Creators behind CTC's ‘Milo Imagines the World’ hope to spark your imagination

When audiences young and old come away from Milo Imagines the World, the world premiere musical opening Feb. 4 at Children’s Theatre Company in Minneapolis, their own imaginations will be fired up.

At least that’s the hope of composer Christian Magby and lyricist Christian Albright, who put music to the adaptation of the 2021 picture book by Matt de la Peña and Christian Robinson. The musical, a joint commission by CTC, Chicago Children’s Theatre and the Rose Theater of Omaha, brings to life the story of a young boy’s fanciful train journey in which he invents lives for the people he sees.

“I love things that have ‘imagine’ in the title, so ‘Milo Imagines the World’ really jumped out as potentially going to be big,” Albright said. “This was a young boy of color. … Magby and I and [writer Terry] Guest really resonated with him.

“I’m an avid daydreamer; I love to create,” he said. “I love that this kid could harness his imagination in such a lovely way.”

The commission came about after former CTC artistic director Peter Brosius saw Magby and Albright’s musical The Incredible Book Eating Boy at Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre, where the two have forged a close partnership after meeting at the city’s Youth Ensemble 15 years ago.

“Peter reached out and said, ‘Hey, I think you guys would be good for writing the music’” for Milo, Magby said.

The duo sent Brosius more samples of their work in late 2022 and by early 2023 they had the job.

Albright said the story fit into their personal mission. Early on in their partnership, they resolved to tell stories about history within the Black community, keeping it “relevant and alive,” he said.

“We had a moment that we decided this is the journey we want to embark on, and we made a pivotal shift to work on original stories, untold stories,” he added. “It was that choice that led us to dig even deeper into how do we perfect our crafts” as composers, lyricists and dramaturgs.

Magby said he first approached Milo with a sense of gratitude.

“Truthfully, I started it by thinking, ‘It’s great to be asked to do a new work.’ That’s the first thing that attracted me. There was a reason they asked us to work on the show.”

But he soon found a deeper purpose.

“I didn’t necessarily get it while I was reading,” he said, “until I got to the end of the book. Then that became our task, to go backward from the ending.”

Albright echoed that sentiment.

“I don’t want to spoil the ending — it’s a really big surprise,” he said. “The moral of it is, don’t judge a book fully by its cover. When I got to the end, I had to think about the cover. Then you literally realize that you judged it yourself. It’s an interesting concept of a child learning a moral, and a reader learning that same moral from the character, as well.

“It also talked about personal issues families and children have gone through — coping, alienation, handling separation. The imagination aspect gave me room to play with the scope of the story.”

There were limiting characteristics to the plot, too, because the book takes place on a train.

“One of the hardest things for us was how to keep audiences engaged for an hour for a story that is on a train 80 percent of the time,” Magby said.

The music is a big part of propelling the story along that track. The songs represent a multitude of genres — hip-hop, country, pop — each of which serves to illustrate the scene.

“Once we know what each vignette and moment calls for, the musicality appears,” Magby explained. “Borrowing things from the book, the illustrations, helped. Truthfully, the road map was there for us; it’s just our interpretation of it.

“What’s cool is that the show has a very contemporary sound, no matter which genre, but it never loses the musical theater style of telling the narrative.”

Magby and Albright both wear other hats, as playwrights and actors in their own right. These experiences inform their writing for other performers.

“I would say that I think there’s a mindset that comes with it — we’re not just writing from a place sitting in front of a stage, but on the stage,” Albright said. “We see ourselves in the moment. We have an innate sense of how it should be performed, what they should say, what feeling and movement should be. Being an actor presents us with a more in-touch relationship watching actors go on the ride with our work.

“Sometimes we also realize it’s OK to allow the actor to do their own interpretation,” he acknowledged. “We do realize from our experiences that they deserve that right. We are teachers and students just as much as they are.”

And as for the audience members, they’ll do their own interpretation, too.

“I think when people hear ‘children’s musical,’ everyone goes into the mindset of, ‘This is what I’m going to see,’” Magby said. “We’re not necessarily making content for kids, but content that can be enjoyed by kids and their families.

“What’s interesting is that young and older audience members are going to leave with something — a sense of, ‘I saw myself in that story today. This is now how I can look at things.’ Every time I watch it there’s something new that I can take away from it, that sits with me.”

The two are hoping audiences will see Milo as the kind of foundational experience they had as kids watching The Lion King, The Adventures of Elmo in Grouchland, The Goofy Movie and VeggieTales.

“What they did back then was amazing,” Albright said of those youthful influences. “It’s stuff like that we remember, how it made us feel.”

Rewatching them as adults had a beneficial result: “It reinvigorated our craft.”

“Those things stuck with me,” Magby confirmed. “That is the material we truly desire to create, something that sticks with you, heart, mind and soul.”

Event details

What: Milo Imagines the World
Where: Children’s Theatre Company
When: Feb. 4-Mar. 9
Tickets: $15-$78