Barbara Follett disappeared in 1939. Her life is now a musical

On the earth of kid prodigies, novelists are the rarest breed. Barbara Newhall Follett, born in Hanover, N.H., in 1914, match the invoice. By the point she was 9 years-old she had accomplished her first novel, a subsequent draft of which was printed by Knopf when she was 12. Two years after that, she launched her second novel. Each had been met with important acclaim, and Newhall grew to become a star within the publishing world.

Practically a decade later, after a battle together with her adulterous husband, the 25-year-old Follett left her residence in Brookline, Mass., with $30 in her pocket and a pocket book. She was by no means seen or heard from once more. The thriller of the vanished former youngster genius has pulled on the public creativeness ever since, leading to a variety of books and articles about her life and disappearance, together with a 2019 essay within the Los Angeles Evaluation of Books speculating that Newhall had dedicated suicide by ingesting barbiturates.

A world-premiere musical can now be added to the rising record of Newhall-themed explorations. “Good World,” written by Alan Edmunds and composed by Richard Winzeler, with lyrics by each males, opens Saturday on the El Portal Theatre in North Hollywood, working by way of Nov. 9.

The challenge marks Edmunds’ debut as a librettist. The retired psychologist — who specialised in gifted kids — stumble on the concept of making a musical about Follett’s life after a deep dive into her archives at Columbia College virtually 15 years in the past.

“As I’m studying by way of this, I begin to really feel the tragedy of what actually occurred to her,” Edmunds mentioned throughout an interview on the theater over the pounding of hammers and the buzzing of drills because the detailed set was put collectively. “I assumed that is the hero’s journey. Sadly, it’s not a contented ending.”

Edmunds was so impressed by the 15 containers of archival materials, together with a whole bunch of hand-typed letters that Follett wrote to dozens of kinfolk and acquaintances, and countless lyrical descriptions of the imaginary world of Farksolia on the coronary heart of her debut novel, “The Home With out Home windows,” that he drafted his preliminary define for the musical on his knee whereas taking the subway from Columbia to Broadway to see “La Cage aux Folles.”

The present’s workforce took artistic license within the retelling of Follett’s story, however for probably the most half Edmunds adhered to the broad strokes of her brief, vibrant life. The musical hops backwards and forwards between two story traces: Follett’s experiences up till her disappearance, and the nationwide investigation that unfolded afterward, led by the dogged Capt. Stahl and without end pushed ahead by her grieving mom, Helen Thomas Follett.

Follett’s childhood was marked by unhappiness, Edmunds mentioned, noting that Helen, who wrote for a industrial transport firm, and Follett’s father, a Knopf literary editor named Wilson Follett, fought usually.

“They had been at one another hammer and tongs,” Edmunds mentioned. “And even after they wrote about Barbara, subsequently, you can really feel the animosity between them.”

This made sense as a result of a couple of yr after the publication of Barbara Follett’s first e-book, Wilson left Helen for a a lot youthful lady, shifting in together with her in Greenwhich Village. Her father’s desertion dealt a crushing blow to Barbara, who adored him. She subsequently launched into a crusing journey with Helen from New York to Barbados after which on by way of the Panama Canal. Barbara grew to become significantly sick through the journey — the results of nerves and despair, Helen thought.

Barbara Follett, a toddler literary prodigy, is the topic of a brand new musical titled “Good World.”

(Courtesy of Stefan Cooke / Farksolia.org)

Round that point, Follett met and fell in love with a 25-year-old sailor named Edward Anderson. Helen didn’t approve, and Edmunds mentioned she conspired to get Anderson fired from his place as second mate. The lack of Anderson was the second main blow in Follett’s life, Edmunds mentioned, and it’s a thread that runs by way of the musical, resulting in Follett’s assembly with a current Dartmouth graduate named Nickerson Rogers — the person who would grow to be her husband, and who would ultimately go away her after having an affair together with her greatest childhood buddy.

The couple shared a love of nature, and earlier than they had been married, spent months mountaineering and tenting collectively alongside the Appalachian Path. Photographs from the early Nineteen Thirties present a slender, bare-legged Follett with short-cropped hair, sitting beside an open fireplace with a cooking pan and an outdated tin espresso pot.

Follett’s life was crammed with crushing disappointment and near-constant stress, however nature offered a launch. That is doubtless why she conjured up the proper world of Farksolia at such a younger age. It was an escape, and Follett packed it with as a lot element as doable, together with its personal system of arithmetic, its personal language — Farksoo — and its personal alphabet.

The heroine of “The Home With out Home windows” is a younger woman named Eepersip who runs away from dwelling to stay contentedly together with her animal mates within the woods. If it sounds easy, it was. However that was additionally its genius.

Critics liked it and it bought greater than 20,000 copies upon its preliminary printing.

“I can safely promise pleasure to any reader of ‘The Home With out Home windows.’ Perfection,” wrote the English creator of youngsters’s books, Eleanor Farjeon, in a overview.

Barbara Follett, a toddler literary prodigy, is the topic of a brand new musical titled “Good World.”

(Courtesy of Stefan Cooke / Farksolia.org)

There are various theories about what occurred to the adventurous and headstrong younger lady after she vanished, together with that she was killed by her husband, who had demanded she cease writing and did not report her lacking till two weeks after she left. Others suppose she merely moved distant, modified her title and continued to put in writing beneath a pseudonym. Then there may be the lately surfaced concept that she went to a family-owned cottage within the woods and swallowed sufficient barbiturates to finish her life. That concept holds {that a} physique found within the late Nineteen Forties was misidentified as one other lady, when it was really Follett.

Edmunds has given the matter in depth thought and believes that Follett liked life an excessive amount of to kill herself. The concept appeals to him probably the most comes from a crumb of a clue in Follett’s archives — a letter from the sailor Anderson that Follett acquired a short while earlier than her disappearance. It could possibly be surmised from her letters that she by no means stopped loving Anderson. Might it’s that she went to seek out him when her husband’s affair grew to become recognized to her?

Edmunds in the end determined to not go down the rabbit gap of hypothesis about Follett’s demise, opting as a substitute to focus the musical on Follett’s life, “What she did, how she rescued herself, how she was so engaged and related to nature, and the way she needed folks to care for one another and be good to one another,” Edmunds mentioned. “How we might have a greater world.”