Author adds music to her resume

When Barb Joosse was a child growing up on Sunset Court in Grafton, she would write and produce “little garage plays” that she and other children in the neighborhood staged for their parents.

“We would sell tickets to the parents and sell popcorn,” Joosse said, adding they would donate their proceeds to the newly opened library in the Village of Grafton.

“I had this fantasy of doing theater.”

That fantasy has become reality for the noted children’s author, who today writes from her condominium in Port Washington.

Joosse, who has written 59 children’s books, wrote the lyrics to the songs for “Lovabye Dragon,” a musical being put on by First Stage in Milwaukee from Jan. 24 to Feb. 15 that’s based on the Dragon and the Girl series of Joosse’s books.

The play will be performed at the Cedarburg Performing Arts Center after its run in Milwaukee.

“This is the most exciting thing I’ve ever done,” Joosse said of her foray into music. “It’s highly creative, and I was working with highly creative people, people who are masters at what they do.”

This is the second time First Stage has put on “Lovabye Dragon” — the first was in 2017 — and Joosse said the production is impressive.

The lead characters are Girl and Dragon, with Dragon being a 13-foot-long puppet that takes up much of the stage and requires three people to operate — one to move it, one to handle the tail and one to move the head and mouth. It’s so impressive, she noted, that the puppet won a Jim Henson Award back in 2017.

“It’s so much fun,” she said of the production. “The children really get into it. They forget that Dragon’s a puppet and see him as a real creature.”

Joosse is now looking ahead to her next composition.

“I wrote this one, and now I want to write more,” she said.

Songwriting is a new endeavor for Joosse, who said that aside from those childhood musings she really never dreamed of writing music. As a child she took piano lessons for 10 years, but she said she wasn’t a very good musician.

“I have no musical talent at all,” she said. “I couldn’t keep the rhythm, and I still can’t read music.”

She took a roundabout path to music that began when she attended a conference for early childhood educators in Las Vegas and noticed a man attending each of the workshops she presented.

Then, at a book signing, he was at the back of her line with a stack of her books.

“He asked me, ‘Have you ever thought of collaborating?’” Joosse recalled, adding she quickly said no. The man then asked her, “What if it’s music? I think you could be a lyricist.”

That, she said, was intriguing. Although she had never written music, Joosse is used to spreading her wings. She’s written newspaper stories, commentary for public radio, books for children and teens, a graphic novel and done an audiobook that tells the stories of six Lake Michigan shipwrecks near Port Washington.

A week later she and the man — Mark Meckel, a Nashville music publisher — talked and he asked if he could send a team to Cedarburg, where Joosse’s office was at the time, to work on a song.

The first day she met with the team, Joosse said, it took all day to come up with a song.

“It was really terrible, but I could see how it was structured,” she said. So the next morning, before the team arrived, she worked on the chorus of a song based on her 2010 book “Lovabye Dragon,” which was published in 2012.

“Their little eyebrows went up,” Joosse recalled. By the end of the morning, the song was written, and by the end of the afternoon the group had written two other songs. Joosse and Nathan Meckel, Mark’s son and a member of the team, are credited as co-writers, and the songs were recorded by the Happy Racers, a band specializing in children’s music that Mark Meckel manages.

Joosse said she always envisioned the song as part of a musical based on her Dragon and Girl books, which are currently out of print. She’s hoping Scholastic will pick them up to reprint them and publish the fourth volume in the series.

She approached Jeff Frank, the executive artistic director at First Stage, with the idea of staging the musical, and he introduced her to Brandon Kirkham, who suggested the idea of Dragon being a large puppet.

Although Joosse said she was skeptical at first, she was quickly won over and embraced the idea.

Dragon isn’t the only puppet in the show. The Bad Hats who are after Girl’s gold —  Joosse described them as “3-year-olds at a party and they’ve had too much sugar” — are three little hand puppets.

The story, which is designed for children through age 8, is about a girl who is clever and resourceful, the big, brave and somewhat clumsy dragon she befriends and the adventures they embark on.

The story is narrated by the Troubadour, something Joosse said is important.

“I felt very strongly the words and feeling of the book be portrayed, not just the story,” she said.

Translating the books into music and a play wasn’t too difficult, Joosse said.

“I like the characters so much and I liked the musicality of the book so much,” she said. “I’m known for that (musical) style of writing. It’s more jazz than classical. It is the style of language non-speakers like babies are drawn to. They’re drawn to the sounds and the words.”

It’s a way of writing that she leaned into after her first grandchild Lucia was born and she saw how the infant responded to different writing styles, Joosse said.

“That changed my writing forever,” she said.

Joosse said the idea for the Dragon and Girl series came from a fantasy she had growing up. She was a small child, she said, “and it felt powerless to be so small. I thought, if I had a dragon who was my best friend and Bob Anderson’s house was on fire, I could fly over there and help.

“It was a way for a small person to have power.”

Joosse said she has plans for more Dragon and Girl books, most based on adventures she’s looking forward to.

“What would you do that you otherwise would not if you had a big dragon at your side?” she said. “I think there’s a lot you would do.”