In the world of Broadway, we are all too often guilty of thinking of New York City theatre as the beginning and end of success in the theatre. In so many ways, that is just not true.
And a startlingly good example of that can be found in Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty's Seussical, due to mark its 25th anniversary November 30. Coming to Broadway at the dawn of the then-nascent internet, the show would become a very public and much ridiculed failure its first time out, running less than six months and 198 performances.
But like a phoenix from the ashes, Seussical has enjoyed one of the most remarkable comeback stories in musical theatre history. When the show hit the amateur, regional, and school markets via licensor Music Theatre International, it not only wasn't a failure—it was a massive hit. Ahrens and Flaherty prepared a one-act version of the show that now exists as a Broadway Junior title for young performers and as a Theatre For Young Audiences (adults performing for family audiences) title, which stands alongside the full-length two-act edition. Together, they make Seussical one of the most frequently performed musicals in MTI's catalogue, far and away Ahrens and Flaherty's biggest success.
If you've been a young person doing theatre professionally or otherwise since the early 2000s, chances are you've been involved somehow in a production of Seussical, which is a pretty remarkable feat ("I'm sorry, but you weren't a teenage dirtbag. You were in Seussical," as a much shared millennial meme put it.)
For the uninitiated, Seussical is essentially a Dr. Seuss mash-up extraordinaire, taking characters and plots from numerous of the famous children's author's iconic books (primarily Horton Hears a Who! and Horton Hatches the Egg) and putting them to music. As infamous as the musical was during its first Broadway outing, the show has become a bonafide classic thanks to Ahrens and Flaherty's score, which includes such favorites as "Oh, the Thinks You Can Think!," "Alone in the Universe," "Amazing Mayzie," and "How Lucky You Are," to name but a few.
We caught up with writers Ahrens and Flaherty, plus members of the show's various stage companies (who reunited for a 25th anniversary concert at 54 Below last month, produced and directed by original Broadway cast member Jerome Vivona), to talk about the tumultuous creation process, Broadway run, and the remarkable legacy it's created in the years since. The conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
And thus, behold: The oral history of Seussical:
The year is 1998. Ragtime has just opened on Broadway and is a massive artistic and critical success. It also, rather infamously, ends up being something of a fiasco, with its production company Livent going bankrupt after it’s discovered producer Garth Drabinsky has been defrauding his investors. And surprisingly, it turns out Seussical started out as a Drabinsky joint, too. SFX Theatrical Group, Barry & Fran Weissler, and Universal Studios would ultimately produce the Broadway bow after the dissolution of Drabinsky's production company.
Lynn Ahrens: It came from Garth Drabinski, who had produced Ragtime. He wanted to do another project with us, and he got the rights to the Dr. Seuss canon and presented it to us. He believed in the studio system, where once you worked for him, you were his forever. We had already turned down another project with him, which really annoyed him. And then he presented us with Seussical and we thought we should consider it. I was very reticent to do it, because there’s children’s work in my past [Ahrens was one of the songwriters of TV’s Schoolhouse Rock]. I just thought I’ve been there and I’ve done that. But Stephen had a vision that was quite compelling.
Stephen Flaherty: I actually thought, in a strange way, that it wasn’t dissimilar to Ragtime. It’s based on a classic piece of literature, in this case literature for younger audiences, but such a distinct writing style. And being given the rights to go to all the books, we knew it would be a multi-story piece like Ragtime is. As it turned out, we were able to use elements from the various books, and characters were meeting that never had met before. For me as a composer, after living in the world of Ragtime—which was wonderful, but it’s set in a very particular place in a very particular time—I was really into the idea that I could create a score that didn’t need to exist in any one place or time. It would be basically the world of imagination. I was looking forward to doing more bright, pop colors. So, I guess I convinced Lynn to do the piece because it seemed like a great idea and a totally different direction. And frankly, after the intense drama that was Ragtime, it seemed intuitive to me to go into something somewhat lighter. That was the notion.
Ahrens: I have a photograph of myself—I think that I was probably about six, maybe, and I’m studiously reading The Cat in the Hat. My father took this picture of me, and I have a little striped t-shirt on, and I’m reading The Cat in the Hat. I realized it’s sort of in my DNA, these stories. I grew up on them. As we began to think about and talk about the project, we sat and read them out loud to each other. [Co-conceiver] Eric Idle was in the room at that time. We were reading out loud, and it just began to feel like a wealth of riches that needed to be sorted into some coherent form that it didn’t have at that point. But it started to get really appealing.
Flaherty: So because of the mishegoss that happened with Ragtime, Seussical started with [Drabinsky], but midway we became an orphaned project. [Drabinsky's company] Livent was being sold, and we were considered an “asset.” It became Lynn and I, like Mickey and Judy in the barn, putting on a show with Eric Idle as The Cat in the Hat. We called up our friends. We knew Kevin Chamberlin. We knew Janine LaManna, who had just done Evelyn Nesbitt for us in Ragtime. We called up Alice Playten, Stuart Zagnit, Michele Pawk, who we’ve known for years. And we had our music director, David Holcenberg with us. And it was sort of magical just being in a room and doing this simple show about imagination.
Ahrens: I just have to point out, Irish Stephen Flaherty is using the word “mishegoss.” So, you know he’s worked with me for a very long time.
Flaherty: But! What does it rhyme with?
Ahrens: I don’t know! [laughs] The incredible thing was those people, they all ended up on Broadway. They were just our friends and we were just trying to cast the show. In our next life, we should be casting directors. We did the whole thing. It was terrific at that point in time—just a bunch of kids playing. It was really fun.
Stuart Zagnit, the original Mr. Mayor of Whoville: I had played Vinnie, the neurotic brother of Rita, in Ahrens and Flaherty’s first produced show, Lucky Stiff, which premiered at Playwrights Horizons in 1988. I was thrilled when they contacted my agent and offered me the role of Mr. Mayor in the very first industry reading of Seussical. I had not heard that they were working on this show, so it came as a great surprise! Eric Idle, of Monty Python fame, co-wrote the book with Lynn and for this first reading played the role of The Cat in the Hat. One of my favorite memories of that reading was when we took an intermission between acts and we all went into an adjoining rehearsal room to relax. Kevin Chamberlain, who played Horton, sat down at the piano and began playing “Always Look on the The Bright Side of Life,” which Eric Idle co-wrote for the film The Life of Brian. We all began to sing it, and Mr. Idle joined us! It was just a magical impromptu moment!
Ragtime had lyricist Ahrens and composer Flaherty writing the score, collaborating with book writer Terrence McNally. The team would reunite to make their later musicals A Man of No Importance and Anastasia. But Seussical’s book is credited to Ahrens and Flaherty. Apparently, that was always more or less the plan. And, they say, Ahrens did the bulk of the actual book writing.
Ahrens: Well originally, Eric [Idle] was going to write the book. He wrote a treatment, and then went back to LA and seemed suddenly unavailable, and then we were dealing with the bankruptcy and what not. We didn’t know where the project was going—we didn’t even know who had the rights to it. So I just started writing. We just started structuring it. The truth is, it’s all in Seussian language, which is kind of my thing. I write little verses for friends, for birthdays. I thought, “I can do this.” I’m a good structuralist, and I’d done the book for Once On This Island. So we just kept plugging away. As the show went along and began to get producers on board, I just stayed the book writer. I’m glad I did, because it’s very good. Stephen and I, by the way, split book credit on that because we both came up with the idea, the structure, and everything.
Flaherty: I think this was our fourth show? And Lynn had written the book for three of those four shows.
Ahrens: Yeah. Nobody knows it, because I don’t make a big deal out of it.
Ragtime made it to Broadway in a giant, very commercial production. But the content of the story is anything but commercial. The show’s success was clearly in major part to an art-first methodology from its creators, and even its producer—for better or worse given the financial and legal implications. It must have been a surprise for Ahrens and Flaherty to follow that up with a family show and one with powerful commercial brand recognition. But they say that was never a concern.
Flaherty: I mostly thought it was a great artistic challenge. It’s a complete unexpected left turn, which excited me. I wanted to write something more in a pop vein after Ragtime, a very period-centric piece. And it was creating a story out of different elements. All of that was very exciting.
Ahrens: We never think about where our shows are going to end up. We think about what we want to do next. What we want to do next is always something that’s very different from what we just did. We’ve made a point of that, just for our own growth and interest. It never occurred to me that it would be a commercial show. It sort of ended up that way. I will say when we went into the project, one of the pluses of it was that the Seuss books are famous, at least in America. They’ve lasted for so many years. Everyone knows them and they’re beloved. And they’re taught in schools and you have them in libraries and parents read them to their kids. So, it had that brand recognition, if you will.
How do you go about adapting a bunch of disparate stories into one musical?
Ahrens: There are probably 40-something books; we have big stacks of them. As we went through, it began to just occur to us that the Horton stories—there were two Horton stories, Horton Hears a Who and Horton Hatches an Egg—they were the most story-heavy of all the books. The rest of the books are little adventures with this character or that character, but these were actual stories. Somehow, I don’t remember how we knew how, it bubbled up that these two stories could be combined into one. So, Horton gets the egg and he’s got this responsibility to hatch it, but he also somehow inherits this clover filled with people, filled with a world of people called the Whos. And in the course of his adventures, he saves the Whos and he hatches the egg. And with the help of Gertrude McFuzz—who was a little fly-by character, no pun intended—she had a one-feather tail. And I think it was Eric Idle who said one very key thing, that every musical has to have a romance. And we discovered Gertrude McFuzz, this very minor little character in a tiny little book (I think Yertle the Turtle and Other Stories, and she was one of the other stories) and she became the heroine. When the pieces fall together, which they did, it became apparent. From that point on, I just started looking for titles and phrases and characters, bits of language and stuff to enrich it, to bring as much of the books in as we possibly could.
Flaherty: The interesting thing is, what we were given from the estate is that we could use the character of The Cat in the Hat, but we could not use the plot of either The Cat in the Hat or The Cat in the Hat Comes Back, because there was a Cat in the Hat movie that was being planned. We had to find a different way to use him. He sort of became the emcee of the evening, like in Cabaret, where he sort of weaves in and out and plays many different characters throughout the evening. We had to find a way that we could stay away from that plot, frankly.
As is often the way in these tales, some things did end up on the cutting room floor.
Ahrens: I’m not sad to have lost it exactly, but when we were out of town in Boston, there was a piece we’d written called “The Lorax.” It was basically a 10-minute musical all contained within Seussical. Somehow we got to this story, told this beautiful story, and it was like a little mini-opera. And then we continued with our main character. We discovered that we needed to cut time very badly. And it felt like a weird left turn in the middle of the show that didn’t belong there, so we had to cut that. It’s a self-contained piece, a terrific little mini-musical that I hope someday we’ll find a use for. I regret it because it hurt people who were in it. That was sad.
Flaherty: It was a cast favorite, and it never played in front of the New York audience because we lost it in Boston. A year and a half or so ago, my alma mater, Cincinatti Conservatory of Music, decided to throw a big celebration of music at Carnegie Hall. It was all student actors and some Broadway folks that had gone there, and a student orchestra. Our orchestrator, Doug Besterman, re-orchestrated “The Lorax” for a 65-piece orchestra, so it finally got its New York debut at Carnegie Hall. It ended the first half of the evening, and it was so fantastic. That was a happy ending.
Joyce Chittick, original Broadway ensemble: It is a perfect little gem. We knew it didn’t further the plot and understood why it had to be cut, but it saddened us all. When we did the recording, we had 10 minutes left in the session to record it with just the piano. We sang it perfectly in one take after not having sung it for a few months. To this day, and with both of these reunion concerts, “The Lorax” remains very dear to all of us originals.
Most musicals languish in development for years and years; the industry guideline is that most projects take five years to get to a final product. But, Ahrens and Flaherty say, Seussical happened remarkably fast.
Flaherty: I think we began not that long after Ragtime had opened, which would have been January of ’98. Definitely by that summer we were writing the show. We had our out of town in mid-2000, and we opened up on Broadway just before the end of the year in 2000. We’re fast writers. Ragtime, I think each draft was about six months. That was up within two years, and that’s a three-hour show. Once we’re inspired and on a roll, if you’re going down the center of the lane (which you always hope that you are)—all of a sudden, the show reveals itself to you, and then your job as a writer is to catch it as quickly as you can.
Ahrens: The thing that usually takes time is getting it produced. The writing is always fast.
Anyone who was paying attention to Broadway musicals when Seussical premiered might remember that it was originally billed as Seussical The Musical, often to some amount of snickering from certain sectors of the Broadway fan community. Ahrens and Flaherty are both still upset about it—the title, not the snickering.
Flaherty: I think the name was from a marketing person—because you know, it was an imperfect rhyme!
Ahrens: Every time I see Seussical The Musical, I just get so mad. It’s not the name, ladies and gentlemen of the press. It is just Seussical.
Flaherty: Somehow it wound up on a poster, and then it became stuck.
There were several developmental stops the show made on its way to Broadway, including industry readings and a workshop with Livent in Toronto.
Zagnit: We did a full workshop production of Seussical in Toronto, with Andrea Martin playing The Cat. One of my favorite moments of that workshop happened when Horton, who had been left to sit on Maysie’s egg, finally meets up with her again. Maysie tells Horton he can keep the egg, and flies off. There is a moment of silence, which was broken when a child’s voice was heard in the audience, asking, “what happened?” The entire audience reacted. At the note session following the performance, [director] Frank Galati excitingly mentioned the little child wanting to know “what happened.” The child was my own four-year–old son, watching the show with my wife in the mezzanine. I could not have been prouder!
David Lowenstein, Wickersham Brother: When we did the workshop performances, the audiences went wild. And these were “the suits” that were there to decide if they wanted to invest in the show. They beat their hands together and stomped their feet. That very rarely happens.
Andrew Keenan-Bolger, JoJo pre-Broadway: I remember rehearsing for a backers’ audition. We were in the lower lobby of the Richard Rodgers Theatre and someone had rolled down a piano so we could learn a new song for the event. Stephen Flaherty sat down at the keys and began to play “Alone in the Universe” for me and Kevin Chamberlin. Hearing it for the first time, I felt my whole world tilt a little. It was the kind of moment that really imprints itself on you as a young performer. I was 14 at the time and I remember thinking, "Oh, this is what it feels like when something truly good is being born." That moment opened my eyes to the magic of collaboration and the privilege of being one of the first voices to bring a composer’s work to life. I think I’ve been chasing that high for the rest of my career. I’ve been lucky enough to reunite with Kevin a number of times over the years to sing it and I still have never made it through without crying.
David John Madore, music assistant: I’ll never forget at the sitzprobe [when the orchestra first plays the score with the cast] in Boston which, by common tradition at the Colonial Theatre, is had in the lobby of the theatre. As I was taking notes for the composer and orchestrator, I had a seat at the creative table. When “Alone In the Universe” began playing, and Kevin began singing, there was not a dry eye in the house. When the music reached the big climax where Horton is imagining flying, Kevin had to stop, because there was so much emotion that he couldn’t sing anymore. Absolutely everyone was crying. I still think of that moment every time I hear or play that beautiful song.
As it would turn out, any drama with the Seussical the Musical title was maybe the least of anyone’s worries. The show’s pre-Broadway bow at Boston’s Colonial Theatre (now the Emerson Colonial) was, according to Ahrens and Flaherty, a horrible and disheartening experience. After Boston, the show would lose its director and most of its creative team.
Flaherty: It was a lot. Everybody was getting fired. It was a bloodbath. Our poor little Lorax, the set pieces were in the sad alley behind the Colonial Theatre. What I learned most is when you think about your worst nightmare, and then that actually happens … I said to Lynn, “We’re not going to exit this experience the way we entered it. We can’t. It will either rip us apart, or we will become so strong and we’ll become superhero-like.” And we realized at that time that we trusted one another, and we just had to believe that we would get through this experience with a modicum of grace.
Ahrens: This conversation was in a bar in Boston at midnight. We were both crying and drunk, so I just want to add that. It was a crazy experience.
The show had something brand-new to contend with in 2000 too: the internet. Shows used to go out of town before Broadway so that the show could be perfected before it got in front of the New York theatre scene. Suddenly, Seussical had the nascent chat and message board scene buzzing—and not positively.
Ahrens: There’s a beautiful ladies’ lounge up in the Boston Colonial Theatre that’s very ornate and gilded and historical. We would go in there to write, and we had a table set up in there because there was nowhere private to work. We would always have to check under the stalls to make sure there was nobody listening in. The most awful thing, for my money, about that process was that it was the advent of the chat rooms and the internet. It had never happened before. All of a sudden, the buzz—people were saying horrible things. “What’s going on in Boston? They’re in trouble! So and so had a fight with his wife in the dressing room.” We just kept going forward and wrote the damn show. We got it up, we fixed it, we survived Broadway. It’s one of the very many reasons that I don’t go on social media, because I feel it’s so harmful, at least to me. I can’t listen to that stuff, or I won’t be able to work. We were the first show to endure that and to experience that close scrutiny of the internet. I think it sank the show, to be honest.
Natascia Diaz, ensemblist: I was gratefully and blissfully unaware of all that nonsense because I was not online then. What a great time that was. Can we go back?
Jerome Vivona, ensemblist: It was hideously distracting and disrespectful—the chatrooms were new and people found courage in anonymity and chose to use that to destroy a production trying to hone its shape and message prior to coming into NY and wasn’t ready for critics yet. I’d say the show has stood the test of time and provides a uniquely positive and rewarding story with sublime music and lyrics that can truly change the soul. It’s a beautiful message and those myopic individuals missed the point entirely.
Bonnie Panson, production supervisor: Birthing a brand-new musical out of town is an extraordinarily difficult, collaborative process. I had to keep my focus on putting the show together technically, which was challenging enough. One night, I gathered the company backstage and talked to them about being a family and keeping family business to ourselves, and not spreading rumors. The next day, a quote from that meeting about keeping family business to ourselves was in the message boards!
Keenan-Bolger: When we were in Boston, I overheard someone talking about this message board called All That Chat. One night, I snuck onto my parents’ laptop to see what people were saying about the show. My voice had started changing during rehearsals, and I was already feeling insecure. I remember reading a post that said, “Andrew Keenan-Bolger, who plays JoJo, is the worst singer in the show and will no doubt be fired before it moves to Broadway.” I was a kid. I didn’t have the tools to separate gossip from truth. I didn’t yet understand how something casual from a stranger can feel enormous to the person it’s about. And the truth is, I was struggling. When the show moved to New York, I was replaced. But Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty fought to keep me involved. They let me stay on for the first month as an alternate and even reorchestrated my songs into lower keys for when I went on. That act of kindness meant everything. It reminded me that even in a tough business, there are deeply decent people who lead with compassion. It also changed how I internalize criticism. As actors, we all have a complicated relationship with it. It’s part of the work, but it’s nearly impossible to take it in without getting hurt. What I’ve learned since then is that you have to build an inner voice that’s kinder and louder than the noise around you.
Flaherty: Everybody was documenting every change, large and small, like single-word changes. And the truth of the matter is… like Ragtime, which we had just finished, we did far, far more re-writes, far more changes. But there weren’t chat rooms, so it wasn’t documented. Seussical was, relatively—I don’t want to say way less changes, but it was less. But every moment was scrutinized. And so suddenly it’s, what is the point of going out of town? It’s very odd.
Ahrens: I don’t think there is any point in going out of town anymore. You’re not going to be able to do it without scrutiny anyway. You used to be able to go do your work, have your friends come up and doctor the show. That can’t happen anymore.
Flaherty: Back in the day, there was a sense of community. Like, oh, Jerome Robbins is coming tonight to take a look at your show and to give you his thoughts about it—we’re all in this together. Seussical did not feel that way. It was so public. There was no privacy. There was no way to have a private life, to protect the baby. Every show has growing pains. But there was no way to shield the show from the public and the constant barrage.
Madore: I remember hearing a certain well-known, then-young wunderkind star Broadway composer, who was also working on a project at 890 Broadway at the time, loudly mocking the concept in the stairwell. “What is The Seussical? What a dumb idea. I get to be Yurple the Purple!”—said in the most withering and mocking tone.
Ahrens: It was very tough. I think my biggest regret about it all is that a lot of people fell by the wayside and were hurt, very hurt. And I felt so bad. It wasn’t our fault. We had nothing to do with it. Somebody who shall remain nameless called me up in tears saying, “Please pull the show. Don’t let it go forward. Don’t let these people keep your show.” And I asked my agent if it was even possible to, at this point, say, "stop this." And he said no. He said, “You could pull your work, but then you would be sued for $10 million. So no, you can’t really.” It was just very difficult and we felt so badly for everybody involved. The only person who was as intrepid as we were in just moving forward was [choreographer] Kathleen Marshall, who is like a rock. One time I was in the ladies’ room bawling my eyes out, and she was, “What’s the matter?” And I’m like, “It’s a disaster!” And she was so great. I’ll never forget her kindness when I was just having a little meltdown. But we got through that, and then it came to Broadway, and that was the next bout of troubles.
Joyce Chittick, original Broadway ensemble member: Those of us who did the workshop in Toronto, we instantly fell in love with the show. We knew this was something special. So to have had the pre-Broadway and then the Broadway experience we had, it was heartbreaking. But the show has clearly won out in the end and has carried on because of the joy and love we all knew was there, you can’t deny or suppress that.
On the road to Broadway, Ahrens and Flaherty says the charge was on to “fix” the show from its bad word-of-mouth. But they didn’t quite love the decisions that were being made around them.
Flaherty: We had a completely different design team, and a new director. All of the people....so much changed around us. All of a sudden, every song had a big brass section. That was the mandate. All of a sudden, the sound design sounded completely cranked and different. And I said, “What’s going on?” They said, “Oh, talk to your producers.” Or, “talk to your director.”
Ahrens: Suddenly it was a big, brassy Broadway musical, which—
Flaherty: It’s the antithesis of that, right? We wanted it to be something you could do in your basement as a kid…
Ahrens: With an inner tube and a ladder. It was the opposite of what we had imagined it would be. I have to say, though, it wasn’t terrible. It really wasn’t. It was fun. I saw the audiences and they reacted very well. Everything was great. But it had so much baggage attached to it at that point that I think it was just doomed. But it wasn’t terrible.
Flaherty: As we got to opening night on Broadway, it wasn’t about the writing anymore. It was about somebody, about commercial producers trying to save their investment. The strength of any show is letting it be its own unique thing, and it was not that.
But, Flaherty says, he was still happy with most of the show’s orchestration (by Doug Besterman, who he’s continued to work with).
Flaherty: We really wanted to get into the playfulness of the score. I had a notion that the "Jungle of Nool" would be like an urban jungle that would be R&B and funk and all that kind of stuff. And we had the Wickersham Brothers, who are these mischievous monkeys. We started doing dance loops with recordings of birds and monkeys and gorillas. If you listen closely on the album, you can hear there’s a bass drum—and it’s a gorilla, it’s not a drum. For Whoville, I kept thinking of Spike Jones, a guy in the ‘50s who wrote these zany recordings. We went into a Walmart and got little kid kazoos and toys, and we sampled them. A lot of the sounds for Whoville were actually small kids toy instruments. Doug had, I think, the time of his life working on the score.
Once the show had opened (on November 30, 2000), critical response was less than glowing. But Ahrens and Flaherty remember that was far from the full story, even though the show would ultimately become a financial failure, running less than six months and for just 198 performances.
Ahrens: The audiences were great. And I don’t read reviews. I just won’t. But the audiences were great. There were so many issues. I think the marketing was wrong on the show. We were told that they were trying to market it as a date-night show. For the life of us, we could not figure out why that was. At one point, there was a photograph of The Sour Kangaroo in a bubble bath nude. Why? We were baffled, and I think it was probably not sold properly. But the audiences were very enthusiastic. That actually hasn’t changed.
The attempts to right the ship didn’t stop at opening night. Less than two months into the show’s Broadway run, producers started bringing in star replacements to play The Cat in the Hat, beginning with Rosie O'Donnell. It became one of Broadway’s first major examples of a role being shared between genders, which actually is a concept that comes from the project’s earliest days.
Flaherty: That was a producer notion. But the original casting lists were all different types of people. At one point, there was Don Rickles, Mikhail Baryshnikov, and Kirstie Alley for The Cat in the Hat. It ran the gamut.
Ahrens: It was to find somebody who would sell tickets and keep the show open, somebody with a Q rating. I kept saying, “Get the Pillsbury Doughboy. He has a Q rating.” Rosie had her show on the air and she loved theatre, as we all know. She was a big promoter of theatre, and was so kind to the theatre community. She came in knowing all her lines. She learned her blocking 1-2-3. She loved the show. She gave herself an opening night party, and at it, gave the whole cast video cameras as gifts. She was fabulous, and I love her to this day for that whole experience. She was just wonderful to the show and to us, and she was funny. She made the role her own, very Rosie O’Donnell. She was very droll, tough, and funny.
Flaherty: She was also into parenting and adoption at that time, and she helped several cast members find their family, find their children. She was incredible. The fact that the producers brought her in and didn’t throw a party for her, and she said, “All right gang, we’re going to take over Don’t Tell Mama.” And that’s where her party was.
Bryan Batt, The Cat in the Hat Standby on Broadway: She was so kind. At the time my husband, Tom, was a personal chef—he was Betty Buckley’s!—and Rosie had him cook on her show. She was so kind and supportive!
Zagnit: When Rosie joined the show, we honestly did not know what to expect. But we soon discovered she truly wanted to be one of the company! She was a team player from the start, giving us all gifts on her opening night! She was supportive, generous, helpful, funny, and made The Cat her own!!
Diaz: Her passion for and belief in the show was a gift. We were alone in the universe, and she was our Horton. Did all she could to protect us and give the show the Broadway birth and run it deserved.
Lowenstein: Rosie was a godsend. She was also instrumental in the adoption of our two children—love her.
Eddie Korbich, ensemblist: I was going to leave the show after Rosie’s first week, but dear Ann Harada and Mary Ann Lamb convinced me to stay through Rosie’s run and thank God, because I talked to her in the second week and she ended up facilitating our adoption process. Our daughter Alex is now 23!
Vivona: Rosie was always a staunch supporter of our show and was a transformational figure for our family specifically. Rosie met our then-two year old daughter, Michaela, at the opening night party at Tavern on the Green and fell in love with her. She invited her to be a guest on her show and Michaela and Rosie became fast friends—Michaela appeared four times over the next year and spent her third birthday on the show (where my very pregnant wife and I presented her with a three-foot Cat in the Hat cake for her Birthday on air) and then she returned to announce the birth of her brother, Thomas Vivona, only a month later. As a Cat’s Helper on the show, I spent a great deal of time with Rosie both onstage and off and appeared numerous times on the show as a performer as well. I have nothing but love and admiration for her and her family.
Ahrens: And then she was followed by Cathy Rigby, who was an entirely different Cat in the Hat. She was literally climbing up on the boxes and hanging from them—this tiny, little athletic creature who was funny and very sweet. And she gave the cast a party. There was a lot of good will and wonderful experiences attached to the show as well.
Flaherty: I think one of the really interesting things about this particular show is it speaks to everybody. Everybody can play it. When we had our reading, we had Eric Idle as The Cat in the Hat. When we did reading number two, we had Andrea Martin as The Cat in the Hat. We’ve had JoJo as male, female, non-binary. I think it’s kind of wonderful that anybody can be any character in Seussical, if they see themselves in that character. In that way, it was ahead of its time, certainly. We just had to be super careful that the correct orchestra parts are on the stands.
Justin Gomlak-Greer, ensemblist: God, the constant reimagining of “Day for the Cat in the Hat,” depending on who our Cat was. In seven months, we had four cats, so we seemed to always be rehearsing that number!
Seussical The Musical ended up closing May 20, 2001. The New York Times reported at the time that the production lost an estimated $11 million, then one of Broadway’s biggest losses. But Ahrens and Flaherty were not done with Seussical. They tightened the show up for a 2002 national tour, losing some extraneous subplots and a few songs, and making the plot progression more linear than it had been on Broadway. But Seussical had a surprise third act ahead that would see it find its biggest success.
Ahrens: We had to wait, I think, a year or two for the rights to revert to us, when producers finally say we’re not going to do anything more with the show. At that point, we simultaneously got approached by the Coterie Theatre [in Kansas City, Missouri], and they wanted a shorter version. They said they needed a version that was about an hour and 15 minutes because of their audiences. I think that’s what impelled us to go back to work on it. I’m not sure that I would have been able to do that had we not had those two events come together. I think I would have just thrown up my hands and said, let’s just give it to stock and amateur and hope for the best.
Ahrens and Flaherty cut their 2.5-hour, two-act version of Seussical to a 70-minute one act version, which premiered at the Coterie. They ultimately brought the musical back to NYC with an Off-Broadway run at the Lucille Lortel Theatre via TheatreWorks USA, directed by Marcia Milgrom Dodge.
Ahrens: It was like a breath of fresh air. It was like, wow this works. This is fabulous. I could see it a million times and never get tired of it, because it moves so quickly. It’s delightful, it’s funny. The plot is clear and the characters are very well-delineated for such a short time. The first time I saw it, it was like a balloon lifted off. There was no Lorax, there was no Butter Battle, there was no JoJo trying to get home for the holidays. It was just the story of Horton and Gertrude and this egg and this community of Whos, and it just flowed.
Flaherty: When Marcia came to us, we started talking about the early reading and how simple it was, how it was about a group of friends telling a story together. We said it should have that kind of vibe, not big sets. It should be whatever you happen to have at home at that time. So she had like turkey basters and oven mitts and plungers and all those sorts of things. It was about imagination. It was about we don’t have anything. We just have these few simple objects, and you have to fill in the blanks with your imagination. That’s where we started, and that’s where we ended.
Brian Michael Hoffman, Horton Off-Broadway: Everyone was excited to have Seuss back in NYC and to see what this new version would be. Marcia Milgrom-Dodge, our director, saw each Jungle of Nool character as a different kid on the playground. Mayzie is the most popular girl in school. Jojo is the young artist, drawing in the corner. The Wickersham Brothers are the jocks. Horton didn't want to be an athlete or a fashion designer, so he was off to the side of the playground...so basically me in middle school. It was brilliant and allowed everyone at any age to see themselves in the show. We had some incredible fans who would come see the show and then come back again and again. I had one little Who who would bring me a sunflower each time he came because he couldn't find a clover in NYC. His family and I are still in touch to this day. And my Off-Broadway cast is also still very close. We celebrate Seuss Day every year "on the 15th of May."
Ahrens: I like everything that’s gone. I love the Butter Battle, the Lorax. But in the whole context, they aren’t necessary. They’re fun. We don’t mourn the material. What’s important in the end is the show, the full show. I think editing is the biggest skill that any writer should have in their arsenal, rewriting and condense, making everything as tight and compact and forward-moving as possible. Young writers don’t know that yet. They’ll learn it, but a lot of them don’t know it, and they all have 2.5-hour readings of shows that should be one act. I see it time and time again when I go, and I want to say, “Edit your work. Shorten it, pick the highest moments and take us on a joy ride, forward, forward.”
Flaherty: And the thing about theatre is these things never go away. That’s what I love about it. If somebody wants to do the two-act version, they can. If they want to do the one-act version, they can. It’s all out in the world. It’s about finding new people and how they see themselves in the show, and what they do with it. That’s always exciting.
Ahrens: When we’re working on a show, we don’t think about where it’s going to play. We just think, well we’d see this. We like it, so somebody will like it. We didn’t have any kind of master plan of it taking over the country and schools by storm. It’s definitely for family audiences. We knew that. Graciela Daniele said something once to me, and it’s the simplest statement. But she said, “You know, if it’s good, it’ll find a home. And if it’s not good, it won’t.”
Flaherty: That’s all you have to cling to. Lynn and I never lost faith. There was a huge perseverance in our attitude as we were going forward with it, and we always knew there was a terrific show in there. We just had to find it. A writer’s fantasy is when a critic says, “Oh, I was wrong,” which never happens. We brought the show back to the Lortel, and we got sensational reviews, even from The New York Times.
Ahrens: It was on the front page, a picture of The Cat in the Hat. All of a sudden, they loved us again. You just go forward. There’s nothing much you can do if you want to keep writing. The truth of the matter is, we have careers as writers if we get up and we write. That’s what we love doing. We can’t let that be taken from us.
From Broadway failure to a sudden success, Seussical has turned out to be one of Broadway’s most legendary comeback stories. Ahrens and Flaherty’s career is storied and includes many beloved and oft-produced musicals—Once On This Island, Ragtime, A Man of No Importance, Lucky Stiff, and My Favorite Year, to name but a few. But, they say, Seussical is by far their most performed and their biggest money maker.
Ahrens: Number one. By far. And I never would have guessed that.
The show is done so often that if you’re a theatre kid, it feels like it’s almost a given that you’ve been involved in a Seussical at some point or another.
Flaherty: This whole new generation of Broadway performers, people come up and say, “You don’t understand what this meant for me to do this show.” I think of whenever I was 12 and I saw my first professional show in Pittsburgh, Godspell. That was a show, again, done with a chain-link fence and two planks of wood, no production value. And I thought it was fantastic. I was so taken by it and thought, oh I want to do that, I want to be a part of that. I know that Seussical has that same effect on so many performers, and I love to hear that.
Janine LaManna, Gertrude McFuzz on Broadway: This isn't a show that started 25 years ago. This is a show that has been happening for 25 years. I have seen many productions over the years and still get butterflies when I hear that score. Watching kids, even my own, perform those roles with such heart, gets me every time. So many young girls reach out to me to ask for advice on how to play Gertrude. And I have met so many fellow actors that tell me of their experience with Seussical as young performers. [Former Wicked Elphaba] Alyssa Fox told me that playing Gertrude in college helped her decide to become a professional actor!
According to Ahrens and Flaherty, for all its struggles, there were lessons to be learned making Seussical.
Ahrens: I think what I learned on Seussical was the value of economy in storytelling, which I try to apply to everything we do always, almost to a fault. I find myself analyzing everything to see if it feels a pinch too long, or if it can go a little faster. I learned a lot about dealing with a producer. Now I don’t say, “Yes.” I say, “Huh. What a good idea. Let me think about that.” That’s my stock answer. And then if they had a point, I try to address their point in my own way. I will come back and say, “You know, that idea you had, we didn’t do it, but we did this other idea which wouldn’t have happened had it not been for your valuable input.” That’s one lesson I’ve learned, is to trust my own instincts and to take what others suggest or want into consideration if I feel it’s worthy. But never just to say “Sure.”
Flaherty: It’s about surrounding yourself with people that you not only love to work with, but you love as people. Working on Seussical, it was a difficult thing, but there was a lot of love and support in that group and the people we were working with. Here we are 25 years later, everyone’s still around. People loved being with one another. Graciela at one point, she said, “Shows that have difficult births, that’s one of the things that brings people together.”
Ahrens: We can talk all we want to about the cruelty of the internet and the bitchiness of the reviewers and the crazy producing choices that were made and the hardships, but it has had such a happy ending. When you survive something like that and you continue your relationship as we have, you look back and—what an experience it was. It was incredible.
The Seussical we’ve ended up with is, they say, the show Ahrens and Flaherty first dreamed of before any of the drama. And that’s what makes them proudest of it today.
Ahrens: The show has gotten tighter and changed a bit, but it’s still the same show, really, at heart. It’s a sweet-natured snow with some very subtle messages in it about the environment, and about treating each other well, and the power of children, and the importance of mixed families. That’s all there, and it’s always been there. I think that’s what gives it its universal appeal. I think that’s what’s integral to the Seuss books. Ted Geisel, who was Dr. Seuss, he didn’t like children very much, weirdly. But he had passionate feelings about things that are very important to all of us. Those were the things we glommed onto and tried to put in the script.
Flaherty: And the ending of the show is really something that we came up with on our own. It ends with two families. There’s a nuclear family, which is the Whos. And then there’s a found family, an elephant and a bird, and they decide that they’re going to raise a child together, an elephant bird—destined to be an outsider in the world. They love one another and they love that kid. Just to have that message, that was totally worth doing the entire show. There are all different kinds of families, and they all have value. Sit up and take notice.
And if you find yourself working on yet another of the world’s many productions of Seussical, Ahrens says she knows the secret to its success.
Ahrens: The simplicity of production. Don’t worry about too much of anything. Just use your imagination, and feel the hearts of these characters, and you’ll have a great show. That’s the most important thing with this particular show, the power of imagination—and it is about family. If you can just keep your eye on those two ideas, you’ll have a successful production.
You can find more content and updates from the October Seussical reunion concert at @SeussicalBroadway on Instagram.
