The children’s book “The Great American Mousical,” published in 2006 by HarperCollins/Andrews, is a family affair, written by the actress Julie Andrews and her daughter Emma Walton Hamilton, a writer, director, and actress, with illustrations by the set designer Tony Walton, Emma’s father.
The action takes place below the lights of Broadway, beneath the Sovereign Theater, where a long-forgotten architect’s miniature model of the theater resides. In that little theater, a troupe of mice are preparing to stage their own show, “Broadway Airs,” when Adelaide, the diva, disappears, and the theater is threatened by demolition.
The story, written by theater insiders, “brims with theater lingo, fittingly applied touches of melodrama (‘The show must go on’) and cleverly placed familiar lines (‘Our revels now are ended’),” said Publishers Weekly. “The players here may be small in stature, but the story is big of heart and deserving of an enthusiastic round of applause.”
Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor, one of whose founders was Ms. Walton Hamilton, also feels the show must go on, in this case with a musical production of “The Great American Mousical.” Ms. Andrews herself will direct a staged reading of the book on Monday evening at 7, as part of Bay Street’s Music Mondays series.
The production, based on the book, features music by Zina Goldrich, lyrics by Marcy Heisler, and book by Hunter Bell. Ms. Goldrich and Ms. Heisler both received Drama Desk Awards for “Dear Edwina”; Mr. Bell was nominated for a Tony Award for the book for the musical.
The reading will be followed by a conversation with Ms. Andrews and Ms. Walton Hamilton. The evening is a one-time-only benefit for the theater, with tickets starting at $250, which includes one free drink. $500 tickets will include a gift bag. All proceeds will support the theater’s development of new works and training of future theater artists.