A February snowfall turns the Island white as composer Bob McDowell ducks into the Main Street Theatre and slips behind the piano.  Three girls in ponytails sling their down jackets over folding chairs and pick up sheets of music.  “The beat is slow and easy,” McDowell tells them, snapping his fingers with one hand and hitting the keys with the other as they sing:  “Fairy tale endings are more than they seem / Aren’t they why we continue to dream / And take them wherever we find them?”

A half-hour later, twenty third-to-seventh graders clutching scripts in green folders scramble onstage.  Director Nancy Howe, who runs the Theatre with her husband, Worth Howe, jumps up from behind her desk.  “You will all be frozen into positions when the lights come up,” she says, lining up the kids.  “Draw a picture so you know exactly where you stand.  ‘Down Right’ is toward the audience.  That’s how you write it.”
 
This is Like Totally Grimm, a children’s musical staging its first-time production on Roosevelt Island:  65 kids in 3 casts, 17 weeks, 57 rehearsals, 71 pages of lines, and 11 new songs.

The Premise
Grimm is the story of four “tragically hip” kids, stuck on a country vacation without cable or video games, left with only the chirping crickets and a book of Grimm’s Fairy Tales.  They smirk over the book and soon find themselves trapped in a fairy-tale land where enchanted characters refer to Martha Stewart and Starbuck’s, Red Riding Hood takes the subway, and a medieval princess shops at the Canterbury Mall.

One of the Brothers Grimm shows up as well, chiding the witch for lapsing into a line from the Wizard of Oz.  As the tales flip-flop from medieval to updated-urban, McDowell’s music swings from 14th-century troubadour to Annie DiFranco-style folk rock.

“It’s definitely a fractured fairy tale!” says playwright Bill McMahon.  “These kids look at the Grimm stories and think, ‘this has nothing to do with our lives.’  That’s when the witch appears and puts each one of them into their own fairy tale.  They have to figure out the moral, or they don’t get to go home.”
 
As the kids grapple with the enchanted characters – a pit bull in sunglasses, a dimwitted king, and a junk-food-munching computer geek among them, they learn that fairy-tale morals still matter.  “It’s about reconnecting with innocence and imagination,” McMahon explains.  “We have kids nowadays who are so scarily mature and who are, on one level, almost over-entertained.”
 
McMahon and McDowell pioneered the Main Street Theatre’s first original children’s musical, last year’s Alphagirls.  For McMahon, a prize-winning playwright hailed by Backstage as “a strong new Off-Broadway voice” in 1999, it was also a first foray into children’s theater.  A finalist for the 2003 Richard Rodgers Award, Alphagirls took shape as the MST kids read through the script together, marking out parts that seemed false to them.

“The early version had only nine characters,” McMahon recalls.  “Nancy was saying, ‘I’ve got a lot of kids, we need more parts!’”  (One year, she added more kids, of all nationalities, to The Sound of Music.)

“I ended up writing a piece with parts for 21 children,” McMahon says.  “I’ve never directed that much traffic on a page before!  Every now and then Nancy would call me and ask, ‘Where do they exit?,’ and I would say, ‘I don’t know, you tell me!’”

“By Grimm, I had more of a clue,” he adds.  “I had fewer notes [comments] from the kids, so hopefully that means I’m getting better at it.”
 
During rehearsals, McMahon let the kids scratch out lines and pencil in Harry Potter.  At Nancy’s suggestion, he tossed out one of his three Martha Stewart jokes.

Laced with plenty of the “edgy and out-there” humor of Alphagirls, the script is “multi-layered,” says Nancy, “with adults understanding it on a deeper level than kids.”  At times, McMahon’s tales turn dark.  A boy learns that he will turn to stone.  Another is chained to a computer alongside creepy web-surfing geeks.

“This is kind of a tough show – there are some things in it that aren’t what you usually see in kids’ theater,” says McDowell, a veteran of more than 20 MST musicals whose credits include Off-Broadway shows Swingtime Canteen and Oats: A Serial.  “It’s not silly stuff.  Nancy has always been very open to letting us try things and going out on a limb with this.”  McDowell, in fact, conjured up the fairy-tale theme and the title.  “I let Bill think he’s in charge,” he says.

“When Bob first came up with the idea of fairy tales, I sort of jerked back and said, ‘We’re going to be compared to Into The Woods no matter what we do,’” McMahon says.  “I complained left and right.  But he persisted because he wanted to try something different musically   Alphagirls had been a pop-flavored score.  He chose three of the stories.  I chose only Red Riding Hood, and he was resistant to that one because he’d done a couple of cabarets of Red Riding Hood!”

Putting It Together
On this February afternoon, the kids are rehearsing scenes from McMahon’s take on Red Riding Hood, a gritty New York-style “Red’s Hood” in which Red must hop the subway to Grandma’s apartment.

“You guys represent the bad, scary things in life,” Nancy tells a clutch of kids who surround Red.  “Come up with your own scary sound – it can’t be funny!  Freeze in a nasty, sinister position. We want the audience to gasp!”

The “scary characters” exit the stage and try the scene again, running toward Red.  “You’re not coming in at the right time – you’re too early,” she tells them.  “How do you turn on stage?  You turn toward the audience.”

When a boy reads a line about the Bates Motel, Nancy asks the kids if they know what that is.  “It’s, like, a movie,” one child offers.

As the calendar flips to May and opening night looms closer, Nancy starts snatching scripts from the kids who try to hold onto them.  “If you forget your line, stay in character and say ‘line,’” she tells them.  Nancy’s assistant, former student Carla Blumberg, feeds them the forgotten lines.

Backstage, Worth Howe and his volunteer assistant, Gwen Almo-Duvar, pull out the costumes.  Medieval hats and headdresses, fashioned by a hat-maker whose child had a part in a long-ago production of Once Upon a Mattress, are scattered across the dressing-room table.  Papers taped to the makeup mirror list cast members to be fitted.  Worth, who began designing costumes and sets as a University of Texas costuming major, places a long lavender veil on the head of a pint-sized actress and jots the details in a book.

He swings open a door to reveal a costume stockroom so vast it requires a map, taped to the wall.  He begins his search here, then combs the Island thrift shop.

So far, a purple doorway on wheels and a tree adorn the stage.  A shirt of yellow flowers hangs on a workshop wall plastered with old movie posters.  Hidden under a sheet, a signboard for the subway scene – Worth’s surprise for McMahon and McDowell – advertises the musical Into the Woods.

A week later, the cast gathers onstage in gowns, tiaras, veils, and tights for the dress rehearsal.  Some sport sneakers with their medieval costumes.  “Don’t forget to bring your party shoes,” Nancy tells them.  One actress asks if she can do homework in the dressing room between her scenes.  Carla Blumberg climbs into the sound-and-lighting booth and slips headphones over her ears.  Worth flips on the fog machine.

As the rehearsal stretches into its fourth hour, the kids break into the finale song.

“Invariably I’m thrilled with what Bob comes up with,” says McMahon, watching from the audience seats.  “And it’s kind of exciting to have actually inspired something like this.”