A Magical Musical, Fit for an Emperor

Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens

Meet the Adaptors: Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty

This fanciful musical adaptation of Andersen’s beloved fairy tale was created by librettist/lyricist Lynn Ahrens and composer Stephen Flaherty. It was originally commissioned and produced in 1985 by Theatreworks USA, an acclaimed children’s theatre company based in New York City. Ahrens remembers that early experience fondly as the first time she ever wrote the book for a musical, the first time she and Flaherty ever had a work produced, and the first time they ever “did anything real.” The team learned a lot about how to read an audience from watching children react to The Emperor’s New Clothes. “Children are like little adults,” says Ahrens, “except that instead of looking at their watches, they get up and start screaming and yelling.” Now celebrating 25 years of collaboration, Ahrens and Flaherty have created an impressive array of hit Broadway musicals, including the Tony Award-winning Ragtime, Seussical the Musical and the Tony-nominated Once on This Island. The pair also wrote the score for the animated feature film Anastasia, and Ahrens won an Emmy Award for her work on public television’s "Schoolhouse Rock."

Learn more at: http://www.ahrensandflaherty.com/

1836 portrait of Hans Christian Andersen by Constantin Hansen.

Father of the Fairy Tale:
Hans Christian Andersen

Hans Christian Andersen—renowned worldwide for his beloved fairy tales—was born in the slums of Odense, Denmark, on April 2, 1805, the son of a poor shoemaker and a washerwoman who could neither read nor write. Andersen received little formal education as a child, but his father loved literature and took him often to the theatre, and his mother told him stories all the time. As a result, young Hans began writing poetry and creating puppet shows, and at the age of 14, he moved alone to Copenhagen to seek his fortune as an actor or singer. Although his dream never came true, he was destined to be in love with the theatre for the rest of his life. But when someone casually referred to him as a poet, his life suddenly took a new direction. “It went through me, body and soul, and tears filled my eyes. I knew that, from this very moment, my mind was awake to writing.”

In 1822, 17-year-old Hans enrolled in grammar school, but because he was so much older than the other students, he endured terrible teasing and humiliations. Five years later, he gained admission to university, where he finally completed his formal education and became a writer. His first works—travel sketches, poetry, plays and even a few novels—were mildly successful, but worldwide recognition came for his fairy tales. In the first volume, he retold old stories he had heard from his mother as a child, but gradually he started making up his own and eventually created 168 fairy tales. The Emperor’s New Clothes is from the third and final volume of the series Wonder Stories Told for Children, and was published in 1837.

Denmark’s greatest contributions to the world of literature are undoubtedly the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen, who is often ranked with the likes of Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Cervantes. Although he titled his collection as “told for children” and claimed they were written exactly as he would tell them to a child, Andersen intended them for young and old alike. “I seize an idea for older people and then tell it to the young ones, while remembering that father and mother are listening!”