Take one beloved band director with vision, add 25 blind marching band students;
mix well in Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House and voila! You have an extraordinary, never-to-be forgotten experience.
From the heights of Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, the bards surely look down upon their Concord with pride. The little hamlet, where the nation’s spark of independence was lit on April 19, 1775, brought forth a second uprising in the mid-nineteenth century. With the publication of “Nature” by Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1836, Concord launched a revolution of philosophy and literature that made Concord the center of political, literary, and social zeitgeist for over a century.
Completely unaware of the existence of Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House, Julie Nass and her daughters had developed a deep affection for Little Women, reading the book multiple times and watching all the movie adaptations as a family on their small Wisconsin dairy farm. The Little Women musical, which debuted on Broadway in 2005, was youngest daughter Hannah’s favorite.
“Perhaps some of these summers we may see a band of pilgrims coming up to our door…”1 Louisa May Alcott wrote in 1874 to the Lukens sisters, five girls living in Pennsylvania who had begun a pen pal correspondence with their favorite author.