Who let the pet mouse out?

I was talking to Goodspeed Musicals’ Michael Price Wednesday morning and was able to ask him about a gossip item that turned up just the day before on the Broadway World website. Seems that Julie Andrews will direct an adaptation of the theater-friendly children’s book she co-wrote a few years ago with her daughter Emma Walton Hamilton, The Great American Mousical. Goodspeed has been tapped to produce, probably at the Goodspeed’s Norma Terris Theatre in Chester.

Price didn’t deny the story, but says it’s way premature. The show hasn’t even been written yet, so don’t go looking for it as, say, the as-yet-unnannounced third show on the Goodspeed’s 2011 Norma Terris slate, for instance.

What the item really signifies is the solid ongoing relationship which Andrews has with the musicalmongering Goodspeed. She was presented with the Goodspeed Award for Outstanding Contribution to Musical Theatre in 2005, and the production she directed that same year of The Boyfriend (a show in which she’d made her Broadway acting debut half  a century earlier) toured nationwide.

Price didn’t mention this, but securing a production like The Great American Mousical is more evidence of the Goodspeed’s ever-deepening interest in kid-friendly musicals. Last season, for instance, there were new musical at the Norma Terris based on Roald Dahl’s James & the Giant Peach and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, not to mention the teen-friendly Band Geeks, while over the Goodspeed’s main digs (The Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam) there was Carnival!, featuring a girl entranced with peppy puppets.