Barbara Follett disappeared in 1939. Her life is now a musical

In the world of child prodigies, novelists are the rarest breed. Barbara Newhall Follett, born in Hanover, New Hampshire, in 1914, was a good fit for this project. By the time she was nine, she had completed her first novel, a later draft of which Knopf published when she was twelve. Two years later, she published her second novel. Both were met with critical acclaim, and Newhall became a celebrity in the publishing world.

Nearly a decade later, after a fight with her adulterous husband, 25-year-old Follett left her apartment in Brookline, Massachusetts, with $30 in her pocket and a notebook. She was never seen or heard from again. The mystery of the former child prodigy’s disappearance has captured the public’s imagination ever since, spawning a number of books and articles about her life and disappearance, including a 2019 article in the Los Angeles Review of Books speculating that Newhall had committed suicide by taking barbiturates.

The world premiere musical can now be added to the growing list of Newhall-themed explorations. “Perfect World,” written by Alan Edmonds and composed by Richard Finzler, with lyrics by both men, opens Saturday at the El Portal Theater in North Hollywood and runs through Nov. 9.

The project marks Edmonds’ debut as a script writer. The retired psychologist — who specializes in gifted children — came up with the idea to create a musical about Follett’s life after a deep dive into her archives at Columbia University about 15 years ago.

“As I read this, I begin to feel the tragedy of what actually happened to her,” Edmonds said during an in-theater interview about the pounding of hammers and the whirring of drills while assembling the detailed set. “I thought this was the hero’s journey. Unfortunately, it’s not a happy ending.”

Edmonds was so inspired by 15 boxes of archival material, including hundreds of handwritten letters Follet wrote to dozens of relatives and acquaintances, and the endless lyrical descriptions of Farxelia’s fictional world at the heart of her first novel, “The House Without Windows,” that he drafted his initial outline for the musical on his knee while taking the subway from Columbia to Broadway to see “La Cage aux Folles.”

The show’s cast took creative license in retelling Follett’s story, but for the most part Edmonds stuck to the broad outlines of her short, colorful life. The musical moves back and forth between two stories: Follett’s experiences leading up to her disappearance, and the national investigation that unfolds afterwards, led by the stubborn Captain Stahl and propelled forever by her grieving mother, Helen Thomas Follett.

Edmonds said Follett’s childhood was marked by unhappiness, noting that Helen, who wrote for a merchant shipping company, and Follett’s father, a Knopf literary editor named Wilson Follett, quarreled frequently.

“They were going at each other hammer and tongs,” Edmonds said. “And even when they wrote about Barbara, later, you could feel the animosity between them.”

This made sense because about a year after Barbara Follett’s first book was published, Wilson left Helen for a much younger woman, moving in with her in Greenwich Village. Her father’s abandonment dealt a devastating blow to Barbara, who adored him. She then embarked on a sailing trip with Helen from New York to Barbados and then through the Panama Canal. Barbara became seriously ill during the voyage, the result of nerves and depression, Helen believed.

Around that time, Follett met and fell in love with a 25-year-old sailor named Edward Anderson. Helen disagreed, and Edmunds said she conspired to fire Anderson from his position as second mate. Edmonds said the loss of Anderson was the second major blow in Follett’s life, a thread running through the musical, which led to Follett meeting a recent Dartmouth graduate named Nickerson Rogers — the man who would become her husband, and who would eventually leave her after she had an affair with her childhood best friend.

The couple shared a love of nature, and before they married, they spent months hiking and camping together along the Appalachian Trail. Photographs from the early 1930s show Follett, thin, barefoot and with short hair, sitting beside an open fire with a cooking pan and an old tin coffee pot.

Follett’s life was filled with crushing disappointment and almost constant pressure, but nature provided her liberation. This is likely why she was conjured up with the ideal world of Fraxulia at such a young age. It was an escape, and Follett packed it with as much detail as he could, including his own mathematical system, his own language—Pharxo—and his own alphabet.

The heroine of “The House Without Windows” is a young girl named Ebersep, who runs away from home to live contentedly with her animal friends in the forest. If it sounds simple, it is. But that was also his genius.

It was loved by critics and sold more than 20,000 copies in its initial printing.

“I can confidently promise happiness to any reader of The House Without Windows. Perfection,” English children’s book writer Eleanor Farjeon wrote in the review.

There are many theories about what happened to the adventurous and stubborn young woman after she disappeared, including that she was murdered by her husband, who demanded that she stop writing and did not report her disappearance until two weeks after her passing. Others believe she simply moved away, changed her name, and continued to write under a pseudonym. Then there’s the recently surfaced idea that she went to her family’s cabin in the woods and swallowed enough barbiturates to end her life. This theory states that the body discovered in the late 1940s was misidentified as another woman, when it was actually Follette.

Edmonds has thought about the matter extensively and believes that Follett loved life too much to kill herself. The idea that appeals to him most comes from a small clue in Follett’s archives – a letter from the sailor Anderson that Follett received shortly before her disappearance. It can be inferred from her letters that she never stopped loving Anderson. Is it possible that she went to find him when she found out about her husband?

Edmonds ultimately decided not to go down the rabbit hole of speculation about Follett’s death, choosing instead to focus the musical on Follett’s life, “what she did, how she saved herself, how she was involved and connected to nature, and how she wanted people to care for each other and be good to each other,” Edmonds said. “How can we have a better world.”