Maggie Cassidy is Chris Jeffries musical adaptation of Jack Kerouac's novel. The production supported by the Kerouac estate is a collaboration with IU Department of Theatre and Drama students directed by the Bloomington Playwrights Project's Chad Rabinovitz.
First Love And Leaving
Jeffries notes that although Maggie Cassidy followed On the Road and Dr. Sax it's a semi autobiographical look back to Kerouac as a seventeen year old. "We find him still in high school in his hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts. It was this sort of grim depression factory town of immigrants. And the book is about his first love, his growing up and leaving home and becoming the Jack Kerouac we know –the writer that even then he knew he wanted to be."
The Voice Yes, But...
"His way of seeing the world and how that's expressed through his really wild language is a big part of the book and we do have some of that in the show, particularly in the songs, but there's a really interesting story underneath. How does an iconic American artist get created, especially one who came from sort of unlikely blue collar, immigrant surroundings? You don't normally think of that as a background to produce a sort of American literary giant, but it did. Telling the story of how that happened was what fascinated me."