    Johanna Spyri published Heidi in 1881. Wikipedia and the jacket cover of the Viking edition of Heidi, 1996, shed some light on the author’s life: Johanna Spryri was born Johanna Heussar in 1827 in Hirzel, Switzerland, a village with magnificent views of the Alps. As a child she spent several summers near Chur in Graubünden, the setting she


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  • Creation of the Play

    I wrote Heidi in response to what I believed were divine promptings. Once the scenes were planned in 1996, I wrote the musical over a period of 20 years, from 1997 to 2017. The composition of many of the piano-vocal scores and orchestrations was supervised by Donald Grantham, Professor of Composition at the University of Texas at

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  • About the Play

    As the play opens, Heidi is taken to live with her forbidding hermit grandfather in the Alps. They form a close bond, and Heidi is happy until she is kidnapped by her aunt and taken to Frankfurt, where she becomes the companion of Klara, an invalid girl. In her homesickness Heidi learns to trust in

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