In August of 2022, I was getting a divorce. Among other things, this meant moving out of my home, which meant packing everything into boxes and taking those boxes from one place to another.

One afternoon, I opened one of the boxes, and sitting on the very top of it was Shannon’s book. I had no real plans to do anything with it, except there was something about that book in that moment that said, “Pay attention to me.”

I picked it up, and I devoured it. Not only was Shannon’s prose beautiful, but her characters sang. I could feel the music leaping off the page. I called my good friend Liz Rossi and told her about the book. She read it practically overnight. The next call was to Penny, my agent, who also devoured the book and agreed to help connect us to Shannon.

Liz and I wrote a scene and a song to pitch to Shannon. We picked the love scene/song, not knowing that Shannon had based the meeting between her two leading characters on her own meeting with the man who would become her husband. And thank goodness we didn’t know, because that would have jammed us up like 5 p.m. traffic on LA’s 405. But in our gloriously ignorant bliss, we each took a crack at the thing we do, and then two friends of ours, Jenna Lea Rosen and Pierre Marais, were kind enough to demo the scene and song for us so that we could send it to Shannon.

I don’t think I’ll ever forget that particular stretch of time. Out of one of the most difficult experiences of my life came one of the most joyful. Shannon said yes to us, and we wrote what we affectionately call a love letter to the American musical theatre: a show by, and for, people who love a good story.

And what a good story The Goose Girl is. It’s a coming-of-age story about Ani, a young princess who loses everything and must discover who she really is before reclaiming her place in the world.

There’s a little bit of Ani in all of us. And I sincerely hope we are able to bring this story to life on the world stage one day.

~ Matt Smedal