Laura Heywood Interviews Steven Sater (Spring Awakening, Alice By Heart)

Laura Heywood Interviews

Steven Sater is a Tony, Grammy, and Olivier Award winning lyricist, librettist, writer, poet and much more. He is the man responsible for Spring Awakening, the show that inspired the passion that led to Laura Heywood's online alter ego, @BroadwayGirlNYC. His new novel, Alice By Heart, is a gorgeous and poetic expansion of the world behind the musical of the same name. Hardly a re-relling of Alice in Wonderland, the story instead is about a different Alice, down a different kind of hole – a lost pubescent girl in the panic of 1940s London, seeking refuge in an abandoned Tube station for herself and her sick best friend. The other children there do seem to oddly resemble the characters from her favorite Lewis Carroll novel, and the more terrifying the war becomes above ground, the more solace she takes in retelling the story she knows by heart to Alfred, the best friend who is succumbing slowly to tuberculosis. As a boy, Steven Sater himself was very sick – confined in quarantine most of his young life – and books were his refuge, too. So as we read the intertwined stories of these two Alices and the plight of struggling youth – we are, in a way, learning Steven’s story, too.