HEARTS IN

THE WOOD

ENGAGING NEW MUSICAL

Book by Joanne B. Koch music and lyrics by Jim Lucas

“We’ll make you dance. We’ll make you jump
And if you ain’t dead, we’ll get you off your rump.”

Bluegrass songs including “So Happy I could Cry” and “Maple Stump” will get you tapping and singing along when you see Hearts in the Wood, a new musical with book by Joanne B. Koch and music and lyrics by Jim Lucas.

Hearts in the Wood follows a West Virginia dulcimer maker and once popular folksinger as he discovers he has a grown granddaughter and reconnects with life. His new found granddaughter prompts him to go to Chicago, where he brings his regional music to a place very similar to the Old Town School of Folk Music. Grandfather and granddaughter find unexpected romantic interests in Chicago and finally get past their differences, united by bonds of love and their special music heritage.

Hearts in the Wood was inspired by a folksinger and dulcimer maker whom composer Jim Lucas met while studying in West Virginia. Joanne Koch, writer of an Emmy Award winning television series and writer or co-author of 18 plays and musicals, first heard Lucas’s beautiful country ballad “I Remember Rebekkah” at the New Tuners Musical Theater Workshop in Chicago and the two decided to collaborate. The song is now one of the most memorable numbers in the outstanding score of the show.

Koch and Lucas received an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship to complete “Hearts.” After several staged readings sponsored by the New Tuners musical theater workshop, a staged reading at the Stage Company in Salinas, California, and an earlier production at Northeastern Illinois University where Lucas was Professor of Music, this talented team brought “Hearts” to a series of zoom Chicago Writers’ Bloc workshops and put the finishing touches on their show.

Jim Lucas now resides in Fort Collins, Colorado, but he still maintains ties to Northeastern and takes zoom harmonica lessons from the Old Town School of Music. Joanne Koch lives in Evanston, but her plays and musicals have been produced and toured to theaters and communities across the country, including off-Broadway.

Go to Produced & Published Plays and Musicals for the following:

“American Klezmer”	“Danny Kaye: Supreme Court Jester”
“Motherland”	“Saul Bellows Stories on Stage”
“Soul Sisters”	“A Leading Woman”
“Stardust”	“Courage like a wild horse”
“Safe Harbor”	“Henrietta Szold: Woman of Valor”
“Sophie, Totie & Belle”	“Shared Stages”

Go to Other Produced Plays For:

“Nesting Dolls”	“Teeth”
“Haymarket: footnote to a bombing”	“Sandburg Among the Goats”
“Flying Feathers”

Joanne Koch

Playwright

_{Joanne Koch has had eighteen of her plays and musicals produced around the country. “Stardust” won the 2007 National Nantucket Short Play Competition, was produced in the Turtle Shell Summer Shorties Festival in New York City, published by Dramatic Publishing Company, produced at the Pine Crest School in Ft. Lauderdale and later published in Stars: Nantucket Short Play Competition Winners. “Mammaries” was produced by the Turtle Shell Summer Shorties in New York and at the Nantucket Short Play Festival directed by Eve Messing.}

_{Joanne Koch has received three Illinois Arts Council grants, a Midwest Emmy Award, First Prize in the Piscator Foundation Eighth International Playwriting Competition, the Chicago Patrons’ Award, and numerous other grants and fellowships.}

_{Dr. Koch’s plays and musicals, including “Haymarket,” “Nesting Dolls,” “Sophie, Totie & Belle,” “A Leading Woman,” “Teeth,” “American Klezmer,” and “Saul Bellow’s Stories on Stage,” have been produced off Broadway and in theaters in Albany, Queens, Philadelphia, New Hope, Boston, Miami, Boca Raton, Ft. Lauderdale, Chicago, Milwaukee, Akron, Carbondale, Champaign, Kalamazoo, Los Angeles, San Diego.}

_{Joanne Koch’s teleplays and educational films have garnered numerous prizes, including a Regional Emmy and the American Film & Video First Prize.}

_{Dr. Koch is the co-editor of Shared Stages, the ten-play anthology that includes “Fires in the Mirror,” “Driving Miss Daisy,” “Medal of Honor Rag,” “I AM A MAN” and “Soul Sisters”. She is the co-author of nonfiction books, magazine and newspaper articles, and previously a column syndicated to 200 papers around the country.}

_{Dr. Koch directed the graduate writing program of National University, Chicago, the Master’s in Written Communication. She won the NLU “Excellence in Teaching Award,” initiated their annual literary anthology Mosaic, and their Writers’ Week Workshops.}

_{Now Professor Emerita, Joanne Koch continues to collaborate on her own plays and musicals, including “Motherland,” with Fern Schumer Chapman, based on Chapman’s award-winning book, and “Good Trouble,” the play set to tour Chicago high schools in 2024. In this powerful play teenager Jamal meets unsung civil rights champion Fred D. Gray and encounters Rosa Parks, young Martin Luther King, Jr and young John Lewis. Fred D. Gray at 93 was honored by President Joe Biden with the Presidential Freedom Award, the highest honor an American Citizen can receive. He is alive and well, still practicing law in Alabama and fighting segregation where ever he finds it.}

_{Through her work with the Chicago Writers’ Bloc, a not-for-profit playwright development group celebrating its 30th anniversary (www.writersblocfest.org), with partial funding from the Dramatists Guild Foundation, Inc., Joanne Koch has helped to bring over one hundred new plays to audiences in Chicago, with many of these new plays going on to other productions and publications.}

_{Joanne Koch is a proud member of the Dramatists Guild.}