Have you heard that Melissa Gilbert is starring in a musical production of “Little House On The Prairie”? It’s true! The renowned Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis-St. Paul is the site of the world-premiere of this show. Gilbert, who is now 44 years old, plays Caroline Ingalls…yep, she’s “Ma”.
This article in today’s New York Times theater section is a little more detailed than that wire story linked above and has a couple of pictures, too. From this article, it sounds like the playwrights borrowed as much from the TV show as from the books. I imagine it must be difficult to deal with the expectations of an audience who are more likely to have childhood memories of the television show, and asking Melissa Gilbert to play Ma is nothing short of brilliant on the part of the producers. It guaranteed the success of the show and creates the possibility of a Broadway run — although it might be a limited run if the only appeal to a bigger audience is her.
Charlotte and I are reading “Little House On The Prairie” as her bedtime story these days, and we’re almost done with the book. We’re actually working our way through the whole set of Little House books, and “LHOP” is Book #3, after “Little House In The Big Woods” and “Farmer Boy” (which is the one about her husband Almanzo’s childhood in upstate New York). If you’ve never read “Little House On The Prairie” itself, it is not the story you know from TV. The Ingalls family uprooted from their home in Wisconsin and travelled to Kansas to homestead in newly-opened Indian territory. It’s a story about a little family on a wide-open frontier, 50 miles from the nearest town, surrounded by unhappy Indians who have been displaced by settlers, and almost totally dependent on their own ability and luck. No Nellie Oleson, no happy little town of pioneers, no heart-warming endings. They almost died of malaria, barely escaped being massacred, and almost drowned just getting there. Then, after just a couple of years, they gave up and moved back to Wisconsin!
Why do I mention Patty Duke? Well, Patty Duke was another child star who managed to continue her career into adulthood, and the role which brought her to prominance as a child was playing Helen Keller in “The Miracle Worker”. Years later, long after her heyday as those wacky “identical cousins”, she starred in a critically-acclaimed TV movie version of “The Miracle Worker” in the other starring role, Helen’s teacher Anne Sullivan. And guess who played Helen in that movie…
Oh, yes. It’s Melissa Gilbert.
And I hear you asking whatever became of the original “Ma”, Karen Grassle. This webpage seems to have the most recent information about her, although even this info is several years old now. She did a lot of theatrical work while she lived in the Louisville, KY area, and made a bunch of TV appearances on game shows several years ago. She still performs on stage, most recently in a Canadian production of “Driving Miss Daisy”. If the new LHOP show goes to Broadway, maybe they could find a role for her as Mrs. Oleson or something.
