Music Theatre Melbourne

Castro’s Children – A History

No, this isn’t an outline of the factual context of our story – you’ll find that outlined elsewhere on this website, and in several of the other places in which Castro’s Children is discussed. Operation Pedro Pan, the people who made it happen, and the varied destinies of the actual 14,048 who were part of it, can be Googled very easily.

This is an account of the development of the work, from its origins in a coffee shop in Caulfield some time in 2010 to its Premiere Season at Gasworks in 2024. It’s a long story (obviously); but this will be a brief account of the evolution of a musical.

The story of Operation Pedro Pan is well known, in the US and – especially –  in Cuba. I’m ashamed to say that, when Simon suggested to me over that coffee fourteen years ago that we might collaborate on a musical, I’d never heard of it. He had, however, and had read a lot about it; it fitted quite nicely with his fascination with the rhythms of Cuban music. He gave me a pile to books to study, and we were launched.

I had recently left Monash University, and embraced the story (and the fictional people whom I soon came to know very well!) quickly and enthusiastically; for Simon, as a full-time Music teacher, the process was necessarily slower. Our modus operandi was unusual. I delivered scenes and full lyrics of songs that I kind-of heard in my head, and he produced far superior music for them. We were both, and remain today, very respectful of each other’s areas of expertise. I loved hearing the songs played or sung for the first time; I remember, when I first heard Olivia’s second-act solo ‘Pictures of Me’, that its beauty just left me speechless …

In 2017 we submitted it to New Musicals Australia, where it was the only show funded for development from a field of eighty-five. That period was crucial to its growth, particularly for the contributions of dramaturg Christie Evangelisto and director Jonathan Biggins, whose suggestion of options for doubling roles prompted a more streamlined and powerful version of the script.

In 2019, we submitted the show to the prestigious New York Music Theatre Festival. At the end of that year, we had a very exciting email from NYMTF, informing us that ‘Castro’s Children’ had been recommended for either a full production or a concert/reading in the following June. The euphoria lasted about thirty-six hours. Then came a second email, advising that the Festival had gone bankrupt; it congratulated us again, though, on having come so far ….

We decided to focus on a Melbourne production, and in March 2020 completed casting the children’s roles in the show. One week later, a mysterious virus was in all the headlines. Our planned July 2020 production at Chapel Off Chapel was quickly postponed.

The pandemic lasted – like Fidel Castro’s incumbency in Cuba – a bit longer than people expected …

Scheduled seasons at Gasworks in 2021 and 2022 had to be abandoned, too. When in 2023 we began talking about one last shot with our production company, Music Theatre Melbourne, almost all our original child cast had become too old for their roles. And a number of our  committed and passionate adult cast had moved on to other things. In the end, two of our child cast remain for the long-delayed premiere (of a total of fifteen very talented child-performers in the July production at Gasworks); the retention rate among the adults is a bit better, with six of the twelve still on board after the aborted seasons. Several of our current cast (Tom Green, Maddie Featherby and Noah Szto) and the Assistant Director of our 2024 production, Laura Fitzpatrick, appear on the demo recordings that we made for our NMA submission in 2017, which you can listen to via the YouTube link noted elsewhere on the MTM website.

Developing a new musical is never easy, especially a large and complex one like ‘Castro’s Children’ and especially, sadly, in Australia. It always takes plenty of luck and persistence to get new work to an audience, and while we have had a fair bit of misfortune on our long journey, we have also been blessed in a number of ways: in the daring and unfailing encouragement of MTM; in the generosity and loyalty of many good performers and other creative people who have helped it become the show it is; in our capacity to discover performers, both child and adult, to match the ones who have moved on; and in the support of a wider community (friends, partners, parents) who have come to know, and to care about, the show.

Peter Fitzpatrick,

Writer and Director of ‘Castro’s Children’.