They All Saw A Cat … Coming to New York in June 2018!
I’m terrified (and delighted) to announce that I’ve been commissioned by the Mormon Arts Center in New York City to create a new concert work for the toughest audience I know of: kids! Real, distractible, fidgety, painfully honest, joyfully noisy, future-of-civilization-type micro-humans.
My mission: to adapt Brendan Wenzel’s terrific book They All Saw A Cat for chamber ensemble with narrator and projected imagery. If you haven’t read this book (with or without a kid on your lap), you should. Not only is it a New York Times bestseller and a Caldecott honor selection, but it’s brimming with vibrant, inventive imagery and rich with meaning. (I’m grateful to have been introduced to it by Rachel W., the fearless and all-knowing juvenile reference librarian at BYU’s Harold B. Lee Library, and to have been granted permission for this adaptation.)
This piece, which intends to be a modest addition to the tradition of Peter and the Wolf, will premiere in June 2018 at the Mormon Arts Center Festival in New York. And, yes, real human children will be in the audience!