Clever and heartwarming, MTH’s musical Little Women allows Alcott’s prose to fly

Photo by Cory Weaver

Music Theater Heritage opened its 2025 season with Little Women: The Musical. Based on Louisa May Alcott’s classic novel. the Broadway musical adaptation is celebrating its 20th anniversary in 2025, and the show’s mid-2000s arrangements make clever choices in bringing the book to stage—mostly in knowing that it can let Alcott’s prose soar and allow the other elements to take a backseat.

Little Women, based on Alcott’s life, follows four sisters’ adventures during Civil War America as they keep a faltering family alive through sheer will and not an insignificant amount of rakish charm. Framed around sister Jo’s freelance writing submissions—adapting their own narrative—the March sisters grow into womanhood while choosing vastly different paths through the world, all the while supporting each other and their community through setbacks and even tragic loss.

Directed by MTH Artistic Manager Emily Shackelford, the ensemble cast features Maurissa Cunningham, Molly Denninghoff, Alex Herrera, Bryson Kendall, Jessalyn Kincaid, Haley Knudsen, Madoka Koguchi, Alan Martin, and Julie Shaw.

This is one of those shows where a full review can simply be skipped (complimentary).

Photo by Cory Weaver

Like many MTH productions, a stripped-down production with a musician placed on the stage is more than enough—allowing the cast to use the space to their heart’s content and making any extra choices around costuming, arrangement, or lighting truly ‘pop’ when employed. For a story with a plotline centered on a piano as a unifying object, putting the show’s lone musician on a grand piano at back-center is the perfect choice. Then, a cast where actors often take multiple roles, whisks in and carries the night away.

The reason there isn’t much to review here is because, tip to tail, Little Women is exactly what it should be. Creative choices to cast skill, there isn’t a clunky note, nor an element I would change. For a show about freedom, joy, and the expansive power of limited lifetimes, the entire thing is simply solid. Not just solid, but almost beyond reproach. I have no notes to offer, no quibbles over choices, and no one player to specifically single out for skill or lack thereof—a very Goldilocks sense of experiencing theater that is ‘just right.’

The arrangement itself makes a few choices that avoid the very common trappings of musical adaptation. Little Women tells the story, as written, and never screeches to a halt to expand a single moment into a full song, simply for the sake of having songs. There is no pecking order of making sure each character gets an equal share of spotlight and/or that their motivations and psyche overpower the world to push everyone else aside. Rather, the show allows Alcott’s prose to remain almost fully intact, and in place of catchy numbers or big refrains, just gives grace and proper power to its original text.

Did you know that you can take a flawless bit of literature and simply add a beautiful piano roll underneath, or layer a fight with a few meaningful chords, or underscore aspirations with a low-key gentle harmony… and that it doesn’t need to be more than that? Turns out that works. That works really well. Almost disorientingly well. After the show, I could name perhaps two of the songs to you off the top of my head, even while singing the praises of the entire cast’s subtle strengths.

I’m not sure I can point to anything adjacent to it in musical theater, where something so successful in its performance can also relax the confines of the genre; to have the confidence of not insisting on more attention.

Photo by Cory Weaver

Perhaps more memorable is how… look, the word “heartwarming” gets overused to the point where its among the Words To Never Use on our internal style guide as a publication. But this was the definition of heartwarming in a moment where, culturally and politically, I have serious concerns about humanity’s very ability to produce empathy. Over the two-plus hour runtime, I left my own neurosis behind and just shared a space with talent, energy, and a universal joy. There is so much entertainment that promises “an escape” these days, and so little of it delivers. That Little Women would be such a successful ‘sick day movie’ amid a pandemic of psychic illness should, perhaps, not have caught me so off guard, but I’m glad it did.

This show is very good. Everyone from KC theater is very good in it. If you think you’re not in the mood for a Little Women musical tonight, you’re wrong. Heal thyself, physician.

The show runs until March 2 at Music Theater Heritage.

Photo by Cory Weaver